On a day of burial there is no perspective-for space itself is annihilated. Your dead friend is still a
fragmentary being. The day you bury him is a day of chores and crowds, of hands false or true to be
shaken, of the immediate cares of mourning. The dead friend will not really die until tomorrow, when
silence is round you again. Then he will show himself complete, as he was-to tear himself away, as he was,
from the substantial you. Only then will you cry out because of him who is leaving and whom you cannot detain.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944), French aviator, author;
Flight to Arras, ch. 2 (1942).