It’s a very deniable state of confusion.

When you are physically removed from people, places, and your sources of information are limited to hearsay, however authoritative, it is so much easier to ignore any event or at least write it off as never having actually taken place. Death is a very conceptual state of being– it is necessarily impossible to relate to. A faraway friend is also conceptual– their relation to you exists in spite of not being able to constantly confirm their existence. I have found it possible for both concepts to coexist, they are not mutually exclusive. It is very natural to deny death, a reversion to a state immune to interaction.

Mark, I miss you.