But I know I would not go out. I had taken this time to fall in love instead — in love with the sort of helplessness I had not felt in death — the helplessness of being alive, the dark bright pity of being human — feeling as you went, groping in corners and opening your arms to light - all of it part of navigating the unknown.

You save yourself or you remain unsaved.

Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain.

As she stood in the darkened room and watched my sister and father, I knew one of things that heaven meant. I had a choice, and it was not to divide my family in my heart.

She liked to imagine that when she passed, the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was. Except when she was at work, no one knew where she was at any time of day and no one waited for her. It was immaculate anonymity.

"When the dead are done with the living, the living can go on to other things," Franny said. "What about the dead?" I asked. "Where do we go?"

These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.