the grief was a full act/repeated for each new condoleress/working up to a climax

Primitive human nature in my aunt María Josefa yielded absolutely to every passion in turn, put up with every trial, but survived and clung no less passionately to whatever was left. Her grief on this occasion [her daughter's death] was violent, but only violent in fits, as when each new visitor came to condole with her, and she had to repeat the whole story, with appropriate floods of tears, sobs, and lamentations

--Santayana, George, Persons and Places, Fragments of an Autobiography, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1956, pg.124.