There have been few more remarkable interviews in recent years than this week’s encounter between the Chief Rabbi and the Archbishop of Canterbury on the Today programme. Both men have experienced the devastating grief of losing a daughter, and their reflections on the trauma some years afterwards — Johanna Welby was seven months old when she died in a car crash in 1983 and Rabbi Mirvis’s 30 year old daughter, Liora, died of cancer in 2011 — was at the same time upsetting, riveting, comforting and necessary. Both men are, as it were, professionally eloquent. But the eloquence of the pulpit is very different from that of the parent, still more that of the bereaved parent. Their interview, for National Grief Awareness Week will have struck a chord with anyone who has lost a close family member before their time. In this wretched year, so many of us have not only lost loved ones but have done so in appalling circumstances when we could not even grieve properly at a funeral or a shivah. This made a terrible time far worse. So it is all the more important that the notion of grief, and how we grieve, is aired properly.