When someone we love is going through something hard  a death, a diagnosis, a loss  it almost always catches us not knowing what to do. We go quiet, or we talk too much to fill the silence, or we pull back a little because we can’t find the words. There’s a kind of panic in not knowing what to say, as if there were a correct phrase hidden somewhere and the only problem were finding it.

And what usually comes out is the urge to fix. We want to give advice, find the bright side, say something that sets it right: “everything happens for a reason,” “at least…,” “what you need to do is…”. It comes from love, but it tends to land badly, because the person isn’t looking for a solution; often there isn’t one. They don’t need us to solve anything. They need company, which is a completely different thing.

What stays, in the end, isn’t the phrase that cost us so much to find. People don’t remember what we said in a moment like that; they remember who was there: who showed up at the wake without knowing what to say and stayed anyway, who brought food without asking, who sat beside them without needing to fill the silence. Being there weighs more through presence than through words, and that, which takes away the pressure to say the right thing, also leaves us without an excuse: you don’t have to be eloquent, you have to be there.

There’s a very simple rule that helps you not get it wrong, and it was thought up by someone who went through a hard illness and grew tired of misdirected comfort. It’s this: in front of someone who is suffering, you only comfort. Your own fear, your sadness, the “I don’t know what I’d do in their place”  all of that is valid and needs to come out, but not with the person in the middle of the pain; that you talk through with someone farther from the blow. Comfort toward the one who’s suffering; venting toward the other side. It sounds like common sense, and yet it’s what breaks most often, because many times, without meaning to, we end up looking for comfort from the very person we came to support.

Because being there for someone has little that’s spectacular about it. It’s listening without correcting, asking few questions, sitting with the silence without squirming. It’s resisting the urge to compare it to your own thing or to rush the person into being okay already. Underneath, we all need the same thing when we’re hurting: to feel that someone understands us and to feel that someone loves us. Almost everything else is extra.

That’s why being there is one of the few things we can always offer, even especially when we can’t fix anything. We won’t remember the right words, not ours or anyone’s. We’ll remember who stayed. And staying, when there’s nothing to say, is probably the highest form of loving someone.