India, April 26 -- There is a particular cruelty in the way the world insists on continuing. Even before my youngest aunt's bier was out of the house, tea arrangements were being made for everyone. People would need tea after the cremation. My brother was driving me, my mother and her septuagenarian brother, the widower who was totally unprepared to cremate his much younger wife, to the middle-of-the-city crematorium. All of us complained about the potholes on the road. And I thought: This is the part they leave out. The tea and the potholes.

Grief, as it is sold to us in elegies, in the long third acts of prestige dramas, in the memoirs that win prizes and generate profiles, is a grand and annihilating weather. It's like a storm. It des...