"If a friend of yours loses someone, write them a letter full of love. You need them, these letters, to help get you through the days and the evenings somehow. You open them, you read, you search through them for the mot juste, and you always find it. However distant the author of the letter may be, he is there, vigilant; he helps you to look at your life; he says that he knows, that he is thinking, that he will keep and protect. The letters cement the bricks laid down by the survivors. Write, write, write. Do not miss one opportunity to do it. If you have the choice between writing and not writing, always choose to write. Not a single letter is out of place. We had letters from people who had heard us mentioned by mutual friends, people we had never met. Everything is a help. Each of us can be of help to everyone else. I have kept all of these letters and of course I have never reread them. I have forgotten the words. Superhuman efforts to reach us through the inadequacies of language are enclosed in great extending envelopes. Were these efforts made in vain? Of course they were not. You should have seen me waiting for the post, opening the envelopes, reading feverishly, commenting, storing away. Then going on to dream about what had been written. Lending it the full weight of my distress. The letters paved the path between my daughters and myself. I was a letter-ogre. I hungered for them, each one satisfied me until the next one arrived."
"There is absolutely no doubt that silence is open to the bleakest of interpretations. You have to come out of the woods into the open and say: I am here, I know, I have seen, I am witnessing, I am here. If you stay in the woods you are saying just as clearly: I am not here, I know nothing, I have seen nothing, I am turning my back on you."
— Geneviève Jurgensen, The Disappearance: A Primer of Loss