“Think of me then, Katrin, never forget me then, that lad gaily assuming the land and its roads and traffic would never be anything but kind to him…” 

“The running colloquy with him distressed her more than it comforted her. Every other person lapsed, she was inhabited entirely by him. She felt that he had not passed away but had passed on, not her, and there he lived, in her, not jealously, not desiring to confine her further life, but wishing her well, urging her to live, to keep up with old friends, make new ones, get on with her work. And all that benevolent admonishing worked futilely on the fact that he, the admonisher, was necessary to her doing what he asked.”  

“She was in a state in which distress, anxiety, panic, rise and rise into something akin to paralysis but fraught with a desperate need, and inability, to move—panic in stasis, no act imaginable that might bring release; confinement in unease without opening or issue in any direction; unbearable, but implosion and annihilation the only conceivable way of ending it.”

-David Constantine, The Life-Writer