Notes on an Absence

We found ourselves unable to compose what is ordinarily called a eulogy, for such a form presumes a comprehension that had not yet been granted to us. The scale of the devastation lay beyond the reach of language, not because words were insufficient, but because understanding itself had not yet arrived. What we could bring, therefore, was not an account of her life as a completed whole, nor a measure of her meaning, but only the altered condition of the world as it now appeared to us: rooms that seemed slightly misaligned, time proceeding without its former weight, the strange persistence of ordinary gestures in the absence of the one who had once anchored them.

In speaking of her, we could do no more than describe these traces: how life now moved around the space she once occupied, how her presence remained perceptible not in memory alone but in the quiet distortions left behind.

If we attempt to say who she was, it is only through what continues to bear her imprint, and through what has been rendered inexplicably hollow by her absence. She was never afraid of what followed death. What troubled her, rather, was how unmanageable it became for those who remained. She understood, perhaps too clearly, that loss does not end with the one who dies, but begins again in the lives rearranged around the absence. And so she insisted, even when it cost her, that we speak not of where she had gone, but of what life would be like for us without her. These were the conversations she could endure, no matter how painful, because she believed that by naming the shape of our days without her, we might suffer less. She asked us not to grieve, not because she denied the depth of attachment, but because she had carried enough of the world’s sorrow already and did not want us to add our own to it once she was no longer there to hold it. Yet when he passed, something in her language failed. The words that had once come so freely - measured, careful, composed - fell away, as if grief itself had crossed a threshold beyond which speech could no longer follow. So we describe our loss through our experiences of what is left.

In the days that followed our loss of her, nothing occurred that could be pointed to as an event. Morning arrived as it always had, with the same light collecting along the edges of furniture, the same minor decisions required to begin the day. Yet something had altered the internal measure by which time was kept. Hours no longer progressed; they accumulated, stacking without compression, as if the mechanism responsible for carrying moments forward had quietly failed.

There was, at first, an expectation that the absence would resolve itself through routine. Errands were completed, meals prepared, messages answered with an attention that bordered on excess. The body continued its obligations faithfully, though it began to do so with a noticeable lag, like machinery running on a weakened current. Nothing dramatic announced the loss. Instead, it expressed itself through a gradual thinning of the world, a reduction in its capacity to hold meaning.

Weeks later, certain patterns became apparent. Objects once associated with guidance or protection no longer functioned as such. Advice, when recalled, appeared incomplete, as though it had always been provisional, intended for a different future that would now never arrive. There was a growing sense that the past had been arranged under assumptions that no longer applied, and that the present was being asked to proceed without the structural support it had been promised.

Months later, the grief no longer presented as pain but as orientation loss. Decisions were made without reference to an imagined witness. Achievements occurred without resonance. Even disappointment felt unanchored, lacking a destination. It became clear that something essential had not been removed but rather withheld, and that this withholding had reorganized the internal landscape so thoroughly that its original contours could no longer be reconstructed.

Afterward, there was no continuous mourning, only a sequence of interruptions. For long stretches, the loss appeared not to have taken place at all. Days passed in which the mind moved freely, unencumbered, as though the relevant information had been filed incorrectly or assigned to a future date. It was only when some minor, unrelated detail presented itself; a particular angle of light on a stairwell, the sound of footsteps in an adjoining room, that the sealed compartment opened briefly, releasing a pressure disproportionate to its cause.

The rest of the time, the absence remained inaccessible, not because it had diminished, but because the internal conditions required for its recognition were rarely met. One lived, therefore, in a state of intermittent bereavement, uncertain whether the loss had already been endured or was still pending.

What became clear, eventually, was that the mind does not permit continuous access to such knowledge. It allows it only in fragments, administered sparingly, as though to prevent collapse. The result is not healing, but a kind of administrative delay, in which grief exists everywhere in theory and almost nowhere in experience.

Because the grief did not announce itself in recognizable intervals, it was assumed not yet to have arrived. Those nearby behaved as though it were still pending, a future disturbance that would, in due course, make itself known in clearer terms. They waited for visible markers; withdrawal, collapse, overt sorrow, as one waits for weather already forecast. In the meantime, normality was maintained with a certain careful optimism.

Over time, this produced a peculiar doubling of temporal frameworks. In one, the loss had already been endured repeatedly, though without witnesses. In the other, it remained hypothetical, awaiting the correct display. The two versions coexisted without meeting. What was most difficult to articulate was that the grief others anticipated was not missing, but exhausted, having been accessed only in fragments, at moments that could not be scheduled or explained.

It was only later that we began to understand that what we had mistaken for endurance was in fact a gradual dulling of the faculty by which one apprehends danger. Certain declarations, repeated with such regularity that they came to resemble a familiar air rather than speech, lost their force to warn. We learned, without knowing we were learning it, to continue our days in the presence of a threat that announced itself so often it ceased to feel capable of completion. And so when the thing finally took place - not as an outburst, but with the quiet decisiveness of a long-considered departure - it struck us not as a rupture, but as a correction. What failed us was not love, nor vigilance, but imagination: the inability to believe that what had always stopped just short of the edge might one day decide there was nothing left to wait for.

