On memory, fabrication, and the missing owner

Standing at the sink, halfway through washing a pan, I was handed a sentence someone had spoken to me nineteen years earlier. 

Not the memory of it. The sting of it, arriving intact, with the reply I never made already assembled behind it. I had not been thinking about that person. I had been thinking about the pan.

I have no idea where that was manufactured or by whom. A thought appears, and almost immediately the mind places a small flag on it: mine. I remember. I am humiliated. I am angry. 

I should have said…

When someone we love dies, we lose their presence, the physical, everyday world of companionship. Their voice, expressions, the way they moved through a room, the warmth of shared glances, and the familiarity of conversations that needed no preamble all disappear. This is the most immediate and recognisable face of grief: the aching absence where a living presence once existed…