“A 97-Year-Old Philosopher Faces His Own Mortality” in the *Atlantic*:
In one scene, Fingarette listens to a string quartet that was once meaningful to his late wife. He hasn’t heard the piece since her death seven years earlier—“her absence is a presence,” he says in the film—and becomes overwhelmed with grief.
I worked in an art museum in college, and one of the exhibits was by Françoise Gilot. My grandfather came to visit me there and I showed him the exhibit. One of her pieces was titled “In the Absence of the Beloved,” and it expressed her feelings of loss of her windowed husband, Jonas Salk. The piece featured the likeness of a couple walking, viewed from behind, with a stark black rectangle covering the male figure. I gave a sophomoric tour of the exhibit and when I described the theme of “Absence” to my grandfather, widowed then for only over a year, uttered with an unmistakable, palpable “Oh.” He grokked what Gilot was trying to get at.