Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us.It is a whisper in the world and a clamor within.More than sex, more than faith, even more than its usher death,grief is unspoken, publicly ignoredexcept for those few moments at the funeral that are over too quickly,or the conversations among the cognoscenti,those of us who recognize in one anothera kindred chasm deep in the center of who we are.Maybe we do not speak of it because death will mark all of us, sooner or later.Or maybe it is unspoken because grief is only the first part of it.After a time it becomes something less sharp but larger, too,a more enduring thing called loss.Perhaps that is why this is the least explored passage:because it has no end.The world loves closure,loves a thing that can, as they say, be gotten through.This is why it comes as a great surprise to find that loss is forever,that two decades after the event there are those occasionswhen something in you cries out at the continual presence of an absence.