"When we've been there 10,000 years..." / We'll see all trips were brief, / For there love's joy will banish tears, / As glory quenches grief....

Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that they will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wait till the incomprehensible power ... that has broken you restores you a little, I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.

Shall we mourn here deedless forever a shadow-folk mist-haunting dropping vain tears in the thankless sea

Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.

When one person is missing the whole world seems empty.

To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought...?