That was a phrase I used in my eulogy for my mother, as a way to describe the space felt by such a loss, and I came across it again in an astoundingly good book I’ve just finished, Lost and Found, by Kathryn Shultz.

It seems like a perfect description of what we are all experiencing right now.

Everywhere we look there is absence. On our calendars, on grocery shelves, in our children’s classrooms, in restaurants and theaters, in the once-familiar texture of our days, in life as it used to be. The relentless disappearance of all we’ve long taken for granted is a fact with which we must reckon daily. We can no longer truly see each other, masked as we are—we struggle with the absence of spontaneity, the lack of joy, the unbalancing of constant uncertainty.