Eleanora (Duse) siad, "Tell me about Deirdre and Patrick," and made
me repeat to her all their little sayings and ways, and show her
their photos, which she kissed and cried over.  She never
said, "Cease to grieve," but she grieved with me, and, for the first
time since their death, I felt I was not alone.

~Isadora Duncan

How we need to talk about the one we have lost.  It not only gives us
something to do with the energy of grief, but also establishes the
continuity of memory and spirit of one who was so much a part of our
lives.

Particularly when young lives are lost - as in the case of Isadora
Duncan, whose two young children drowned - to speak of them, and
their ways somehow extends lives to soon cut off, affirms the reality
of their having been here - See, I will speak of them.  They were
important.  They were here.

To talk freely of the dead is also to begin to get used to our
different experience of them now.  We still have a relationship with
them.  We talk as a way to try it out, and try ourselves out.  We
miss them.  Can we reach across the line of death - back to where
they were?  Will our memory serve us?  Yes, it will.  Who are they to
us now?  It is all so new.  We say their names and our minds
reverberate with the echoes of a new world.