I stumbled upon this quote in a novel by one of my favorite authors, Jeffery Deaver, best known for his
Lincoln Rhyme series, especially The Bone Collector which was made into a movie starring Denzel Washington. It is a dialogue about grief between an adolescent girl who has lost her mother tragically in a case being investigated by Kathryn Dance, a frequent Deaver character.
LL
“…Everybody tells me it goes away, what I’m feeling. Just time, it’ll be alright.”
“Everybody’s wrong,” Dance said.
“What?”
“I lost my husband a few years ago.”
“Hey, I’m sorry.”
A nod of acknowledgement. “It doesn’t go away. Ever. And it shouldn’t. We should always miss certain people who’ve been in our lives. But there’ll be islands, more and more of them.”
“Islands?”
“That’s the way I thought of it. Islands–of times when you’re content, you don’t think about the loss. Now it’s like your world’s underwater. But the water goes down and the islands come up. the water will be there always, but you’ll find dry land again. That helped me through it. A friend told me that…”
…She rose and turned away. Dance did too. Then in an instant the girl turned and threw her arms around the agent, crying again. “Islands,” she whispered. Thank you…Islands.”
from Solitude Creek by Jeffery Deaver
Solitude Creek is available from Amazon in softcover, Kindle or Audible book form. You can find it at this link: Solitude Creek at Amazon
