Outside the hospital, I squinted in the harsh morning sunlight. I could hear birds chirping in the tree, but even though I searched for them, they remained hidden from me.

I have no complaints about my path and the places it has taken me; enough complaints to fill a circus tent about other things, maybe, but the path I've chosen has always been the right one, and I wouldn't have had it any other way.

It was inevitable, of course, but somehow it didn't seem right to Alex that they would never remember the sound of Carly's laughter, or know how deeply she'd once loved them.

You know the real me," she said, stopping to peer up at him. "More than anyone else.

The emotion that can break your heart is sometimes the very one that heals it.

No one in my family or my circle of friends had ever had to confront something like this. Jamie was seventeen, a child on the verge of womanhood, dying and still very much alive at the same time. I was afraid, more afraid than I'd ever been, not only for her, but for me as well. I lived in fear of doing something wrong, of doing something that would offend her. Was it okay to ever get angry in her presence? Was it okay to talk about the future anymore?

The search for God's presence was much of a mystery as God himself, and what was God if not a mystery?