The Book of Months by E.F. Benson

I do not think that I have hitherto mentioned that, since I came here in the spring, the house in which Dick and Margery spent those few weeks together before he went out to South Africa has stood untenanted, and often during the past months I have wandered slowly by it, noting with a sort of pleasure, I think, that at any rate no one I knew lived there. The feeling was, I am aware, utterly unreasonable, but it was of the same childish and instinctive kind as that which prompts us to put away and not use, or at least not let others use, some little object which has been in any way closely connected with someone who is dead, whom we have loved. I do not think this feeling is in the least defensible, for it implies that we cut the dead off in ever so small a degree from the living, and thus tend to keep alive the sting of death.

For in that the dead have once been intertwined with our ordinary workaday lives, it is altogether a false sentiment which makes us separate them now, if we believe at all, as I do most fully, that they still are about and around us. All the same, it was with a certain surprise and shock that I saw early in August that the signboard that the house was to let was taken down, and that a few days later a furniture-van was drawn up at the door. In fact, this very natural and reasonable event disturbed me to a degree which I was totally unable to understand. It seemed dreadful, somehow, that others should be at home there (it never occurred to me at the time that it was highly unlikely that the house had stood vacant for two years), so wholly was it consecrated in my mind to those two.