How to Describe Grief
By André Aciman's Call Me By Your Name
Many writers, across centuries, have attempted to describe grief. It is a complex, messy, and deeply personal emotion. It resists simple definitions, and yet André Aciman captures its essence in a father-son conversation about heartbreak in Call Me By Your Name. The father knows his son is grieving, but his approach is subtle. He cannot be too obvious — his reasons, like grief itself, are complex.
The father starts by urging his son to give it time. He warns him what might happen if he doesn’t. This is an essential aspect of great writing: showing instead of telling. People rarely respond to direct advice, but they engage with emotional resonance and consequences. Aciman doesn’t say, “Take your time to heal.” Instead, he paints a vivid picture of what happens when grief is rushed. This approach allows readers to feel the weight of his message, rather than just hearing it.
Emotions are complicated. Almost all art is an attempt to understand a flicker of emotion a human being felt in a particular instant in space and time. But we all try, nonetheless. With grief, people believe they have cracked the framework to deal with it. Stages, steps, phases, frameworks, and whatnot. Yet, we all know people who have been grieving for years – their pain frozen in time.
How do you explain that endlessness in a way that resonates universally? Aciman shows us how:
Use a metaphor: “ripping out so much of ourselves”, a phrase that captures the raw, self-inflicted harm of rushing grief.
Connect it to a human desire: “to be cured of things faster than we should”, a relatable impulse in a world where everything and everyone is in a rush.
Give it vivid real-life imagery: “by the time you’re thirty”, transforms abstract emotional depletion into something tangible: a deadline.
Conclude with an outcome: “[we] have less to offer each time we start with someone new”, this is the effect of grief. It’s important for reader to understand what’s at stake to care.
Now, everyone is on the same page. At some point, we’ve all experienced grief—the kind that feels like our hearts and minds are being torn apart by emotional turmoil. This makes the reader feel the grief of the character. That’s what best writing should do – make you feel.