Usually time alters and affects everything, but when someone you love dies time cannot change that, no amount of time will ever change that, so time stops having any meaning.

Grief is love turned into an eternal missing

A selfish person can still love someone else, can't they? Even when they've hurt them and let them down.

Just thinking of your laughter gives me courage. . .

And imagine acquiring a new language and only learning the words to describe a wonderful world, refusing to know the words for a bleak one and in doing so linguistically shaping the world that you inhabit.

But my lazy lack of faith, my in-vogue atheism, has taken away the safety net hanging beneath our children's lives.

It's not the fledgling birds that are thrown out of the nest by their parents and made to fly; it's the parents who are made to get the hell out of cozy family nest by their teenage offspring. It's we who are made to be independent of them, crash-landing if we don't manage it.