the mother's first job is to raise a daughter strong enough to outlast her.
Scratch a fantasy and you'll find a nightmare.
What they never tell you about grief is that missing someone is the simple part.
The real hell of this," he told her, "is that you're going to get through it.
Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive.
The belief that life was hard and often its worst battles were fought in private, that it was possible to walk through fear and come out scorched but still breathing.