What we call mourning for our dead is perhaps not so much grief at not being able to call them back as it is grief at not being able to want to do so.

Mann’s aphorism turns mourning inward: the pain of bereavement is framed less as frustration at the impossibility of reversing death than as a crisis of desire itself. The mourner discovers an unsettling ambivalence—part of the self no longer even wishes to “call them back,” whether from exhaustion, acceptance, or the recognition that the dead belong to a different order. Grief thus becomes a form of self-reproach and moral discomfort: we suffer not only because we have lost someone, but because our capacity to long for their return fades, exposing the limits of love, memory, and will. The line captures mourning as a psychological drama in which the bereaved confront their own changing attachments.