030. There should be a word for this

“I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” people kept saying to him, and he wished there were some way to measure people’s sorrow. Were they sorry enough to bring him a casserole or visit the grave? Sorry enough to think of him a week from now, when the mourning was over?

Outside it was snowing, and he wondered if he were allowed to think of it as beautiful, so soon after losing her.

There should be a word for this, he thought, over and over. There should be a way to say how he felt. Because ‘grief’ wasn’t enough. There was relief in there too – relief that it was over, at least – and a strange conspicuousness, like strangers should somehow know about the turmoil inside him. When people asked how he was, he didn’t know what to call it. Restless nausea, perhaps, and the sensation of his own heart beating in his chest.