The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I thught grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that graduallu receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity.

The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course.

Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive.

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.

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.

Scratch a fantasy and you'll find a nightmare.