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The messages start about an hour after the news gets out. So sorry for your loss. Thinking of you and the family. And you sit there holding a phone that has gone quiet, trying to work out why none of it fits.
Because everyone is talking about a person you did not know. They are telling warm stories. Someone is laughing about a thing he used to say. And the person you knew is the one who left the mark you still check for.
So you cry, and then you feel like a fraud for crying. Then you stop crying, and feel like something worse for stopping. You are grieving someone who hurt you, and nobody prints a card for that.
Grieving Someone Who Hurt You Is Not a Contradiction
Here is the thing nobody says out loud at a funeral: love and injury can sit in the same chest at the same time, and neither one cancels the other out.
You are not confused. You are not being disloyal to your own pain. You are holding two true things at once, and the reason it feels unbearable is that everyone keeps asking you to put one of them down.
The Bible does not ask you to put one down. It tells the story of a king who never did — and it refuses, from start to finish, to tidy him up.
The King Who Wept Over the Son Who Tried to Kill Him
David had a son named Absalom, and the trouble between them ran for years before it ended.
Absalom killed his half-brother Amnon and then ran for his life to a foreign kingdom, where he stayed three years. Scripture says “David mourned for his son every day” (2 Samuel 13:37). The text does not spell out which son it means, and readers have argued about that line for centuries. What it does say plainly comes two verses later: David “was comforted concerning Amnon, seeing he was dead” (2 Samuel 13:39).
Hold on to that phrase. It matters later. One of David’s griefs actually closed.
Absalom was eventually allowed back into the city. But not back into the room. “Let him turn to his own house, and let him not see my face,” David said (2 Samuel 14:24). And so Absalom lived “two full years in Jerusalem, and saw not the king’s face” (2 Samuel 14:28).
Two years. In the same city. A short walk apart.
When they finally met, the whole reconciliation gets one line: “and the king kissed Absalom” (2 Samuel 14:33). No conversation is recorded. Nothing is said about Amnon. It is a kiss where a hard talk should have been — and not long after, Absalom began quietly building a following, took the capital, and drove his father out of it.
If what you are carrying feels closer to betrayal than to ordinary loss, Scripture has language for that too — the Psalms name that specific wound of being hurt by someone who was close to you more bluntly than most people expect.
David Had Already Told the Whole Army to Spare Him
This is the part that usually gets skipped, and it changes everything about what comes next.
Before the battle, David gave his three commanders an order in front of everyone: “Deal gently for my sake with the young man, even with Absalom.” Then the text adds a detail it did not have to add — “And all the people heard when the king gave all the captains charge concerning Absalom” (2 Samuel 18:5).
The whole army heard the king ask them to go easy on the man who was trying to kill him.
And it held. Absalom’s head caught in the branches of a great oak while his mule walked out from under him, and he was left hanging there. An ordinary soldier found him and would not touch him. When Joab offered him silver to do it, the man refused: “Though I should receive a thousand shekels of silver in mine hand, yet would I not put forth mine hand against the king’s son: for in our hearing the king charged thee and Abishai and Ittai, saying, Beware that none touch the young man Absalom” (2 Samuel 18:12).
Read that again. A common soldier turned down a fortune, and named Joab as one of the three men who had heard the order with his own ears.
Joab took three darts and killed Absalom anyway.
So when David breaks down at the gate a few verses later, it is not a strange reversal that nobody saw coming. It is the same thing he had said out loud, in public, before a single sword was drawn. He had never hidden it. The army knew. Joab knew.
Joab’s Rebuke, and the One Thing He Did Not Say
Then comes the verse people know: “And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept: and as he went, thus he said, O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!” (2 Samuel 18:33).
Count the words in that sentence. He says my son five times. He says the name three times. He does not say traitor. He does not say rebel. He does not say anything at all about the throne, or the war, or what his son had done to him. He only ever calls him one thing.
And it cost people. Scripture is honest about that in a way most grief writing is not. The soldiers who had just saved the royal family crept back into the city “as people being ashamed steal away when they flee in battle” (2 Samuel 19:3). The victory turned into a funeral for everyone.
So Joab came in hard: “Thou hast shamed this day the faces of all thy servants, which this day have saved thy life… In that thou lovest thine enemies, and hatest thy friends” (2 Samuel 19:5-6).
Now notice what Joab never says.
He never says Absalom deserved it. He never argues that David’s grief is wrong, or excessive, or a sin. He does not touch the feeling at all. He asks for exactly one thing, and it is a thing you could do with your body: “Now therefore arise, go forth, and speak comfortably unto thy servants” (2 Samuel 19:7).
Go outside. Say something kind to the people waiting. That was the entire ask.
The Chamber and the Gate Are the Same Building
Here is the detail that will not leave me alone.
David wept in “the chamber over the gate” (2 Samuel 18:33). And when he finally gets up, the text says: “Then the king arose, and sat in the gate” (2 Samuel 19:8).
The same gate. The room where he fell apart was directly above the seat where he did his job. The distance between the worst hour of his life and his ordinary duty was one flight of stairs.
