When a pounding on the front door jolts you from sleep, when you can see the blurred outline of two men in uniform waiting stiffly behind the glass, when your heart has already dropped like a cannonball in your gut, yet you have to keep moving forward to open the door and receive their news, there are no words.

When your quivering hand manages to turn the knob, and the two figures are not army officers but policemen, and relief wrestles with the rise of new fear, there are no words.

When you are told your son, your beautiful baby boy, has been found in a van in Queens, choked by his own vomit, a needle by his side, there is no oxygen, let alone words.

So you utter polite nonsense through your sobs before closing the door, and you say your son's name over and over as if words could conjure the vanished. You stare at your arms and marvel that you are still flesh when, by all right and desire, the officer's words should have turned you to ash; you ghost walk back to your bedroom to find your husband sleeping through your nightmare. You know you must tell him, but there are no words. You collapse instead to the floor and weep gutterally, maniacally, because this is actually all there is to say.

Max's funeral was yesterday; I could not speak. I had the words prepared. My wholly inadequate attempt at farewell. But as the mourners gathered in the cold stone church and I watched Max's childhood friends file to their pews, so adult now, so alive, I became stiff as a pillar—stupid with grief and anger and fatigue.

—Shelley Read; Go As A River

Holly Margl is the award-winning author of Witnessing Grief; Inviting Trauma and Loss to Our Coaching Conversations, An Enneagram Perspective, coach, coach mentor, and trainer specializing in grief, trauma, and the Enneagram.