In her novel Come and Go, Molly Snow, Mary Ann Taylor-Hall gives an account of Carrie attempting to come to grips with the loss of her eight-year-old daughter, Molly Snow. Carrie is a fiddler, but in the wake of this tragic loss she says, "The music doesn't rise up in me right now." In the months that followed, Carrie listens to homespun wisdom and begins the first steps of coming to grips with the absence of Molly Snow and the presence of a deep, dull ache which had taken her place. At one point Carrie remarks, "Sometimes STILL HERE seems stranger than GONE."

Carrie finds it is as hard or harder to deal with being left behind as it is to deal with Molly Snow's being gone. Most anyone who has lost some significant person in his or her life knows that feeling. Without the person we loved, STILL HERE no longer carries the same meaning and joy it once did. When a wife dies, a part of the husband dies, too. When a child dies, a part of the parent dies, too. STILL HERE just isn't the same without them. The plans we made are rendered obsolete. More than that, we wonder how we will go on without the person in whom so much of our lives found their identity and meaning. Stuck in the STILL HERE, Carrie wants to know what is going to happen next. Even as she begins to put her life back together, she admits, "I'm not brave, just cried-out.”

Finally, Carrie comes to this realization, "I'll always have this grief in the center of me, but my life will grow around it. My life will be real. It will have its moments. It will have music in it."