“The reason why that grief had penetrated me so easily and deeply,” he concludes, “was that I had poured out my soul on to the sand by loving a person sure to die as if he would never die.” Notice, the problem isn’t that he loved his friend; the problem is how. “I loved what I loved as a substitute for you.”19 If Augustine invokes idolatry here, that is not a harsh dismissal of our grief but a diagnostic account of what’s going on in our grief in order to help us
