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.

Maybe this is the point: to embrace the core sadness of life without toppling headlong into it, or assuming it will define your days.

What do you do when the story changes in midlife? When a tale you have told yourself turns out to be a little untrue, just enough to throw the world off-kilter? It’s like leaving the train at the wrong stop: You are still you, but in a new place, there by accident or grace, and you will need your wits about you to proceed.

The real hell of this," he told her, "is that you're going to get through it.

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

What they never tell you about grief is that missing someone is the simple part.

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.