You’d think losing your mother would be the worst part of losing your mother. But for Annie Broadbent, whose mother succumbed to cancer in 2011, one of the hardest parts of the loss was watching her friends and family become paralyzed by the fear of saying or doing the wrong thing, leaving them unable to support her during the most difficult time of her life.

For a while, death and the grieving process took over Broadbent’s life: “I became entirely identified by my grief and all things death and dying. It was the only way I knew how to make sense of my world,” she said.

Read more on Vice.

Get Annie’s book, We Need to Talk About Grief.