"You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally, the river floods these places. 'Floods' is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding: it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, that valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory--what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our flooding."

Toni Morrison, 1986

One of the greatest betrayals of our illusion of permanence, one of the sharpest daggers of loss, is the retroactive recognition of lasts—the last time you sat across from a person you now know you will never see again, the last touch of a hand, the last carefree laugh over something that binds two people in intimacy—lasts the finality of which we can never comprehend in the moment, lasts we experience with sundering shock in hindsight. Emily Dickinson, the poet laureate of loss, knew this well:
We never know we go—when we are going
We jest and shut the door—
Fate following behind us bolts it
And we accost no more

Maria Popova, Figuring, pg 184