My sympathies for that rough experience. I hope you have a wider family and friend group that supports you taking care of yourself, and have or will find a better match of romantic partner.

Not the person you replied to, but just listening and allowing the person to express themselves and feel heard goes a long way. Getting it all out to someone and not being bottled up inside your own head can be a huge relief, even if the problem itself remains the same.

The instinctual reaction is to want to offer fixes. However, whatever the hearer thought of in five seconds, the sufferer probably also already thought of, and spent days/months/years attempting to make it work and it just didn’t, and now the listening session gets diverted into kind of an argument where the suffered has to justify they have already put in sufficient effort to the fix the listener is pushing that it’s not worth continuing on that road.

I am biased because I own (small) parrots who genuinely love crackers, and any reference to that cute behavior is positive for me. But I believe this would be a great metaphor even if I weren’t biased in favor of parrots.

He was shot in the head prior to the explosion going off. Seems unlikely that sequence of events was accidental.