What does 'grace under fire' mean?

It means staying yourself while things go badly: still decent, still reachable, still talking to the people around you.

The phrase started as Ernest Hemingway's, with a different last word. Dorothy Parker's 1929 New Yorker profile of Hemingway describes an argumentative evening where someone pressed him: "Exactly what do you mean by 'guts'?" He answered, "grace under pressure." He had been praising a friend who wasn't there, so the phrase began as a description of someone else's nerve. Fire is the later swap.

No. If calm comes, take it. If it doesn't, you don't have to fake it.

Hiding what you feel has a cost, and part of it falls on whoever is sitting across from you. In two lab studies, Emily Butler and colleagues paired women who had never met to talk about an upsetting topic, and asked some of them to keep their emotions from showing. When one woman hid her feelings, the conversation went worse, and her partner's blood pressure response was larger. In the second study, hiding also cut rapport. Those were strangers in a lab, far from a family in a hospital waiting room, so hold the finding loosely.

Saying you're not okay is allowed, and it gives people something true to work with. If you're thinking about ending your life, call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, US).

Related: What to say when you're in crisis and someone asks how you are

Staying in contact. A person showing grace under fire keeps reaching for the people beside them when going quiet would be easier. That can sound like telling your partner you love them in a voice that won't hold steady, or telling a friend you're still around on a night when that's the most you can manage. Shaking hands don't disqualify it.

It also belongs to the person on the other side of the crisis. Sitting with someone in pain, without rushing to fix it or changing the subject, takes the same nerve.

Related: How to support someone in crisis