I give myself a good cry if I need it, but then I concentrate on all good things still in my life.

But she wasn’t around, and that’s the thing when your parents die, you feel like instead of going in to every fight with backup, you are going into every fight alone.

You say you should have died instead of me. But during my time on earth, people died instead of me, too. It happens every day. When lightning strikes a minute after you are gone, or an airplane crashes that you might have been on. When your colleague falls ill and you do not. We think such things are random. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole.

This is the greatest gift God can give you: to understand what happened in your life. To have it explained. It is the peace you have been searching for.

I am in love with Hope.

Kids chase the love that eludes them, and for me, that was my father's love. He kept it tucked away, like papers in a briefcase. And I kept trying to get in there.

Courage is confused with picking up arms and cowardness is confused with laying them down.