The ordinary detail can make a large feeling believable.

Large emotions announced directly tend to slide off the page. A reader believes grief through a coat still hanging by the door, not through the word itself, because a specific ordinary object is something the mind can stand inside. Scale comes from precision rather than from volume or from adjectives.

When you are writing something with a big feeling in it, take out the naming and put in one small fact from that day. Then read it to somebody and watch where they go quiet.