And look at what Scripture does not record. It never says the grief ended. It never says David reached a verdict about who his son had been. There is no scene where he decides Absalom was innocent, and no scene where he decides Absalom got what was coming to him. The contradiction is simply left standing, in the Bible, unresolved, forever.
He never stopped grieving. He just came downstairs for an hour.
That is the whole thing. Not get over it. Not let yourself feel it as long as you like and let the world wait. Something smaller and far more human than either: come down, sit in the gate a while, and then go back up if you need to.
Remember Amnon, back in chapter 13 — that grief closed. David “was comforted.” The Bible records one grief that healed and one that never did, in the same man, about his own sons. It does not treat them as the same shape, and it does not scold him for the one that stayed open.
What This Looks Like on an Ordinary Tuesday
Nobody is asking you to decide what that person was. That verdict is not yours to reach, and — this is the part to hear — it is not the entry fee for your own grief. You do not have to forgive them first. You do not have to stop being angry first. You do not have to earn permission to miss them.
What life will keep asking of you is much smaller: come downstairs for an hour. Answer the one message. Cook the food. Sit in the gate, where people can see you, and say something kind to someone who is still here.
Then go back up. The stairs run both ways, and they always did.
They may keep turning up — in a smell, in a song, in the middle of a night when you are finally asleep. That is not a sign you are doing it wrong; what Scripture actually says about dreaming of someone who died is gentler than most people have been told. And if the words will not come at all, our free Bible Verse for How I Feel finder will hand you one to start from, which is sometimes all a person can manage on a Tuesday.
Three Things You Can Do Today
- Say both sentences out loud, alone, in your own room. “What they did was real.” “I miss them.” Say them one after the other. Do not join them with the word but. Two minutes, and no one has to hear it.
- Do one ordinary thing you have been letting slide. Wash what is in the sink. Walk to the shop. Open the message you have been leaving unopened. Not because you are fine — because the gate still needs sitting in.
- Send four words to someone else they hurt. “Thinking of you this week.” You do not have to explain, and you do not have to agree about the person. You are just two people who were both there.
Journaling Prompts
- Which of your two feelings do you keep apologising for — the grief, or the anger? Who taught you that one of them was the wrong one to have?
- What did you keep hoping would still happen between you and them? Write it in one sentence, in the past tense.
- If you never reach a verdict on this person, what are you afraid that would say about you?
A Prayer for Grieving Someone Who Hurt You
God, I do not know what I am supposed to feel, and I have stopped pretending that I do. I miss someone who hurt me, and both of those are true, and I am so tired of being asked to choose. I am not asking to be told which one is the right one — I am asking You to sit with me while I hold both. Help me come downstairs today and do the small thing in front of me. And when I go back up, be there too.
One Question Worth Talking About
Joab told David that his mourning was shaming the people who had just saved his life. Was Joab right to say it out loud — or was that something no one should ask of a man in that much grief? Tell us how you see it in the comments.
Share This
- Nobody warns you that grieving someone who hurt you feels like lying. David wept over the son who tried to kill him, and Scripture never once made him pick a side.
- A soldier found Absalom hanging in an oak and refused to touch him, because he had heard the king say “deal gently with the young man.” Joab killed him anyway — then told David he had no right to cry.
- He wept in the chamber over the gate. Then he came down and sat in the gate. Same building. Nobody made him resolve it. They just asked him for an hour.
Questions People Ask About Grieving Someone Who Hurt You
Is it normal to grieve someone who hurt you?
Yes. Grief follows attachment, not approval. A person can cause real harm and still have been woven into someone’s daily life, memory and sense of self — and when they die, all of that goes with them, including the possibility that things might one day have been different. Feeling loss and anger at the same time is not a sign of confusion or disloyalty. It is what happens when a relationship was genuinely both things.
Does the Bible say anything about mourning someone who wronged you?
It shows it rather than explains it. In 2 Samuel 18:33, King David weeps over his son Absalom, who had seized his throne and driven him out of Jerusalem. David calls him “my son” five times in a single sentence and never once calls him a traitor. Scripture records the grief without correcting it, and without ever resolving the contradiction between what Absalom did and what David felt.
Do you have to forgive someone before you are allowed to grieve them?
No. Nowhere does Scripture make forgiveness the condition for mourning. David grieved a son he had never fully reconciled with — 2 Samuel 14:28 says Absalom lived two full years in the same city without being allowed to see his father’s face. Forgiveness may come later, or slowly, or in pieces. Grief does not wait behind it for permission.
What does 2 Samuel 18:33 mean?
It is the moment King David learns his son Absalom is dead after leading a rebellion against him. The verse reads: “And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept: and as he went, thus he said, O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!” It is one of the rawest expressions of grief in the Bible, and notably it contains no judgement of Absalom at all — only the word “son.”
Why did Joab rebuke David for weeping over Absalom?
Because the army that had just saved the king’s life and family was creeping back into the city in shame while the king mourned the man they had defeated (2 Samuel 19:3). Joab’s rebuke in 2 Samuel 19:5-7 never claims David’s grief is wrong — it asks for a specific action instead: “arise, go forth, and speak comfortably unto thy servants.” David did get up and sit in the gate, but Scripture never says his grief ended.
