Good Morning, Good Mourning

On The Inadequacy of Language and the Uniqueness of Grief

Thank you for coming back, or for finding your way here for the first time. However you arrived—I’m so glad you’re here.

Hallo Kartoffelkumpel,

I have spent the past several posts and several thousand words trying to communicate what it was like to step into that particular grief of getting a life altering diagnosis for your child. I am about to give you a couple thousand more on how none of those other words will ever accomplish that task. This is a little longer post than usual so feel free to break it up if you’d like as I’ve tried to write each section to be (mostly) self-contained. I believe in you.

The Skin of Language

We live inside words.

They shape how we think, how we share ourselves, even how we imagine what is possible. From the first sounds we mimic as children, language wraps around us like a second skin. It orders the chaos, gives names to things, lets us believe the world can be held in syllables.1

And yet there are moments when words abandon us. They shrink when we need them most. In the presence of love so fierce it hurts, or suffering so sharp it takes the breath from your chest, language begins to stumble. It gestures, it repeats itself, it circles like a plane above an airstrip waiting for clearance to land but it never quite arrives.

Grief makes this failure unavoidable. It is not a tidy emotion, if it even is one at all. It’s not something that fits neatly inside the words sadness or loss. Grief is a kind of terrain.2 For some it feels like erosion, a slow dissolving of the self; for others it is sudden storm, or a silence that fills the room like heavy air. No two landscapes are the same, no two losses identical.

When a doctor pronounces a diagnosis for your child, perhaps a rare one and life-altering one, grief rushes in differently. It is not a single event, but an unmooring. Words arrive—strung together from syllables of medicinal Latin, percentages, prognoses—but they do not match the feeling in your chest. You hear the phrases, you even repeat them back, but they do not touch the living, wordless rupture opening inside you. The vocabulary of nosology and the vocabulary of emotion pass each other like strangers in the night down a hospital hallway.

This is the puzzle I keep rearranging the pieces for. The very tool we depend on to make meaning cannot hold the weight of one of the most meaning-making things we experience: grief. Words are too orderly, too bound by grammar and sense-making, while grief is stubbornly irrational. It doesn’t follow a sequence. It doesn’t stay inside lines. It lives in pauses, stray memories that ambushes you in a grocery store aisle, in the particular way you inhale after a doctor says, “I’m sorry…”

To grieve is to find yourself beyond the sound and sight of sentences or signposts. You reach out hoping for anything to catch you, grasping for branches but finding only breath.

Language depends on shortcuts. Each word gathers a history of shared usage, worn smooth by repetition. To say I am sad is to gesture toward a vast common experience, but it never touches the particular texture of embodied3 sadness, let alone something as complex as grief. The sadness of a rainy day is not the sadness of losing a child’s future you once imagined and yet language hands us the same small syllable, flattening both into a single shade.

Metaphors try to rescue us. We say, it feels like a hole in the heart, a wave crashing over me, a dark cloud overhead. They help for a moment. But each metaphor strains under the weight. A hole implies emptiness, when often what you feel is not vacancy but a relentless, heavy presence. Waves suggest rhythm, but grief rarely has a rhythm, often breaking without warning. Images help us reach toward each other, but they fail to reach the center.

Sometimes silence does more. The unspoken pause after someone asks how you’re doing. The stillness of a hospital hallway when no one knows what to say. The absence of language can mirror grief more faithfully than any phrase. Words, in their neat pursuit of definition, can become a distraction, a false map. Silence, on the other hand, can be truer: a shared acknowledgment that what is happening has slipped beyond speech.

Grief is a language we are born into but can only learn to forget, and writing is the clumsy dictionary of its echoes. It exposes language for what it is: necessary but not sufficient, and always partial. A scaffold built too small for the weight it’s asked to hold.

Culture tries to give us language for this singularity. In Portuguese, there is saudade—a word for longing that is not just nostalgia but an ache for something gone, something perhaps never fully possessed. It lingers like scent in an empty room, a shadow of what once was. Beautiful, yes, but still only a gesture.

In Japanese, mono no aware4 points us toward the fleetingness of all things like the blossoms that scatter too soon, the light that changes as afternoon slips into evening. Grief, here, is not an interruption but part of the fabric of life, inseparable from joy. The word teaches acceptance, but even so, it cannot quiet the raw cry for what has been lost. Where saudade leans backward toward what has slipped away, mono no aware opens our hands, reminding us how little we can keep.

