Siri Hustvedt’s Revelatory Examination of Grief

In volume six of In Search of Lost Time, Proust, with trademark acuity, notices that when our loved ones die, they don’t die for us immediately, if ever, but rather transform into a kind of aura—something like a ghost—and it is through this aura that they remain alive for us and occupy us as they did when living. Proust compares their deaths to a journey abroad, albeit a journey from which they can never return. Their auras, though, don’t need to return—they never left in the first place.Siri Hu...