My idea of a productive day, as both a child and an adult, was reading for hours and staring out the window.

the mother's first job is to raise a daughter strong enough to outlast her.

That she was irreplaceable became a bittersweet loyalty: Her death was what I had now instead of her.

I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.

You can’t change the tale so that you turned left one day instead of right, or didn’t make the mistake that might have saved your life a day later. We don’t get those choices. The story is what got you here, and embracing its truth is what makes the outcome bearable.

Near the end I asked him one night in the hospital corridor what he thought was happening, and he said, "Tell her everything you haven't said," and I smiled with relief. "There's nothing," I said. "I've already told her everything.

It's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur, aand epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part-- time and space and heart's weariness are the blander executioners or human connection.