Maura had honestly thought she had processed the grief.
She knew the old Kübler-Ross Model with its long accepted five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
She knew the newer expanded seven stage version, with its slightly more detailed division of responses and reactions: shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, testing/reconstruction, and acceptance.
She even knew the newest theories which said that the processing of grief wasn't actually linear at all, but more a twisting interwoven thing as the brain tried to make the painful and the incomprehensible make some sort of sense.
But whatever route it took, Maura had truly thought she had dealt with it.
And then she had found the yellow Post-it note.
It was a closed case, really. Marked in her computer for eventual upload to the massive computer archives but right now sitting in its standard city government file folder in a cardboard case file box because between the budget restricting man hours and the sheer Himalayan mass of data that had to be converted from hard copy to electronic no one had gotten to it yet.
But then a new body had come into her morgue and Maura had gotten the uneasy sensation that she had seen something all too familiar like it before.
It had taken her a while to determine exactly what had triggered her memory, but she had.
And she had pulled the case file.
There had been all the normal forms and reports. Most people had no idea just how much paperwork a single homicide provoked. Or how many different hands a case passed through before it found its own version of a burial in a quiet shelf in some storage facility or an even quieter electronic place in some data record bank somewhere.
Among the various lab techs, officers, and clerks she found all too familiar handwritings. She had recognized Jane's hasty scrawl. Then Korsak's more old-fashioned printing. The commissioner's precise marks. Her own carefully elegant script.
And then she had come across a single crinkled yellow Post-it note stuck accidentally it looked like on the back of her morgue's Release of Human Remains form, with a young man's hurried scratching in a Bic pen's last sputtering oily black ink.
Frost.
And just like that, the grief returned as sharply bright and bitterly piercing as if it were just yesterday he'd died.
She'd closed her office door then and wept for him again.
That young man with the eager eyes and bright smile.
And Maura found that she hadn't really finished processing it at all.