The Grammar of Grief
Loss does strange things to language. It is worth paying attention to what those things are.
The tense goes first.
Anyone who has lost someone knows the small violence of the correction. You start a sentence in the present because that is where the person still lives in your head, and halfway through you have to reach back and change the verb. She takes her coffee black. Took. That single edit, performed several times a day for months, does more to teach you that someone is gone than any amount of thinking about it.
Grief is often described as an emotion. In practice it behaves more like a change in the rules of the language you speak. Words that worked last week stop working. Sentences will not close properly.
The failure of the available words
The vocabulary we have is unhelpfully small. There is a word for a child who loses parents and a word for someone who loses a husband or wife, and then the language simply stops. There is no word for a parent who loses a child, which tells you something about what the language was willing to look at. There is no word at all for losing a friendship, a marriage that continues, a version of your own future.
So people reach for approximations, and the approximations feel dishonest, and the dishonesty makes them go quiet. A great deal of what looks like emotional avoidance is closer to a supply problem. They are not refusing to speak. They have run out of accurate sentences and would rather say nothing than say something untrue.
A great deal of what looks like emotional avoidance is closer to a supply problem.
This is one of the oldest jobs poetry has done. Not to explain grief, which cannot be done, but to enlarge the available vocabulary for it. A good elegy does not give you an answer. It gives you a phrase you did not have, and the relief of that is out of all proportion to its size. Having words for a thing does not fix the thing. It does end the additional loneliness of being unable to name it.
What to say to someone
Since the words are scarce, most people default to the ones they have heard, which are almost all forms of resolution. At least she did not suffer. He is in a better place. Everything happens for a reason. These sentences are attempts at kindness and they mostly fail, because they are all trying to finish something that is not finished.
The sentences that work tend to be smaller and more grammatically incomplete, and they are usually small enough to accept without accounting. I do not know what to say. I have been thinking about you all week. Tell me about her. Note that none of them resolve anything. They just stay in the room.
That last one is worth the whole article. Grieving people are routinely starved of the chance to talk about the person, because everyone around them is afraid of causing pain by mentioning it. The pain is already there at full volume. What the mention actually does is grant permission, and permission is frequently the thing most missing.
The long tail
The grammar does eventually settle. Not into how it was.
People who are years out will tell you that the tense stops being a wound and becomes something more like an accent, a feature of how they speak now. They can say she took her coffee black without the sentence costing anything. The word changed, and then the changed word became ordinary, which is a fair description of most healing.
What does not go away, and should not, is the small structural absence in the language. Some sentences remain unfinishable. Someone you loved is a hole in the grammar, and the hole is a form of company, and after long enough you would not want it filled even if filling it were on offer.