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I found this sentence in From Memories by Sarah White. Is it correct? I think the tense is a bit strange here.

She looked sad like after you have your loved one pass away.

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There is nothing wrong with the sentence grammatically (except that it would be clearer if there were a comma after sad), but it is written in a very colloquial register, and it employs have in a way you may not be familiar with.

  • The colloquial part is the use of like where formal English would employ as. The like phrase compares the woman’s sadness to what you, the reader, might feel after a particular sort of experience. The experience, the object of after, may be expressed as a noun, as a gerund clause, or as a finite-verb clause

    Here are examples of the construction with a noun and a gerund phrase (they're from the first page of a Google search on "sad like after"):

    ... feeling sad—like after a lousy day at the office or a fight with someone you love
    It's a good sad, like after watching a really tragic movie and you've just cried your eyes out while eating an entire box of chocolates

    Here are examples with a finite verb in the past tense.

    He was still sad—like after you left I feel sad (like after we lost the girls)

    Those two have the verb in the past tense because sad is compared to the feeling prompted by a specific past event. But the verb can also be cast in the present tense if you compare sad to a ‘generic’ event which occurs repeatedly or might occur at any time:

    ... sad like after you get dumped by someone you didn’t really care about
    ... sad like when you pass a cemetery, seeing all those lonely gravestones

    That's the sort of construction that's involved in your example.

  • The other thing that could be confusing you here is the use of have, which may feel to you like the beginning of a perfect construction. It's actually something quite different: neither a perfect auxiliary nor a causative auxiliary (as in to have something done) but the lexical verb used to mean “experience” or “suffer” and taking as its direct object a non-finite clause with a bare infinitive (an infinitive not marked with to) as its head. Thus:

    She had her house burn down = She experienced her house burning down.

    In the same way, you have your loved one pass away means “you experience your loved one passing away”.

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