The death of someone close pulls us out of our normal life and throws us into a place that exists between the world of the living and the world of the dead. We feel alone and isolated by the trauma. People don’t understand the importance of the words we haltingly speak. We feel detached from everything we have known and trusted, and abandoned in a place without any familiar landmarks. We feel hollowed out, like the Clothespin giant sequoia in Yosemite whose center was burned out by a fire, yet continued to live.
