Grave Situation

I miss linguistics. Not the class, but the subject. I thoroughly enjoyed my etymology research on the word sweet, although, if you were to ask me, I honestly couldn't recall what the history of that word in English is, and I think I lost my paper...

This morning as I was writing part of my introduction for my research paper in Aging & Society, I made a completely unintentional pun that made me laugh, ironically. My topic is on evolving attitudes toward death and dying throughout the lifespan. Thrilling, I know. The sentence that made me laugh starts like this:

"Often, when one considers such a grave topic. . ."

In French, the word grave, from my understanding, means serious. When I was in Chad, some of the other SMs and I would use the phrase, "Oh, c'est grave," fairly often, sometimes jokingly. I remember talking to Stefan once about the lack of an equivalent usage in English. "What am I going to say when I'm back in America?" I asked in dismay. Then I remembered that the word grave does exist in English; we just don't often use it.

Anyway, the point of all this is that after writing that sentence for my paper, I thought of how much I would love to do a short etymology of the word grave just for kicks. Random? Yes.