You can’t know, sweetie, because you’ve never had a baby become a brilliant young reader with a side interest in horrible television shows, but the joy you bring us is so much greater than the sadness we feel about your illness.

He knew he couldn't tell stories, that he always included extraneous details & tangents that interested only him.

I hated hurting him. Most of the time, I could forget about it, but the inexorable truth is this: They might be glad to have me around, but I was the alpha and the omega of my parents' suffering.

If I had cared about her as I should have, as I thought I did, how could I have let her go?

All hurt is brain hurt.

But a lot of times, people die how they live. And so last words tell me a lot about who people were, and why they became the sort of people biographies get written about.

Maybe all the strings inside him broke.