" Sometimes I forgot that Mimi was dead. Like, one morning, I woke up to the smell of coffee and thought, Mimi’s already in the kitchen.

And one afternoon I was in a card store and suddenly thought, almost in a panic, Mimi’s birthday is only a week away and I don’t have a card or a present for her. Each time, the awful truth would then blaze its way back into my brain.

Other times, I wouldn’t be thinking about Mimi at all, and her memory would come crashing back to me. Those times were the most inconvenient, because I wanted to forget, not remember.

Once, I was listening to the radio, and a song was playing and there was a line in it about a gentle person or a gentle life or something like that, and it brought Mimi to mind right away. "

― Ann M. Martin , Claudia and the Sad Good-bye (The Baby-sitters Club, #26)