As the presence of those we love is as a double life, so absence, in its anxious longing and sense of vacancy, is as a foretaste of death.

Jameson contrasts the enlivening effect of love with the desolation of separation. To be with those we love feels like living “twice”—one’s own life enlarged by the beloved’s presence—while their absence produces a hollowed-out existence marked by yearning and emptiness. By calling that vacancy a “foretaste of death,” she suggests that death is not only an event but an experience anticipated in miniature whenever attachment is severed: the world continues, yet meaning and vitality seem withdrawn. The sentence captures a Romantic-era psychology of feeling, where emotional bonds are treated as essential to the self’s fullness and where loss is understood as existential, not merely circumstantial.