-inconsolable

what we ask for in that inconsolable state is the acknowledgment that, ‘yes, it is unfixable. No, nothing could be worse than this.’

http://www.zerotothree.org/inconsol.html
Zero To Three is the bi-monthly professional publication of ZERO TO THREE: National Center for Infants, Toddlers and Families. Each issue addresses a single topic of child development.

We want love, which is always going to turn out to be less dependable than the infinite we hoped for. We want psychological security and it will never be enough. We want physical security. We want to continue as me forever. Our wants, and perceived needs come up bang against the wall of aloneness which wanting and hoping and grasping creates. Then, can we be with the sadness this evokes? Can we feel it, the impulse to run away from it, the absoluteness of it, the non-negotiable nature of our predicament as a vulnerable, scared human being? Perhaps if we truly perceive the fact that there is nothing I can do, then the child/adult may for the first time be free from an enormous burden of managing the unmanageable.

Years ago I felt helpless when I saw a little boy of two sobbing his heart out, leaning with his face against a screen door of his house where I was visiting. oh- I tried to console him but he pushed me away as if nothing I could do could help. Sometimes a child in this despair seeks solitude behind a curtain or a tree; sometimes by lying face down on the floor.
In our nursery school years ago, a little boy hid in the empty fireplace, unreachable, broken-hearted, overwhelmed on his first day away from his mother--two years old, not understanding that she would return. oh-
That first little boy is a man now, gifted, sensitive, perceptive. When I recalled that incident when he sobbed, unreachable, and said that I felt that the inconsolable child needs to be understood he agreed and wrote me a letter about his reflections:*
“The inconsolable state of grief, or what feels like an intolerable level of loss or disappointment, is a very important point where the child begins to deal with our most fundamental relations--call it existential despair, or call it, ‘damn it, don’t you understand, this tragedy is unfixable!’. If a precious toy is lost, or a trust betrayed, or some such tragedy, it may evoke the feeling that this is not something I will be negotiated out of. I won’t be seduced by offers of warmth or food or entertainment. This is non-negotiable. (Is this what is known as integrity?)

*This letter from Kevin Frank.
When a Child is Inconsolable:Staying Near
Lois Barclay Murphy
Edited from the Zero to Three Journal, December 1988

and
Inconsolable Grief (1884) Ivan Kramskoy