Later - when things happened that they could never have imagined - she wrote him a letter that said: When will you learn that there isn't a word for everything

Part of the work of writing a novel is to uncover the symmetries or connections that make it whole, which might not reveal itself at first.

And he isn't crying for her, not for his grandma, he's crying for himself: that he: too, is going to die one day. And before that his friends wil die, and the friends of his friends, and, as time passes, the children of his friends, and, if his fate is truly bitter, his own children. (58)

I forced myself to picture the last moments. The penultimate breath. A final sigh. And yet. It was always followed by another.

I like to think the world wasn't ready for me, but maybe the truth is that I wasn't ready for the world. I've always arrived too late for my life.

After all who doesn't wish to make a spectacle of their loneliness

She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you'd grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence.