Grief is a peculiar emotion. I used to think that widows grieved in proportion to the love they felt for the husband. They missed him - like a temporary parting, an angoisse desgares, but magnified. I also thought the shape of the grief was that of the dead person: they mourned the absence of particular characteristics.

But from what I've seen - in my mother and a woman who used to live downstairs - it's not like that at all. The removal of the partner seems to precipitate a sort of top-to-bottom crisis in the way the survivor sees herself, her past and all her connections with the world. The long married life now appears to have been a species of delusion. She's not sure if it really even happened: for all the evidence of children and photographs, she doubts it's reality. She reverts in some ways to life before it, to girlhood. She becomes a dowager-child. For some reason, even going shopping or making a telephone call seems to require a confidence that's gone missing. She can no longer mediate with 'the world'. So grief, from what I've seen, doesn't look like a deep feeling that symmetrically mourns the absent shape; it looks like a disintegration of the acquired personality. It looks like going mad.

In these circumstances what comfort can you offer?

Taken from "Engleby" by Sebastian Faulks

Not everyone's story or even the whole of it, but this clicked when I read it.