The last line of this paragraph from Michael Ondaatje's 'Anil's Ghost':

He had grown up loving the sea... And whatever coast he was on - at Hambantota, in chilaw, in Trincomalee - he would watch fishermen in catamarans travel out at dusk till they faded into the night just beyond a boy's vision. As if parting or death or disappearance were simply the elimination of sight in the onlooker.

Each time anyone close to me has died, I have been absent - not close at all. The pattern has been remarkable, to me at least. And so it has at times seemed to me as though it is not that the person has gone, but simply that I am not going to see them any more; they have stepped outside my line of sight. Almost as though it is my failure, my inability to see, that is at the heart of their absence.

This all sounds pretty silly and pagan and more serious than I would like when written down by me, but when Ondaatje says it - it speaks.