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Missing people carry hope
His father's death
Harlan Coben's father lost his job at 57 and died of a heart attack at 59, in 1988. In his twenties and early thirties Coben delivered seven eulogies, and he has given only one since. He is sure the loss made him a better writer.
Missing people in the books
Most of his books deal with parent-child relationships and what it is like to lose somebody. They are full of missing people, and often people who seem pretty surely dead and turn out not to be. With a missing person there is always the hope that they could come back.
The recurring dream
He has a recurring dream in which his father is alive and worried about bills, and he tells him not to worry about money anymore. He is so happy his father is alive that he simply accepts it. Then comes the moment when he realizes it is probably a dream, that he will wake up and his father will still be dead, and he tries to grab on to him to bring him along.
Why is a missing person harder to grieve?
Family therapist Pauline Boss coined the term ambiguous loss in the 1970s while studying families of soldiers missing in action. She described a loss with no confirmed ending, where hope and grief run at the same time. Without a death there are none of the rituals, such as funerals, that people usually use to mark a loss. Boss laid out the idea in her 1999 book Ambiguous Loss.
Why do fictional dead characters keep returning?
Arthur Conan Doyle sent Sherlock Holmes over Reichenbach Falls in The Final Problem in 1893 to be rid of him. Readers protested loudly, and Doyle brought the detective back in The Adventure of the Empty House in 1903. That story explained that Holmes had faked his death.
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