GEN1202 We are obligated to comfort a mourner.  … When a person visits someone who is sitting shivah (the seven-day period of mourning), he fulfills the commandment to emulate God Sotah 14a.   It is especially important to visit someone who probably will not have other visitors.   This is what Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch wrote about consoling the bereaved: “Be with him from whom God has taken a member of his family, and make him feel that though the individual dies, the Jewish community never dies.   Let his sorrow for the deceased by softened by the sympathy of the community.  Stay by him and show him that he is not forsaken.   Comfort him, remind him of the teachings of the Torah, show him how everything is only loaned, and that we have to give thanks for its withdrawal even as we give thanks for its bestowal.   Show him that in both days of joy and of adversity there are opportunities of fulfilling tasks which God’s wise love has imposed on us for our own salvation.  Console him, and melt the bitter sorrow into silent dedication to God’s will.   Do not say, however, ‘What can one do, one must resign oneself,’ for that is not consolation but blasphemy; it is the murmuring of the helpless against his helplessness, not the recognition of the blessed wisdom of God Shulchan Aruch, Yorah Daiah 376:2.   Sit silently by until the mourner himself gives vent to his sorrow in words, and leave him as soon as your presence seems to be a disturbance and he shows that he wishes to be alone with his grief.” Horeb, pp. 433-4.  It is fitting to direct the conversation to the subject of the deceased, and especially to mention the good qualities which endeared him to others.   Someone who purposely avoids mentioning the deceased, believing that in this way he will take the mind of the mourner off his grief, does not fully understand the psychology of grief.   A visit spent discussing trivialities is far less consoling to the mourner than a visit during which the deceased’s well-spent life is considered.  To be a Jew, p. 303.  PLYN 93-4