health
When my brother Edwin's wife died in a car accident, he left her 3 children on my doorstep and disappeared without a trace: 15 years later I receive an envelope...
Fifteen years is long enough for absence to become part of the architecture of your life. You stop expecting the phone to ring with a certain voice on the other end, you stop scanning faces in a crowd with the background hope that one of them will turn into someone you recognize, you stop leaving small mental doors open that say he might come back. Eventually you close them, not out of bitterness, but out of the practical necessity of living in the present, not the conditional.
TL;DR
- Fifteen years allows absence to become a structural element of life.
- Expectations of contact and hope for return diminish over time.
- Mental openness to a person's return is eventually closed for practical reasons.
- Closing these mental doors is a necessity for living in the present.