“The Smell of Loss” – NY Times

The English author and critic Julie Myerson explores in her fictional piece the smell of a loss. It is amazing how many different associations and aspects are covered in this short piece in the New York Times.

“THE first time it happens is a dark winter’s afternoon, not quite a year after her death. I’m at my desk working, and there it suddenly is: sharp, glassy-green, with that faint, musky undertone that catches at the back of your throat.

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I recognize it instantly: the scent that hung in our hall every time she came to supper. The perfume that clung to her coat, her scarves, detectable sometimes for hours on my babies’ hair after she’d been carrying and kissing them.

That first time, it’s a shock. Her perfume is something I’ve long forgotten (in her final months, mostly bedridden, she was beyond all that). But here it is — absolute and definite and quite overpowering. It lasts for three, maybe four minutes, long enough for me to get up and start searching the room for its source (my daughter, Chloë, has a few of her cardigans — did she leave one in here?).

Then, just as suddenly, it’s gone…”

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Read more at: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/03/opinion/sunday/the-smell-of-loss.html