It arrives without warning. A photograph, a song, somebody describing a weekend, and then a long ache for a life that is not gone, exactly, and not within reach either. English has words that come close. Nostalgia, longing, homesickness. None of them quite fits, and Welsh speakers reach for hiraeth for much the same reason.

Portuguese has a word that fits better.

Saudade, roughly sow-DAH-duh, names a longing for something absent. A person, a place, a time, a version of yourself. It can point backwards at what you had and forwards at what you expected and did not get. The feeling is specific enough that Portuguese and Galician speakers use it constantly and translators give up on it.

The origin is less romantic than the tourist version. You will read that it comes from the Age of Discoveries, from families watching ships leave. The word is older than that, and traces back through medieval Portuguese to a Latin root meaning solitude. The seafaring story is a later explanation attached to an existing word.

What makes it useful to you is the shape of the feeling.

Grief has an object that is gone and, eventually, an end. We looked at that two weeks ago, with the table set for the dead and the marigolds taken down afterwards. Saudade can be for the dead too, but it is not confined to them. It can be for the living, for a place, for a version of you still walking about. When the loss is an illness, the two often sit side by side. Grief for what ended, saudade for what is still there and out of reach.

And here is the part that makes the word worth having. Saudade is not always purely painful. A much quoted old description calls it a good thing you suffer and a bad thing you enjoy. If any of the memory of that kitchen is fond as well as sore, that is part of the feeling rather than a betrayal of it.

English has no settled category for a feeling that is half fond. So it gets filed as grief, which makes you think it should be resolving, or as self-pity, which makes you think you should stop. Both filings add a second problem on top of the first.

Which turns the question away from fixing it:

Today’s Practice

A different kind of practice. Nothing to process, and nothing to get over.

On a hard day, name it and do nothing else with it. And the line that matters: if the longing has stopped visiting and started living in the house, or nothing lifts at all, that is a conversation for your doctor. And if it has come with thoughts of not wanting to be here, tell someone today. Your doctor, or Samaritans on 116 123 in the UK, 988 in the US. In immediate danger, call 999 or 911.

What the Research Says

There is decent work on what naming a feeling does. Studies where people label an emotion in words, rather than only feeling it, find reduced activity in brain regions linked to threat, and a modest drop in distress. The research is mostly laboratory based, often imaging small groups, and the mechanism is argued about. It is not a large effect. But the direction is consistent. A precise name is plausibly more useful than a vague one, which is why borrowing a word from another language can earn its place rather than being a decoration.

Everyone’s Talking About

Untranslatable words have become a genre online, and it is worth separating the parts. The catalogues of hygge, lagom, ikigai and saudade are enjoyable, and the better scholarly versions treat them as a map of feelings different languages have made legible. The weaker version sells candles and tells you to adopt a Danish lifestyle in a grey November. What you get from a foreign word is narrower and better. Not a philosophy, not a way of living, but a category for something you already feel, which is the part that lasts.

Come Home

Five lines, for whenever this one comes round again.

One act for today, or smaller still. Today, or the next time it arrives, say the word for it once, out loud or on paper, and leave it there.

A recurring ache can look like unfinished business. It may only be a feeling with a name, one people have been having for centuries.

P.S. Tomorrow, one finding. What inflammation does to mood, and why feeling flat during a flare is not a weakness of character.