The language of grief

As I write, I have just landed in London on Air-India — flying the same airline, to the same destination and on the same date and time as the ill-fated passengers who perished in Ahmedabad. I travelled to speak at the British Library under the auspices of the Jaipur Literary Festival. My very first talk was about language and the power of words. Yet words failed me at the news of the 241 lives lost on the plane and the 5 more who died on the ground. The language of grief, suffering, and loss is a landscape of shadows, often inadequate to the profound desolation it attempts to articulate. Language is made to describe what is or could be; it falters before an absence, a stuttering whisper in the face of an unimaginable void.

- SHASHI THAROOR

Literature has long grappled with the profound human experience of death, offering glimpses into its unplumbed depths. Yet it has only confirmed the inherent limitations of words. How does one truly describe the tearing of the soul, the visceral ache of an absence that permeates every fibre of one’s being? Phrases like “heartbroken,” “devastated,” or “condolences” become commonplace, yet feel hollow against the monumental reality of personal sorrow. The communal rituals of mourning often rely on shared, almost ritualistic language, but beneath this veneer of collective sympathy, the individual wrestles with an incommunicable anguish. C.S. Lewis, in A Grief Observed, captures this when he writes, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” His struggle to find a new lexicon for his bereavement after the death of his wife underscores the inadequacy of language. He grapples with the “cold, grey, level-headed, and ... all-embracing pain,” illustrating how grief often demands a radical redefinition of one’s emotional vocabulary.