how to deal with the crooked timber of our hearts and our penchant to deny all of this and cling to the mortal as if it were immortal. “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
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