ABSTRACT
When someone dies and their belongings are dispersed, those who remember them lose the familiar, home, places in which they habitually met. They had set up unconscious habits and previous times – the chair, the arrangement of table settings, the ashtray and vase on the mantelpiece that would be reminders of the ordinary times together have now gone. An ordinary death and an ordinary disposal of belongings destroys a great many prompts that might recall habitual conduct. This chapter is concerned with such loss, but on an extraordinary and a shared scale. It is also concerned with the other end of life, when attachments to maternal and paternal figures and domestic things have their greatest scope and significance – the immensity of corners and the potency of repeated, familiar things. What if that is lost, not just beyond recall as a mysterious hint, but denied by some destructive force? What does the survivor do to fill in that absence?