In Czech, lítost names the sharp torment of being laid bare by sorrow, of seeing one’s own misery reflected back, unhidden, unendurable. It is the humiliation of being unraveled, the sense of standing exposed in a grief so consuming it strips away any pretense of composure. Where mono no aware offers a tender resignation, lítost recoils, refusing grace, showing us instead the raw nerve of being broken while the world carries on as though untouched.

In many African traditions, ubuntu offers another vision: “I am because we are.” In grief, ubuntu names the rupture that is never private, the tear in the communal fabric when one thread is pulled away. It reminds us that mourning is not carried by a single body but shared among many, that even when loss isolates, the work of grief is also to draw us back into relation. Where lítost exposes the unbearable solitude of loss, ubuntu insists that no sorrow is borne alone.5

These words are gifts, little lamps lit against the vastness of loss. But they remain fragments. Grief will not sit still long enough to be captured by any one of them. It shifts, transforms, unsettles. What feels unbearable one season may soften into memory the next. Anguish can turn into tenderness, and then back again. Grief is not a state but a space that is labyrinthine, unpredictable, never identical twice.

Grief does not repeat itself.

Each grief is singular because each love is singular. To speak of grief as though it were one thing is to miss its essential fact: it is always bound to the someone experiencing it. It is a clearing always found within the intricate forest that is Life. Though it touches us all it refuses to be universal.

Grief insists on being lived, one body at a time, one love at a time, one loss at a time.

When words collapse under the weight of grief, we reach for other forms. Art, ritual, sometimes the body itself. These become languages that do not rely on sentences and yet still speak.

A poem6 can sometimes hold what prose cannot. A single image, distilled to its sharpest edges, can carry more truth than paragraphs of explanation. A line of verse does not need to define grief; it only needs to open the door and let us recognize ourselves inside it. Music7 does this too. A melody, without a single word, can slip past the mind and lodge itself directly in the chest. I think of the hush that falls in a room when a slow piece is played, the way people instinctively bow their heads, as if grief itself had entered and everyone feels it together.

Ritual offers another way. In some traditions, grief is guided by prayers, chants, days marked off with candles and incense. In others, it is met with color and feasting, the telling of stories, the building of small altars that make the absent present again. Whether solemn or celebratory, rituals create a frame strong enough to hold what feels uncontainable. They tell us: you do not have to carry this alone.

And then there is the body, which often speaks before we do. Shoulders slumped, hands trembling, the uncontrollable rush of tears. These are not accidents or symptoms; they are grief itself made visible. A body bowed in sorrow is already telling the truth words cannot manage.

None of these are complete. Not poetry, not music, not ritual, not even the body’s raw cry. The silence of grief is a vast, echoing chamber, but writing opens a window, admitting light and shadow in equal measure.

And Now For Some Living

When I think back to the day of my daughter’s diagnosis, I remember the words of the specialist but more so the quiet in the days after. The long hours sitting in the hospital room between rounds. The eventual drive home. The way the world outside the windows seemed both unbearably sharp and strangely muffled. It was grief announcing itself. It was not the grief of death, but of thresholds, of futures foreclosed and futures unknown. Just this past week we stepped through another door into a new clearing of grief, full of its own wilderness we know nothing about.

This kind of grief does not resolve. It does not move neatly through stages.8 It lingers like fog, receding, then thickening again, a weather of the soul. And yet, in its persistence, it teaches that grief is not only about endings but about the weight of love pressed against finitude. We learn that here loss isn’t the source of all grief but rather grief is the source of seeing loss in all things. To grieve is to feel the depth of our attachment in a world where nothing is guaranteed.

We search for words because ordinary language falters. But even the richest words and rituals are but charcoal sketches of the outline. The rest must be lived. It is in the feeding tube, the hospital corridors, the held breath before a monitor alarm. It is in the laughter that arrives anyway, sudden and undeserved.

So when we speak of grief, whether in poetry or diagnosis or silence, what are we really doing? Everything spoken about grief is a compromise with what cannot be spoken about. A necessary defeat. Perhaps then it is not a thing for words. Perhaps it is not a thing for us to solve or explain but something more like a clearing in the forest of our lives allowing us to hold space for what exceeds us. A space to honor the fragile, relentless truth that love and loss are never separate things.

In this way, my daughter’s diagnosis was not only a moment of grief, but a opening up of a new way to see, a call into a life where joy and sorrow are braided so tightly they cannot be unknotted.

And maybe that is what grief offers in the end: not resolution, but a

Stay safe, stay kind, and know that you are appreciated.

Cheers,
[kartoffelvater]

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