They say the Welsh have a word for a kind of longing that doesn’t quite exist anywhere else — hiraeth. It rolls off the tongue like the wind coming down from the hills, a little soft at the start, lingering at the end.

“The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered.”

There are three needs of the griever: To find the words for the loss, to say the words aloud and to know that the words have been heard.

Grief is a language many of us never learned to speak. When we lose someone we love, the world around us shifts in ways we never expected. It feels like a heavy fog envelops everything, making it impossible to see beyond the immediate pain. And in that state, when words fail, silence often becomes the default response from others — friends, family, and even ourselves.