Grief among us
November has a way of reminding us that everything living is also passing. The thinning light, bare branches, the crisp air that carries a sense of memento mori - it invites a kind of humble inwardness that brighter months don’t allow as often. Last month, while touring with All Souls’ programme, something in the music unsettled the air around me. Requiems, laments, and sounding invocations for the departed soften the walls we build around our own grief. Even when the sorrow belongs to someone else, the painful musical phrases resonate in places in our minds we thought had gone quiet. I kept thinking of my father - how his absence lingers not as a memory but as a structure inside me, one I continue to navigate. The music summons grief that has been present beneath the surface, calling to be acknowledged.
Perhaps that is why I was particularly receptive the evening I visited her, the elderly woman in my neighbourhood whom I’ve been helping out in Basel. We became unexpectedly close after a shared summer weekend with friends at their small paradise in central Switzerland, and the sudden death of her husband shortly after. There was nothing dramatic about the evening itself: errands, small repairs, the kind of practical tasks that accumulate when life has collapsed around someone. When we were done, she asked whether I’d join her for a glass of wine. She had already opened the bottle, and although I don’t drink wine, I said yes without thinking. It felt like the answer she hoped for.
We sat at her dining room table, and when I gently asked how she was really doing - four months on - she sighed, as though weighing whether she could bear her own truth.
“Mein lieber Mann ist tot. Er musste aber nicht sterben.”
My dear husband is dead, but he did not have to die.
The words arrived with a sorrow so heavy it seemed to fill the room. The doctors had known about his heart condition. Something could have been done to prevent this - a truly cruel thought that lingers… Now she is left to manage the absurd practicalities of loss alone: frozen accounts, endless letters demanding urgent attention, curt conversations with insurance workers who never say his name, the keys whose locks she cannot identify. Their properties, the tenants, the tasks - all arriving faster than grief can be felt.
“There are mornings,” she said, “when I start the day crying, and evenings when I end it crying too.” In between, she does what she can to keep everything from falling apart. Her tears came suddenly, thankfully without apology - unguarded, heavy, the tears of someone holding it together for too long. I reached for her hand, and we sat in silence, way more eloquent than our words could be.
She told me she still feels him beside her - not as a memory, but as a presence. When she was desperately searching for an important document, panic pressing in, she whispered, “Please, help me.” She found it moments later.
A couple of glasses in, we were both crying with the softness grief requires when there is finally room for it to breathe. Forty-nine years of marriage. A life built through loyalty, affection, stubborn teamwork, and real tenderness. They never went to bed angry. They would talk until 5 a.m. if needed, but would not sleep without reconciling first. They created, travelled, laughed, disagreed, and loved. A companionship built over almost half a century of daily rituals - the kind of relationship many people long for and dream of creating nowadays.
At one point, she spoke about how difficult, yet necessary, it is to listen to music or look at art these days. She pauses sometimes to listen to something they both loved or to take a look at a painting they chose together. “It reminds me I still have a world,” she said. “Even if I don’t know how to live in it without him yet.” How profoundly beautiful, I thought. There is a fidelity in art that grief instinctively recognises.
I remembered something I had recently read:
Our societies sometimes struggle with the question of what art might be for. Here the answer feels simple: art is a weapon against despair. It is a tool with which to alleviate a sense of crushing isolation and uniqueness. It provides common ground where the sadness in me can, with dignity and intelligence, meet the sadness in you.
Grief is often described as love with nowhere to go, but perhaps it is more accurate to say that grief is love learning anew form - unfamiliar, unwelcome, yet undeniably alive. It reshapes the inner landscape the way a tree grows around the space where the lightning once struck. It is not something to overcome, only something to live with.
Her sorrow called up my own and made that evening feel purely honest rather than heavy. Two lives, two profound losses, meeting at a table in Basel with open hands and a bottle of wine you’d rather not drink alone.
When she said, “I’m not ready to let him go yet,” I squeezed her hand and told her she didn’t have to. Grief has no schedule. Love does not retire simply because the beloved is now gone.
Sometimes the most human thing we can offer is presence - a steady willingness to sit beside someone as they learn to meet a world that has been permanently changed, and, in doing so, let our own sadness stand beside theirs with dignity and warmth.
