The Continuous Presence Of An Absence

Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us. It is a whisper in the world and a clamour within. More than sex, more than faith, even more than its usher death, grief is unspoken, publicly ignored except for those moments at the funeral that are over too quickly, or the conversations among the cognoscenti, those of us who recognize in one another a kindred chasm deep in the centre of who we are.
Maybe we do not speak of it because death will mark all of us, sooner or later. Or maybe it is unspoken because grief is only the first part of it. After a time it becomes something less sharp but larger, too, a more enduring thing called loss.
Perhaps that is why this is the least explored passage: because it has no end. The world loves closure, loves a thing that can, as they say, be gotten through. This is why it comes as a great surprise to find that loss is forever, that two decades after the event there are those occasions when something in you cries out at the continuous presence of an absence. "An awful leisure," Emily Dickinson once called what the living have after death…
The landscapes of all our lives become as full of craters as the surface of the moon. My brother is a young widower with young children, as his father was before him. And I write my obituaries carefully and think about how little the facts suffice, not only to describe the dead but to tell what they will mean to the living all the rest of our lives. We are defined by whom we have lost.

- Anna Quindlen in "Life After Death"