A note that appeared “here” (on the thread of tumblr blogs that I follow) leads me to comment that very few connections with other people are irrevocably broken. Time allows them to find their rightful place. There’s no way to know what that place will be, but the connection itself - its moment - has to be seen as part of life’s trajectory. I just read Tony Judt’s essay on Primo Levi, which discusses the impact of Auschwitz on him and other survivors. They were haunted by the experience, he implies, or tainted by it. Levi felt a responsibility to document, in part to recover the dead. In a sense, his project was partly to acknowledge how a connection, once made, lives on in us. The note I read is an example of this. It says, to self and others, this happened and is still with me. It’s not so much the person who’s with us as the connection itself - what we experienced, which we’re still absorbing.