A bottle of whiskey and a box of tissues

How do you comfort someone if you can't empathize? Not to say I'm cold hearted, but empathy is often tossed around, but today I was confronted of not knowing what to say in a sensitive situation and I could not empathize. We toss around empathy and I am not sure I really know what it means, because there are many times I cannot relate to the situation that causes the pain. I am speaking today about talking to my grandfather on the phone when he mentions how much he misses my grandmother. I think the worst feeling is the one you get when you know nothing you can say or do can alleviate the torture of another. When you reach a breaking point in the conversation where the only thing left to say is goodbye because it is well known that one cannot help the other. I have never been married, never truly loved the way he has, so when he mourns the loss of a wife, a best friend, a completing piece, I have nothing to say but "sorry." As defeating as this sound sit is the sad fact of life that by the time I will understand his pain he'll be with her again. So in that situation what is the expected outcome? What is the expected reaction? The shitty part about death is that it affects everyone different. As close as I was with my grandmother I will never be able to come close to the attachment that a man who spent 60 years by her side. For one man it is losing his life, for another it is losing his youth. The two diverging instances alienate the grief among men. While we are both in mourning we handle it in different ways. He confides that it is hard for him to cook dinner without breaking down. I can cook fine. Yet we both can't look at pictures without pressure in our gullet. I can't remember her voice, and I wonder if he can. I only had twenty two years with it, he had six decades. I wonder what he misses the most, but I would never ask. It is tough to see your parents cry, and in some ways tougher to watch your grandfather. So much of my life was spent laughing with him that the sudden change has separated me from emotion. I want to cry along with him but I stare instead. Like a voyeur with a pain fetish I find myself taking it in, writing it down, prostituting an emotion I never want to forget. I often wonder what this memory will be when I am his age, in a situation I never want to understand. Death finds me selfish and wandering. They say I'll see her again, and when he passes him as well. Then maybe I'll understand, I'll have the words. Yet the way life works thats too little and certainly too late. As the world passes and I get older I find that all the knowledge I gain only leads to more questions and a vast amount of things I realize I will never understand. You don't get smarter getting older, you just begin to realize there is an infinite amount of answers you wish you could know. But like my grandmother used to say, "If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride."