“Everything feels sort of inadequate,” she observes, rolling the letter in her hands like a worry-stone, “when it's ... you'd think we'd all get better at it. Everyone dies eventually except, apparently, incredibly irritating elves. Everyone loses someone. Usually more than one person. And we're all...”

Some people, to be fair, manage to be worse at it than others. Certainly, both of them fall under that particular heading. And even still it strikes her: in hundreds of years and apparently across hundreds of disparate worlds, no one has managed to come up with anything that doesn't feel like nothing, somehow. To say or to hear.

After a moment, “It isn't. Inadequate. That you're here.”

To set aside her grand philosophising on the intangibly, existentially empty nature of condolences—

actually, it's good, a bit.