Only much later did we begin to understand that we had vastly overestimated our own significance in the economy of a household. For years we had carried the unspoken conviction that it was our presence, our need, our attachment, the sheer fact of our continued arrival into the world, that served as the tether preventing a final disappearance. This belief, though comforting, was sustained by nothing more than repetition and hope. What truly held the structure in place was something far less visible to us at the time: the daily, unremarkable persistence of the other parent, whose constancy functioned not just as devotion in the sentimental sense, but as ballast.

When that counterweight was removed, its absence did not announce itself immediately, but its effects began to register everywhere.

After that point, though no one at the time could have said precisely when it occurred, it became evident that the world had altered its bearing. Not in any dramatic or outwardly perceptible way, but through a series of small displacements that accumulated quietly. The body, once accustomed to moving with a certain unconscious assurance, began to hesitate. Rooms appeared larger than before. Sounds lost their edges. Even daylight seemed uncertain of its right to remain.

It was not grief, exactly, that governed this new state, but a reorganization of perception. The world had not merely lost a figure within it; it had lost a principle of cohesion.

It became apparent, gradually, that what had been given could not be reassigned. Not because it was excessive or idealized, but because it belonged to a particular configuration of attention that no longer existed. To have been regarded in that way, to have one’s presence acknowledged without effort or explanation-had established a standard of recognition for which there was, afterward, no adequate substitute. Encounters continued, affections formed, bonds accumulated, yet each arrived bearing the faint but unmistakable mark of insufficiency, like copies made from a source that could no longer be located.

This was not something one actively mourned. It functioned instead as a background condition, perceptible only when comparison became unavoidable. One realized, in the midst of ordinary exchanges, that the sensation of being fully received, of having one’s existence confirmed without remainder; belonged to a past arrangement that could not be reconstructed by assembling its individual elements elsewhere. What had been offered was indivisible, bound not only to the person herself but to the singular way in which she oriented herself toward the world, and toward us within it.

Thus the absence did not announce itself as loneliness, but as a persistent asymmetry. Life continued to provide connection, even tenderness, yet something in the body remained calibrated to a form of recognition it no longer encountered. And so one moved forward, carrying within oneself the knowledge of having once been seen completely - an experience that, precisely because it had existed, rendered its disappearance unmistakable, and ensured that its place would remain, not empty, but unfillable.

As the weeks and months accumulated, each indistinguishable from the last except by the condition of the light - it became increasingly difficult to say who she had been, apart from what she had done. Not because she lacked a self, but because she had distributed it so thoroughly among those around her that no single remainder could be retrieved and examined. Attempts to describe her inevitably collapsed into inventories of care: gestures performed without witness, adjustments made before they were noticed, a constant, nearly invisible calibration of the world to accommodate the needs of others.

What one came to understand, though never satisfactorily explain, was that her way of giving had rendered her almost undocumented. She had occupied her life the way certain structures occupy a landscape, not as landmarks, but as supports whose presence is inferred only after their removal. In her absence, the difficulty was not only that she was gone, but that the very conditions that had allowed her to remain partially unseen had disappeared with her.

Thus she survived not as a character that could be fully recalled, but as a standard that could not be reproduced. The forms of care she embodied resisted duplication because they were never performed as roles, nor anchored in a singular identity. They belonged to a manner of being that dissolved itself into its effects. And so we found ourselves living among those effects, still intact, still operative; while the source itself receded beyond description, leaving behind the enduring knowledge that something essential had once been given, in a way that cannot be repeated, precisely because it was never claimed as her own.

Over time and through reflection, it became apparent that what had been given had not departed with her, though it no longer bore her name. It persisted instead in the smallest, least conspicuous adjustments, in the way one paused before speaking, or altered a course without quite knowing why, or attended to the edges of a situation rather than its center. These actions did not announce themselves as continuations of her presence. On the contrary, they appeared entirely unremarkable, indistinguishable from habit or temperament, and for this reason were rarely recognized as anything else.

Yet it was precisely this quality of indistinction that revealed their origin. The love she had imparted operated without display, having been learned not as a principle but as a manner of inhabiting the world. It moved outward through us, not as imitation, but as an internal orientation, an attentiveness that sought no acknowledgment and therefore left no trace of authorship. One did not feel oneself to be doing what she had done; one simply found that the world was approached in a way that had already been shaped.

In this sense, her love had become inseparable from perception itself. It governed how distance was measured, how others were allowed to appear without demand, how presence was offered without insistence. Those who encountered it could not have identified it as hers, just as one cannot identify the source of a current by observing the water alone. And yet, in certain moments, often only in retrospect, it was possible to discern that what moved through us bore the unmistakable structure of something once received whole.

