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.
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.
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The language of grief is also deeply personal, often isolating. Language cannot capture the depth, the intensity or the specificity of grief. This inherent subjectivity can lead to a profound sense of loneliness, as the bereaved feel their unique suffering is misunderstood, taken for granted or, worse, dismissed. Others go on with their lives and the bereaved person cannot understand how. W.H. Auden’s poem “Stop All the Clocks” captures well the mourner’s feeling that the earth has stopped turning and his incredulity that a death that has utterly consumed him has left others indifferent.
Think of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, whose “inky cloak” and “customary suits of solemn black” are mere outward signs of a grief that “passeth show.” His struggle to articulate the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” or the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” speaks to the difficulty of translating internal torment into external utterance. Even Shakespeare yearns for a language that can fully convey the depth of his despair, but finds only inadequacy.
Lesser poets have explored the language of suffering. When direct description fails, metaphor and simile step in to bridge the gap between inner experience and outward expression. Grief is a “heavy cloak,” a “sea of tears,” a “gnawing emptiness.” These are desperate attempts to give form to the formless. They almost never work. In Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H., written after the death of his beloved friend Arthur Henry Hallam, the poet grapples with this very struggle. He uses a vast array of imagery to express his sorrow: “The shadow of a great affliction moved / Upon the face of things,” “The low sad murmur of the sea,” “A spirit haunts the year’s last hours.” The sheer volume and variety of his expressions highlight the futile effort to find words for an all-consuming grief. I don’t think it works —but then how can you shoehorn your pain into the literary demands of poetic form?
No, to me, the real language of loss is silence. There are moments when words utterly fail, when the magnitude of sorrow renders speech impossible. This silence can be a testament to the depth of feeling, an acknowledgment that some experiences transcend linguistic articulation. It is a silence pregnant with unspoken pain, a space where the bereaved simply are with their suffering. In Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, her narrative is punctuated by such silences, moments where the raw shock of her husband’s death leaves her speechless. She records the mundane details of her life, the bureaucratic necessities, but beneath it all lies an unspoken, unutterable grief that no amount of eloquent prose could fully capture.
The language of grief, suffering, and loss is therefore a language of striving and inadequacy. Literature, in its unending quest to illuminate the human condition, continually returns to this difficult terrain, not necessarily to provide answers, but to bear witness to the enduring human struggle to articulate the inarticulable.
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