Understanding is such a small thing to offer, but ACTUALLY understanding is the world. I had another email from the brother and he explained that our grief is as different as I posited, but ultimately diagnosable as the difference between weltschmerz and sehnsucht. Ah, a rational mind.
Literally meaning “world grief,” weltschmerz is a grief or depression based on one’s inability to come to terms with the evils of the world infringing on subjectivity and personal freedoms. A concept attributed to the romantic era of literature, it nonetheless fits. As brothers, they were quite close in childhood and on holidays. But time and adulthood create independence and distance beyond the physical. The impact upon one another is poignant, permanent, but mostly historical. It’s pain for lost nostalgia.
My affliction is much more akin to sehnsucht. Sehnsucht has no literal translation, but is a sweetly personal grief and yearning that may even be more lovely than any actual fulfillment.
“All the things that have deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it — tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest — if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself — you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say ‘Here at last is the thing I was made for.’ We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want . . . which we shall still desire on our deathbeds . . . Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it — made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.”
-C.S. Lewis from The Problem of Pain.
This is sehnsucht. This is finding a soul mate only to lose them before that pairing can truly be realized. The sweetest of promises ripped away.
Sorrow is independent and personal, but it can be understood and to some rare extent, relatable.
taurgalas 