A series of slight physical adjustments

James Krasner, from PMLA 119:2 (March 2004):

A child no longer accompanied by a mother still reaches a hand toward where hers should be. A father leans over to steady a missing car seat. A woman thinks she feels the heavy collapse of her dog beside her chair and shifts slightly, to accomodate its now missing head on her feet. Our grief becomes a series of slight physical adjustments based on the fact that a body that was always here, in a certain relation to our own, is now gone.