absence

'I lay on her bed trying to get close to her. I smelled the faint smell of her perfume, Eau de Rochas, that I used to look for at airport duty-frees when they still had such things. I just felt rather light and strange, but not unhappy. I was asking her absence to be there as a sort of bizarre inverted comfort. Just for a minutes I felt I was her, lying there, and that I, the real other I, was downstairs in the old bedroom, and I wondered what I thought about myself. An inadequate, traitorous, unloving man? A presence oddly necessary, even with a floor and ceiling between?' from The Secret Scripture

The speaker lost his wife a while ago. His drunken fling a few years back ruined their marriage. Since then she had moved out of their bedroom and stayed upstairs in the old maid's room till death.

How does one read 'asking her absence to be there'? Does that mean to truly feel her absence?

Thank you.

That sounds reasonable, Mia. He seems to be invoking her memory in some odd way. Of course, nobody literally asks an "absence" to "be there". We have to look for some figurative meaning. He's moping around on her old bed, trying to get some comfort out of doing that.

I see... Thank you, owlman. 👁 Smile :-)