In the face of grief, it’s hard to find the right words to say. What matters is that you keep trying

‘I decide to take the same approach with my grieving friend … I text a short message most days.’ Photograph: kasha_malasha/Alamy

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

Thus wrote CS Lewis in A Grief Observed after his wife died from cancer. I have thought a lot about these words while bearing witness to my friend’s grief at the sudden death of her mother.