There’s been a lot of mourning recently. People mourning Terri Schiavo’s death, her life, the death of the pope. But how sorrowful can the death of a stranger make you?

Mourning is accompanied by grief–the kind of loss that drives the breath from your body. Grief lasts more than a day, more than a week. It’s an acknowledgement of something very important in your life that you have lost.

But you can also mourn for something you’ve never had. For something you always wanted but have never been able to obtain. Grief happens when you finally learn that you won’t be able to achieve your desire.

But that kind of grief is hard. If you lose a loved one–that’s something people can understand. It’s tangible. It’s comprehensible. It’s something everyone has experienced. But this other kind of grief–it’s strange.

There are no words or phrases that come to mind.

No words of explanation or comfort, except “I’m sorry.”