04/20/2026
What Lewis is describing here takes most people years of grief to understand: That loss doesn't just take the person. It takes your capacity to be comforted.
It dismantles the very mechanism by which other people reach you. It leaves you standing in a room full of people trying their best and feeling, despite all of it, completely unreachable.
And the cruelest part is that you know it. You watch them trying. You watch their faces in that moment of approach, that split second where you can see them calculating, weighing silence against words, trying to locate the right thing in a situation that has no right thing.
And you feel simultaneously desperate for them to say something that helps and certain that nothing will. You resent their attempt and their silence in equal measure. And somewhere underneath the resentment is a grief so total it has nowhere left to land except on the people closest to you.
The people will get it wrong no matter what they do. No perfect words that will land right. No way to acknowledge catastrophe that doesn't feel inadequate to the person living inside it.
I'm sorry sounds hollow. Silence sounds like erasure. They're in a better place sounds like you're selling something. How are you holding up sounds like you're asking them to perform okay-ness so you don't have to sit with their not-okay-ness.
Everything is wrong. And everyone will get it wrong.
Grief just doesn't have to make sense. Doesn't have to be fair or gracious or any of the things we quietly expect loss to teach us. It just has to be felt. Survived. Carried until it gets lighter, which it will, eventually, though not as fast as anyone wants.
And the people who stay, the ones willing to be hated, willing to get it wrong, willing to witness the impossible arithmetic of your pain, they're not fixing anything.
But they're there. They are there for us at our worst. And when everything feels impossible.
That alone is something. And some days, that's the only math that matters.
