Human suffering has many facets: we never encounter another pain of precisely the same shade. We may recognise similarities, identify comparable losses and use common words—grief, abandonment, fear, loneliness—but what each person feels remains profoundly unique.

Two people may lose someone they love and yet inhabit completely different forms of grief. For one, absence may carry the grey colour of an endless silence; for another, it may burn like red fury. For some, pain manifests itself through tears; for others, through the inability to cry. Some speak incessantly about what happened, while others can communicate only through the body, insomnia, exhaustion or a nameless anxiety.

The intensity of suffering does not depend solely on the event that caused it. It also depends on the sufferer’s personal history, the affection they received, previous losses, words they were never able to say and wounds they believed they had forgotten. Present pain rarely arrives alone: it tends to awaken older pain, open inner rooms that had remained closed and return us to parts of ourselves we thought we had overcome.

For this reason, comparing suffering is a subtle form of violence. Telling someone that other people are in worse situations does not diminish their anguish; it merely adds guilt to what already hurts. Suffering is not a competition, nor can it be measured on a universal scale. Each person feels with the emotional resources available to them at that particular moment.

To listen to someone truly means resisting the temptation to explain too quickly, offer immediate advice or search for equivalent experiences in our own lives. Saying, “I know exactly how you feel,” may sound empathetic, but perhaps no one knows exactly what another person feels. We can draw closer, recognise echoes and offer our presence, but we cannot fully occupy the place of someone else’s pain.

It is precisely because no two pains share the same shade that each form of suffering requires its own kind of listening. Some pain asks for words; other pain first needs silence. Some requires understanding; some simply needs companionship. Certain forms of suffering begin to change when they are given a name, while others become bearable only when someone agrees to remain in their presence without trying to erase them.

Human pain possesses many colours, some so dark that they resemble the absence of light. Yet even within those shades, there is a story that deserves to be heard. Understanding suffering does not mean immediately removing its colour, but helping the person discover that they are greater than the shade that, at that moment, covers their entire life.