This is Philosophy Bytes with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

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Anyone who's lost a spouse, a parent or a close friend will know the feeling.

That initial sense of intense grief tends to drop off over a period of months and years to something less overwhelming.

Returning to Philosophy Bytes, Samuel Sheffler, author most recently of One Life to Lead,

says there's something puzzling about this. Samuel Sheffler, welcome to philosophy bites.

Thank you. I'm delighted to be here. The topic we're going to talk about is grief and time.

Before we get on to the connection with time, could you just say what you understand by grief?

Well, grief is a more complex notion than we sometimes take it to be.

People often think of grief as a feeling of some kind, and it certainly

it has affective quality, but grief is actually quite complicated syndrome of feelings,

dispositions to think in certain ways, to act in certain ways, characteristic patterns of

thought, feeling, and affect that typically occur

in response to a personal loss.

What's that got to do with time?

Well, like many of our feelings and attitudes, grief seems to be affected by the passage

of time in ways that sometimes can seem puzzling or even troubling, both puzzling to us as

philosophers and sometimes troubling to people who are experiencing grief. One way to approach

the question is to think about how various other feelings and emotions are affected by the passage

of time. Not all of our feelings and emotions

seem to be affected the same way. So, for example, if you think of something like gratitude,

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