Grieving

Services now generate a voice, a face or a chat that answers in the manner of someone who died, and some families find them a comfort. Grief is not that conversation. It is what happens to the person left behind, the slow reorganisation of a life around an absence, with no task to complete and no version of it that counts as finished. Law recognises it as something only a person undergoes. The United Kingdom created a statutory right to parental bereavement leave in 2018 because the state accepted that a bereaved parent cannot simply work, and most employment codes carry some version of the same admission. A model can hold the memories, and hold them more accurately than any of us. It has lost nothing, so there is nothing for it to do with them.