Snow Angel

What's the protocol for a Christmas with a missing child?

I'm trying to hold off the dreadful thoughts through mental discipline - think about something else, do something else or think about nothing at all. Marion is bathed in grief. She says that everything she does, everything she thinks, everything she touches reminds her of Kay. There's only a hairs breadth between tears and no tears and she crosses the line easily.

This is just a terrible experience. Like a Snow Angel, Kay is demarcated by what is not there, by a silhouette of absence, by an echo of nothing, by a need that can never be fulfilled. The light in our house, the presence of our family, the smell of wonderful cooking serve merely to highlight what is not. With my photographer's eye I can see where Kay is not, but I cannot capture her. With my physicist's eye, her absence is a black hole set in the centre of our lives, visible by the effect that it has on the light that flows around it.

I miss my Kay. From the nucleii of the atoms that make my being to the deepest places of my heart. I miss my Kay.

Kay, wherever you are my darling, I love you more than I can ever say or think or do.