The past acts as a wall which prevents the present from entering the life's time; or, if it filters in, it is transformed immediately into terms of the past. Everything he sees reminds him of what he can no longer see; and what he is reminded of becomes the essential experience, not what he sees. Supposing the period of bereavement passes. The future becomes available again, the present impinges, and they pull the past out of it fixity. The amalgam of intentionality is formed once more. The recovery is not the result of circumstances changing. The death is irreversible. It is the result of the life's time finally accepting the death and surrounding it, the loss becoming part of that life.
Loss is final. (at least at the level of our particular rationality,
and this is not the moment to try and go further.)
Absence can be thought of as temporary. Yet the suffering of enforced
absence can destroy intentionality more thoroughly and for longer
than bereavement. Imprisonment is the extreme example. The prisoner
suffers the double pain of absence. He misses everything he feels
as absent. At the same time, that which is absent, continues without
him. He lacks and he is lacking. Yet absence is not final loss.
His sentence has an end. He can envisage how he will rejoin the
absent. This is a source of hope but it is also the pivot of the
violence of imprisonment. P.178
Berger, John and Mohr, John A Seventh Man Viking Press, 1975
