“Two weeks after October 7, Avi Sagi’s mother died. One could use a cliché and say that his private loss merged with the disaster that befell Israel – but the connection between the two events was anything but self-evident.

Hannah Schweitzer was 98 when she died, a woman “whose life was an exemplary model of a wholly lived human existence,” and “whose death came silently without suffering or pain,” as her son writes in the preface to his new book “From Despair to Hope – Grief, Compassion, and Hope in Times of Dread” (Carmel Publishing House; in Hebrew). The shivah was characterized by “serene sadness,” as contrasted by the raging storm outside.

The contrast between mourning over a person who lived a long life and departed from the world surrounded by her loving family, and the deaths of children burned alive in a safe room or young people dancing at a party, was unbearable: “At moments I felt as though my right to grieve with ‘pure’ sadness was flawed when the sadness around was heartrending.”

The words of those paying condolence calls at the shivah only sharpened the disparity. “What can one say to someone whose world fell apart that day? That things will be well? That ‘in their death they commanded us to live’? All those banal expressions embody everything but consolation.”