And so it is that you learn how to pass, if you're lucky, to look like everyone else, even though you're broken inside.

So is it just human nature to believe that things happen for a reason - to find some shred of meaning even in the worst experiences?

You got to learn to take what people are willing to give.

I love you," he writes again and again. "I can't bear to live without you. I'm counting the minutes until I see you." The words he uses are the idioms of popular songs and poems in the newspaper. And mine to him are no less cliched. I puzzle over the onionskin, trying to spill my heart onto the page. But I can only come up with the same words, in the same order, and hope the depth of feeling beneath them gives them weight and substance. I love you. I miss you. Be careful. Be safe.

I've come to think that's what heaven is- a place in the memory of others where our best selves live on.

When something terrible happens, a lifetime of small events and unremarkable decisions, of unresolved anger, and unexplored fears begins to play itself out in ways you least expect. You've been going along from one day to the next, not realizing that all those disparate words and gestures were adding up to something, a conclusion, you didn't anticipate. And later, when you begin to retrace your steps you see that you will need to reach back further than you could have imagined, beyond words and thoughts and even dreams, perhaps to make sense of what happened.

Time constricts and flattens, you know. It's not evenly weighted. Certain moments linger in the mind and others disappear.