“Having lost the presence of your loved one in daily life, you’ve only had them as ghostly presence to begin with. Visits home and phone calls can bring them to life, but only temporarily. So after the call with the news comes, the long-distance griever has to resummon the love object in her mind, then lose the beloved again. The gears of imagination grind through a painful game of found-and-lost, lost-and-found.”
