This text begins from the assumption that profound grief offers insights into the conditions and the structure of human-level intentionality. This is chiefly in virtue of grief’s amounting to a temporary impairment of an individual’s capacity to grasp and process reality – a breakdown in the emoter’s experiential world. Instead of focusing on the aspects relevant to this in a general, abstract and mainly theoretical manner, this article proceeds by recounting and discussing a set of individual reflections about one concrete episode of a mother’s grieving. These reflections are those of poet and philosopher Denise Riley, whose autobiographical notes on the aftermath of the unexpected death of her adult son revolve around a marked experience of arrested temporal flow. By delving into the depths of this almost unspeakable alteration in lived time, Riley unearths a level of reflection that can rival philosophical studies of lived time and intentionality. I will consider Riley’s thoughts in tandem with recent phenomenological work on grief and bring it into conversation with ideas about the temporal foundations of lived experience and interpersonal relatedness. My main consideration might be summarized as follows: Grief can so thoroughly “break” intentionality because it is a continued expression of the love that had “made” intentionality in the first place. And, as it turns out, this “love” must be understood as rooted in existential temporality. So I arrive at a Heideggerian conclusion (time as the essence of intentionality) by what I hope is a rather Un-Heideggerian route (a consideration of grief and the love it expresses).