Читать книгу The Language of Loss - Barbara Abercrombie - Страница 24

I did already know that only the old words would do: death, grief, sorrow, sadness, heartbreak. Nothing modernly evasive or medicalising. Grief is a human, not a medical, condition, and while there are pills to help us forget it—and everything else—there are no pills to cure it. The griefstruck are not depressed, just properly, appropriately, mathematically (“it hurts exactly as much as it is worth”) sad. One euphemistic verb I especially loathed was “pass.” “I’m sorry to hear your wife has passed” (as in “passed water”? “passed blood”?). You do not have to force the word “die” on others, even if you always use it yourself. There is a midpoint. At a social event she and I would normally have attended together, an acquaintance came up and said to me, simply, “There’s someone missing.” That felt correct, in both senses.

—JULIAN BARNES