Thus she remained both indistinguishable and singular. The love she had given did not preserve her image, nor did it replicate her form. It continued instead as a quiet alignment between self and world, an invisible devotion enacted daily without attribution. And it was only by noticing how naturally this way of being persisted, how impossible it felt to abandon, that we understood it as her most enduring presence: not a memory retained, but a way of moving forward that could not be unlearned.

What proved most difficult, and quietly sorrowful, was not that she had been misunderstood, but that there existed no adequate means of making her known. Those who had not lived within the field of her attention could be told what she did, how she cared, how she held a family together almost without appearing to do so, yet these accounts inevitably fell short. They sounded dutiful, even conventional, when set down in language, stripped of the conditions that had once given them weight.

The sadness resided in the fact that her true legacy did not take the form of stories that could be repeated, nor traits that could be easily named. It was carried instead in altered dispositions - in the way her grandchildren moved through the world with an instinctive regard for others, or how father learned, almost imperceptibly, to remain present in moments where absence would have been easier. These were not achievements that could be pointed to without diminishing them. They were discernible only over time, and often only to those who were already inclined to notice such things.

Thus any attempt to explain who she had been felt like an act of translation from a language no longer spoken aloud. One could gesture toward the outcomes, a family shaped by gentleness rather than force, a widening circle of care that extended beyond obligation, but the source itself remained elusive. The very quality that allowed her to leave the world more bearable than she found it was the same quality that made her difficult to represent: she had not sought to mark the world, only to steady it.

In this way, the sadness was inseparable from constancy. To make her fully visible would have required turning her way of being into an object, a portrait, a narrative center, something she had never allowed herself to become as a collective whole. And so those who loved her were left with a paradox: knowing that the world had been altered for the better by her presence, while also knowing that this alteration could never be conclusively demonstrated. It could only be lived forward, quietly, in forms of care that bore no signature, yet continued - day after day - to hold the world together in the manner she once did.

Looking back, it became possible, though only imperfectly, to discern the particular quality that distinguished her presence. It was not warmth in the ordinary sense-though she carried warmth-nor generosity as it is commonly praised-though she carried this too, but a sustained attentiveness that seemed to precede interaction itself. Those who entered a room where she was present often experienced, without remarking upon it, a subtle realignment, as if the space had adjusted to receive them. One did not feel observed, but accounted for.

Her way of seeing others was not interrogative. It required no clarification, no performance in return. People were permitted to arrive as they were, already legible, already sufficient. This produced a form of connection that left no impression of effort and therefore resisted later description. To say she was understanding would be inadequate; understanding implies distance. What she offered instead was a kind of immediate recognition, a tuning-in so precise that it eliminated the need for explanation.

This attunement did not announce itself through speech or instruction. It was conveyed through timing, through pauses held just long enough, through the unspoken assurance that nothing essential would be missed. In her presence, one felt briefly relieved of the labor of self-presentation. The self, such as it was, could rest.

Only afterward did it become clear that this capacity, to perceive without claiming, to connect without occupying - had been her defining characteristic. And because it functioned without emphasis, it left little record behind. What remained were not memories that could be cited, or things to devy out, but a lingering standard by which all subsequent encounters were measured, often to their disadvantage.

Thus her character was known not by what she asserted, but by what she made possible. Love, in her case, was not a feeling expressed just outwardly, but an infrastructure quietly maintained. And those who had once been seen in this way carried the imprint forward, recognizing in themselves an altered capacity to attend, to remain, to allow others to be fully present - without ever being able to say, with certainty, how they had learned it.

In the end, what could be said was this, though even saying it felt imprecise: that love, for her, was never assumed. It was not treated as a given condition of relationship, nor as something that could be inferred from circumstance or intention. It had to be made perceptible. Whether one felt held, recognized, fed, or accompanied was not left to chance. She attended to this continuously, adjusting herself in ways that ensured the fact of being loved did not remain abstract, but became something inhabitable.

This labor was carried out quietly, without declaration. She understood, perhaps more clearly than most, that love unregistered is indistinguishable from its absence, and so she worked - patiently, repetitively - to translate care into forms that could be received. What she gave was not just reassurance in words, but a steady externalization of regard, enacted until it could be taken inward and no longer required confirmation.

Only afterward did we recognize the extent of this devotion. What she had been making possible all along was not dependence, but an internal condition, an assurance sufficiently stable to persist in her absence. The fact that we continue to move through the world with a sense of having been loved, even when no one is actively expressing it, is evidence of her final and most enduring act: she made love a priority not by naming it, but by installing it within us, where it remains; unalterable, unclaimed, and impossible to undo.

And so if there is any way to speak of her now, it is only this: that the world, having once been held in this particular way, can never again be entered without noticing the difference.