When my brother Richard died I was overwhelmed by grief, so I developed a systematic way to get through it. I assembled a list of all his adjectives (dear, lovely, wonderful, artistic etc) and all his nouns (brother, little brother, youngest brother, Richard, etc). Then, in the most bloody minded way, I went through and considered every combination of the 2 lists, and found that every descriptive phrase seemed to contain a droplet of grief... but only 1 such droplet. When I had worked through the whole list I had just about cried myself out, and I wasn't bothered by those phrases ever again. So I dealt with grief.