I grew up in a funeral home.
My family’s funeral home is a beautiful old building constructed in the 1920s, with two floors dedicated to the business and an apartment on the top floor where we lived. Death was not something that happened at a distance in our house. It called at dinner. It called during soccer games. When it called, everything else stopped.
That upbringing gave me two things I still carry: a deep comfort with conversations most people avoid, and a front-row seat to how profoundly unprepared the rest of the world is for them.
I’ve spent 20+ years in PR. I’ve launched companies, managed crises at 2 a.m., prepped CEOs before high-stakes interviews, and helped leaders find exactly the right words for exactly the right moment. In my world, silence is never the answer. You always have a response ready. You never go in unprepared.
And yet, when it comes to death and grief, we are collectively, spectacularly unprepared.
The Protocol We Have And the One We Don’t.
When someone loses a person they love, we have an unspoken protocol: send flowers, drop off a casserole (usually made with cream of chicken), mail the sympathy card with the prescribed inscription: Sorry for your loss. You are in my thoughts and prayers. Here if you need anything.
We are fluent in the gesture.
But when it turns into a conversation, we don’t know what to say, so we say nothing. So many of us avoid eye contact when the grieving person walks in or asks “what happened?” in rooms they’re not in. We quietly distance ourselves from the one person who most needs to feel less alone, because we are terrified of saying the wrong thing.
This is death’s PR problem.
What PR Teaches Us About Hard Conversations
In communications, we train for difficulty. Before a crisis, you identify your key messages and anticipate the hard questions. You prepare your spokespeople so they walk in with confidence instead of panic. The goal isn’t to have a perfect script, but to not be caught off guard. To stay present, stay human, and keep the conversation moving forward.
Here’s what 20+ years in PR and a childhood spent in a funeral home have taught me about grief conversations: people don’t need you to say the perfect thing. They just need you to show up and say something kind and supportive.
The fear of saying the wrong thing is almost always worse than the thing itself. Silence reads as abandonment where an imperfect sentence reads as love.
A few things that help:
Be direct. “I’ve been thinking about you since you lost your dad” is more powerful than “thinking of you.” Specificity signals that you actually saw what happened.
Extend the timeline. Grief doesn’t wrap up in two weeks. Check in at month three. Month six. A year later. The people who show up long after the casserole are the ones who are remembered.
Resist the fix. You cannot solve grief. Don’t try. “I don’t know what to say, but I didn’t want to say nothing” is one of the most honest and generous things a person can offer.
Ask a real question. “What was her name?” or “Do you want to talk about her?” gives the grieving person permission to actually grieve, instead of performing okayness for your comfort.
Why This Belongs in a Professional Context
You might be wondering what this has to do with business. The answer is EVERYTHING!
Leaders lose people. Employees lose people. The colleague who seems distracted, the executive who’s off her game, the team member who has gone quiet. Grief doesn’t clock out, and the cultures that don’t demand people perform normalcy through loss are the ones that retain people and build trust.
Better PR around death is a personal skill and a leadership one.
We don’t need a script, but a shift from silence to presence, protocol to humanity, and the fear of saying the wrong thing to the courage of saying anything at all.
That’s why I launched Condolences and Casseroles, a podcast about grief and what happens after the cards and the casseroles stop coming. Each episode features real stories and honest conversations about loss, with the goal of helping all of us talk about death and grief more openly and show up better for the people we care about. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Death is the only appointment every single one of us will keep. The least we can do is get better at talking about it.
Katie Radel is the Founder and CEO of Ripple Consulting Group, a PR and executive visibility firm based in Nashville. She helps healthcare founders, CEOs, and executives get seen by the audiences that matter most through strategic media placements, thought leadership, and speaking opportunities.
