Grief has a language all its own, but even the best therapists can get tongue-tied around the tricky stuff. Our grief vocabulary isn’t clinical, and you probably won’t find it in the self-help books that friends hand you after the memorial service. But this does come from some hard-earned experience: We both lost parents as young adults. Loss is messy, melancholic and often darkly hilarious. It also lingers forever. Here’s a glossary that takes all that into account. Use it well.