I sat with Dada in the basement of Louisa Coffee on Qingnian Road in central Kaohsiung. I was visiting Taiwan and staying for a couple weeks after traveling and before going back to America. I’ve met Dada once before, before she lost her husband to an unknown and sudden condition.

Her husband, Robby, who was 36, only a decade older than me. He was cheeriest man I knew; he taught me the ropes of DnD with gusto and played a mean sorcerer in our campaign; he’d lived in Taiwan for almost a decade and loved Dada more than anything else.

I didn’t know how to feel when I heard the news from my friend Phil. I had just left Taiwan when he passed, and was with my family in India, oddly removed from the situation – I hadn’t seen Robby in months and didn’t plan to. The odd thing about someone dying is that it is the absence of them, rather than the presence of anything in particular, that is significant.

Dada spoke rapidly to me in Mandarin. She told me how he called her on LINE his last moments and she heard the strangled sound of his voice and she hurried home on her scooter and she found him lying there motionless on the ground. And she spoke I saw her tears and her voice choke and I felt his absence dearly, the loss of a man well-loved in my little world in Kaohsiung.

And she told me she believes he is still here, and that she sometimes hears his voice in the wind, and I believe her.