When the Soul Leaves the House

Doesn't it seem that the home knows when the person who lived there has died?

Brian Dillon writes about "The Empty Space."

A house changes after somebody has died: There is suddenly too much space. We all know the symptoms of that change. We set an extra place at the table. We leave empty for months, even years, a chair in which the de­ceased used to sit. We imagine that at any moment the lost loved one will appear in the room (the air, the light, the whole room would subtly alter). These phenomena are familiar to the point of cliché. So well-known, in fact, that, even in the shock of our bereavement, we are sur­prised (in my case, embarrassed; shame seems to have covered for every other emotion) to find ourselves suc­cumbing to them, as if we feel our grief must, surely, be more original than that. When nothing is said of the ab­sence at the heart of the house, these lapses multiply; if only we could name the emptiness—we do know, after all, its name, her name—we would surely be better able to navigate around it, to keep moving. But time and again we find ourselves stranded in these ludicrous poses, like a photograph from which one figure has been erased: four dummies with nothing to say to one another.