the Denial-Pietà: carrying the corpse
She held and swaddled the dead thing just as if it were alive instead of dead, and she began to carry it around with her wherever she went, just as she imagined devoted mothers carry their babies with them everywhere they go
Context
Denial given its most extreme physical form in the book: a fortification "of complete and black Denial" so total that she carries the corpse through the August streets for weeks, turning tricks with it in her arms, "just as she imagined devoted mothers carry their babies." The scene makes Denial not a mental state but an action sustained against mounting sensory proof — the smell, the passersby reeling away, the friends' remonstrances — because the alternative truth is unsurvivable. It is the negative image of the recovery to come: the same woman who could not put the dead thing down will later have to pick the truth up "and swallow it."