Grief (n.) is a place none of us can imagine. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.
Grief (n.) is endowed with the power to derange the mind.
Grief (n.) is passive. Grief happens, in contrast to mourning, which, as the act of dealing with grief, requires attention.
Grief (n.) comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of waves.
Grief (n.) is an experience in which you secretly think you're crazy, because you realize you are thinking things that don't make sense.
Grief (n.) is odd in that we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were when the unthinkable occurred, how everything preceding it is often so ordinary and normal and unremarkable that one is prevented from truly believing it happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it.
Grief (n.) is the frustration of numerous impulses, thoughts, feelings, and actions that are habitually directed to one's loved one as a matter to course, only to realize that the target is now gone. By force of habit, one keeps on fitting an arrow to the string and then remembering and having to lay the bow down.