Art & Creativity Quote by Petra Nemcova

Grief shows up here as a rerouting of language: when the person is gone, the relationship doesn’t vanish so much as change mediums. Petra Nemcova’s line is quietly startling because it’s not framed as a grand declaration of mourning; it’s logistics. She talks, she writes, she creates a new habit (a diary) not for self-improvement or memoir, but as a direct address to Simon, as if the page can function like a phone line with bad reception. That specificity makes the sentiment feel less like a platitude and more like a coping technology.

The subtext is a refusal of the cultural script that insists closure is the healthy endpoint. Instead, Nemcova describes what psychologists call “continuing bonds,” but she does it in plain, lived terms: she doesn’t “move on,” she learns how to keep speaking. Writing “to him” rather than “about him” matters. It keeps Simon positioned as a person with presence and agency, not a subject to be processed.

There’s also a subtle shift from private to communal. “Not just me” widens the frame, suggesting that what might be dismissed as mystical is actually social: family and friends “can still feel him around.” That line reads like permission-giving, an attempt to normalize shared hauntings in a world that often treats grief as something best handled quietly and efficiently. Coming from a public figure, it’s also a counter-image to the polished resilience we demand from celebrities: messy, repetitive, intimate, and stubbornly ongoing.