That fall, after the summer when they both died, she and my father, there was a point when I wanted to say to them, All right, you have died, I know that, and you’ve been dead for a while, we have all absorbed this and we’ve explored the feelings we had at first, in reaction to it, surprising feelings, some of them, and the feelings we’re having now that a few months have gone by – but now it’s time for you to come back. You’ve been away long enough.

(Lydia Davis, Can’t and Won’t – quoted by Adam Thirlwell in The Giant Slightness of Being, New York Review of Books, LXI-10)