People keep sending you things to read about loss. You open them, and you close them after a few lines. So a story about a widower and what his suffering came to mean may be the last thing you want to read.
It is told here for what it shows, and for what it does not.
If you are in a loss of your own, it is real, and it may be the whole of what you are feeling. Nothing on this page asks you to find a meaning in it, now or later.
01
The story
Frankl was a neurologist and psychiatrist. He tells this in his book Man's Search for Meaning.
An older doctor came to see him. The man's wife had died two years earlier, and he had loved her above everything.
Frankl asked him a question. He wanted to know what would have happened if the man had died first and his wife had been the one left.
The man answered that it would have been terrible for her. She would have suffered a great deal.
Frankl answered that she had been saved from that, and that the man was the one who had saved her from it. The price, he said, was that the man had been left to outlive her and to grieve.
The man said nothing. He shook Frankl's hand and left.
02
What changed
His wife was still dead, and he still had to mourn her. Frankl says he could do nothing about that.
What changed, as this library reads the story, was what the suffering meant. Frankl's own comment is that once a person's suffering has a meaning, and he gives a sacrifice as one example, it is in some way no longer suffering.
03
What Frankl did not do
He did not open by telling the man what his suffering was for. He asked first, and his reply was built on what the man had said himself.
He did not say the death was good, or meant to be, or for the best.
He did not do it in the first week. Two years had gone by.
He did not say the grief would stop. The price, in his telling, was surviving her and mourning her.
04
Why it is in this library
It is the plainest picture of the idea this section is built on. Nothing about what happened was changed. The meaning was, and it came by way of the man's own answer. What Meaning Mapping Is sets the idea out.
Subtraction, this library's method, removes explanations that do not hold. It does not remove a loss.
05
If you are grieving now
This is one man's story. It is not a measure of how anyone grieves, or of how long it takes.
This is also not a line to use on a grieving friend.
If you are in crisis, licensed mental-health care is the right door.If tonight is an emergency, call or text 988 (US). This library is not that door.
When to leave meaning alone is on When Meaning Is the Wrong Thing to Offer.