Why she was weeping

After the Prophet ﷺ died, Abu Bakr said to Umar that they should go and visit Umm Ayman, as he used to visit her.

They went. And when they reached her, she wept.

They said to her: what makes you weep? What is with Allah is better for His Messenger.

It is a reasonable thing to say to someone grieving, and it is the sort of thing people do say. She had known him longer than either of them.

Her answer was that she was not weeping because she did not know that. She was weeping because the revelation from heaven had been cut off.

The report says that this moved them to weep with her.

What she had done was correct the frame. The two men had assumed she was grieving a person, and had offered the consolation appropriate to that. She told them she was grieving something else: that for twenty-three years there had been a channel open between heaven and earth, and that it had now closed, and would not open again.

The report is in Sahih Muslim. It is the only place in this dataset where a Companion tells Abu Bakr and Umar that they have misunderstood something, and is immediately proved right.