This week I opened one of my favorite blogs and read that the writer had lost her husband. He flatlined at the gym during his morning workout. Just like that.

I’ve been trying to write about something—anything—else all week. But my thoughts keep coming around to him, to her, to their two little boys. I’ve hesitated to write about it, thinking it distasteful of me to meditate publicly on her grief.

I’ve read her daily thoughts on religion and culture and family life for six years, but I’ve only met her a couple of times. It seems disproportionate that I haven’t been able to sleep the last three nights, that my thoughts have been stuck in a holding pattern over the details of her grief, which she has described on her blog and her Facebook page: Telling her young sons their dad has gone to be with Jesus. Throwing away the sandwich he had taken for his lunch the day he died.

She’s been blogging and Facebooking through her shock. And judging by the com boxes, so have hundreds of others, including me, all virtually grieving a virtual friend. There was a time I might have thought this grossly postmodern in my technophobe self-righteousness. But now it seems like a great mercy.

This is a spouse’s greatest fear realized, a thought experiment that has kept me awake many insomniac nights. Well, maybe it’s not every spouse’s greatest fear. My freakily well-adjusted husband assures me that I think about death a lot more than he does—which is almost never. I don’t see how that’s possible, since he lives with me. Anyone who talks to me or reads my work for more than five minutes knows my mother died when I was 14, and I’m often paralyzed by those memories and the concurrent fear of leaving my own daughter motherless. With any new grief, mine or another’s, I feel again the smarting of that old wound as if it were fresh, the naked hurt amid the flurry of activity, the funeral arrangements, the food arriving from barely-known neighbors. It’s all too imaginable.

So is the urge to action that would drive a grieving person to the internet, and now, to Facebook. One of the most wretched realizations of those who mourn is that the world is still rudely turning on its axis. Everywhere people are going to work, eating lunch, jogging, buying groceries. In the days after my mother died, my sister got in her car to drive to school and thought, “I can’t believe the sun came up.” The world seemed cold, oblivious. Nothing had changed. But the outpouring of grief I’ve witnessed this week contradicts that understanding in a way that I know would have comforted me during those intense times of loss.

When my godchild died, I surrendered to the intense urge to go shopping. My feelings were so muddled, but I knew even then that I wasn’t just looking for a distraction, or even for something to ease the pain. I was looking for her—the lost child. At Target. The absurd finality of her death trumped the absurdity of this scenario in my grieving mind. Her loss was so impossible to comprehend that it seemed to me she’d simply been misplaced, and that I could find her and restore her to her mother if only I knew where to look.

When Target didn’t satisfy, I sat in front of my computer, desperately trying to think of a search term that would lead me to her via Google. It doesn’t make sense now, I know. But in the fog of grief, the conviction that I should search was real and frustrating. That urge to action, which must go unsatisfied, is enough to break the heart again.

We’re always wondering here at Good Letters whether what we do matters; my last post in particular meditated on the possibilities of personal narrative and testimony. In her own excellent post, Caroline Langston has contemplated “Facebook and Eternity,” and how what many of us wanted to disregard as a flimsy social networking tool has instead served to remind us of the world that exists outside our own memory, and revealed a comfort in being known.

I would have expected that contemplating death in this manner would only highlight for me the vanity of writing and especially of the internet, making it all seem so shallow, finite, and meaningless.

Somehow the opposite has been true. There is real comfort in realizing we exist beyond our own obsessive self-narration. The world is still turning, everywhere people going to work, jogging, eating lunch, but they’re neither mute to our pain nor unchanged by our presence. My greatest comforts in these last few days have been this writer’s words. She’s still there. And we’re still there with her.