What words can’t hold

A discursive composed by Joel (Year 12 Advanced)

There’s a peculiar kind of grief that no word quite fits. You search for the right one, something heavier than “sad”, less theatrical than “devastated”, more personal than “heartbroken” and still nothing settles. We say we’re lost for words as if we took a wrong turn in conversation. But maybe the words were never with us to begin with. Maybe they slip through, not because we misuse them, but because they were always slightly too small for what they try to contain.

I remember sitting at the kitchen table the day before his funeral, legs swinging beneath the chair, faced with a crumpled and empty sheet of paper. I was just a kid, maybe eight or nine. They told me it didn’t have to be long. 

“Just a few words,” someone said gently.  But even those felt impossible as I wrote and rewrote the same sentence. 

“My grandfather was…” 

Nothing that followed felt right. 

Words like “kind”, “strong” and “funny” weren’t wrong, they just didn’t hold anything. The words looked hollow on the page, like porcelain cups lined in cracks; polished on the outside, but ready to shatter at the lightest touch.

It’s strange how often we expect words to do the heavy lifting, to turn memory into meaning, to make experience communicable. But experience doesn’t always lend itself to language. Some moments live in the throat or behind the eyes; but not in the mouth.

Science offers an explanation, though it doesn’t make speaking much easier. During intense distress, the brain’s speech centre, Broca's area, quiets down, while the amygdala, which processes emotion, lights up. It makes sense, then, that in moments of grief or shock we fall silent. It’s like in Homer’s Iliad when “he wept, but no sound came.” That line has always resonated with me. Words don’t vanish because we have nothing to say; sometimes the body speaks best by saying nothing.

I still remember sitting next to him in the backyard, weeks before he got sick. He was wearing his old work boots even though he hadn’t worked in years. We talked about nothing important, a dog he once had, a memory he misremembered twice. It wasn’t profound. 

Just real. 

I remember that his laugh came before the punchline; and that he kept tapping his mug with one finger as he spoke. These are the things I wanted to tell people. But I don’t know how. There’s no word for the sound of a laugh that interrupts itself. Or the kind of silence that feels full, not empty. Even if I was to describe every detail, the boots, the mug and the tapping; it wouldn’t recreate that afternoon. 

At best, it would approximate it and that’s all words can do; depict, never duplicate.

When I tried to write about it, they bent out of shape and cracked under the weight of the moment. I’ve often wondered whether this is the quiet flaw in language; not that it fails entirely but that it can’t replicate the pulse of real experience. It can describe the frame, the lighting, the setting.  But the actual feeling of it? 

That always seems to leak out around the edges. Some say that’s the beauty of words; that they suggest, hint and reach. But I’m not sure that’s always enough. It’s like Dr Jeykll and Mr Hyde, the surface says one thing, but something entirely different moves beneath. 

Emotion often splits us in two; the self that speaks, and the self that feels what can’t be said. That’s why funerals feel strange. People stand up and say “he was a good man”, and you nod; but it’s not the truth. The truth can’t be delivered in the past tense. The truth is the crack in your voice you try your best to hide, the way your throat tightens when you hear their name in a supermarket aisle; spoken by someone else. It’s the feeling that doesn’t quite fit into any known word.

At the funeral, I stood behind the lectern; small hands gripping a sheet of paper that felt far too big, I don’t remember exactly what I said. I only remember the dryness in my mouth and how my tongue seemed too small for the words I was trying so hard to shape. The vowels wouldn’t round properly. The consonants felt sharp and uncooperative. I don’t think anyone noticed. But I did.

Someone told me after that what I said was “beautiful”. I’m sure they meant well. But what I didn’t say felt more honest. The pauses. The parts where the sentence stopped short. In those cracks, I think, something real got through.

Not everything needs to be spoken. Some memories don’t want to be translated. They don’t live well in the past tense. They stay with us in the present, through the breath and the tremor behind the teeth.

And maybe that’s enough. 

I said what I could. The rest stayed unwritten. It lives in fragments now, images, sounds and the faint rhythm of a mug being tapped. Maybe one day I’ll write it properly. Or maybe it doesn’t need to be written at all. Some things, I’m learning, are not lost because they weren’t said. 

They remain, quietly, in what words can’t hold.