A Thousand Splendid Suns

"With the passing of time, she would slowly tire of this exercise. She would find it increasingly exhausting to conjure up, to dust off, to resuscitate once again what as long dead. There would come a day, in fact, years later, when Laila would no longer bewail his loss. Or not as relentlessly; not as nearly. There would come a day when the details of his face would begin to slip from memory's grip, when overhearing a mother on the street call after her child by Tariq's name would no longer cut her adrift. She would not miss him as she did now, when the ache of his absence was her unremitting companion -- like the phantom pain of an amputee."

Khaled Hosseini | A Thousand Splendid Suns