About this passageWritten for this collection. It makes no claim about what happens after death, in either direction, and is offered to a reader for whom that question is either settled or beside the point at the moment they are reading.
Grief is not an emotion so much as a change of address. Everything is where it was, and the person is not, and the mismatch has to be worked through one object at a time — the mug, the side of the bed, the shop you both used.
Some of it arrives late. Months on, a person can be undone by a supermarket, or by the sudden realisation that they have gone a whole morning without remembering. That second one tends to feel like a betrayal. It isn't. It is what carrying something looks like once you have carried it long enough to walk.
The part nobody tells you is how much of the work is administrative. There are forms. There is a bank. Somewhere in the middle of the worst month of your life you will be on hold, and the tinny music will keep playing, and this is not an insult to the dead. It is simply what the living have to do.
What is left of them is not nothing, and not them. It is the shape they pressed into the people who knew them, which those people go on carrying, mostly without noticing, and occasionally all at once.