What pitiable cant to say ‘She will live forever in my memory!’ Live? That is exactly what she won’t do. You might as well think like the old Egyptians that you can keep the dead by embalming them. Will nothing persuade us that they are gone? What’s left? A corpse, a memory, and (in some versions) a ghost. All mockeries or horrors. Three more ways of spelling the word dead. It was [Helen Joy] I loved. As if I wanted to fall in love with my memory of her, an image in my own mind! It would be a sort of incest.
C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 18-19.
