This project began with an interest in absence.

Not only the absence left by death, but the peculiar ways people, places, and possibilities continue to shape our lives after they are gone. Over time I became less interested in grief itself than in what it revealed. The persistence of memory. The way someone can be gone for years and still appear unexpectedly in an ordinary moment. The strange fact that a person can be absent and still remain present.

As a therapist, I was not trained in grief so much as I encountered it through the people I worked with and through my own attempts to understand attachment, trauma, and the lasting effects of what is missing. I could empathize with the grief experienced by the people I worked with, but I did not fully understand its depth and complexity until I experienced significant loss myself. Loss appeared in many forms: early absences, relationships that never fully developed, experiences that should have happened but did not. Over time I came to see that grief often seemed larger than the language available to describe it. It disrupted ordinary assumptions about time, distance, memory, and even reality itself. People who were gone remained active in the lives of those who loved them. The past appeared unexpectedly in the present. What should have ended often did not feel finished.

I found myself reading outside psychology, first literature and history, then eventually physics. Not because I thought physics could explain grief fully, but because it wrestles with questions I kept returning to: how we perceive the world, what remains uncertain, and how much of reality lies beyond what we can directly observe. It offered a different language for something I could sense but couldn't quite put into words.

The deeper question was never whether grief behaves like physics. The comparison mattered less than the problem they share. The things that matter most often resist measurement, and what resists measurement is notoriously difficult to describe. Physics confronts this difficulty as does grief.

Grief reveals how little of reality is available to us at any given moment. How much exists beyond awareness? What remains present despite going unnoticed? How much of a life unfolds outside the narrow field of what can be perceived, named, or known?

The essays collected here circle those questions from different directions. Some begin with grief. Others with memory, family, trauma, love, science, or the natural world. Together they are part of an ongoing attempt to understand what remains after loss, and why certain things continue to exert a force on us long after they should have disappeared.

Perhaps some of these questions belong to more than one of us.

With love,

Marissa