Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living.

Living and dying get drawn as one continuous thing rather than two separate states. Every day is shaped by the fact that it ends, and those who have gone keep a presence in the people who remember them, cast by us as much as by themselves. Whether you call that metaphysics or memory, the experience is familiar to anybody who has lost somebody.

If you are carrying a recent loss, the part worth holding is that a shadow is not nothing. Speaking their name, cooking what they cooked, keeping a habit they gave you: none of that is a failure to move on. It is how the living do the carrying.