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If the spirit world does exist, it’ll be good to see those people I’ve lost. Be good to give them a hug and tell them I love them, tell them I’m sorry.
There is a code among the dying: let the living speak. They have longer to atone for it.
It’s something I had a hard time reconciling, my father making himself small for them. “People will be someone other than themselves if they have people who rely on them,”
“There are things more important in this world than taking credit, Joe.”
There was love in that house, but none of us really knew what to do with it.
When you’re an only child, semi-imprisoned, books become more than paper between hard cardboard, more than the alphabet organized into words and printed on a page.
Some people, I have learned, are meant to read great works and others are meant to write them. Often, these are not the same people.
Hope is such a wonderful thing until it isn’t.
I envy those people who can dig deep and find that thing that originally allowed them to believe they could spend their entire lives sleeping in the same bed, sit across the table from one another day in and day out, make a family, make memories, good and bad.
If children lose their parents, they are orphans. If a husband loses his wife, he’s a widower. But there’s no word for a parent who loses a child. I’ve come to believe that the event is just too big, too monstrous, too overwhelming for words. No word could ever describe the feeling, so we leave it unsaid.
I wanted to be me before there was her, but I didn’t know how.
Her wisdom wasn’t bound up in fancy words or written down in books. There was nothing elegant about it, and it was thrown out into the world all rough around the edges. But it made a difference.
Mark and I had love, just not a future. And as hard as it was, we both knew this.
“Things always seem the worst just after they happen. Time will take care of this as time always does.”
Grief can be wide and feel bottomless sometimes, but eventually, it begins to subside, to grow into something useful.
Some secrets are so dark that it’s best they remain buried. Even people who exude light and happiness have dark secrets. Sometimes, the lie becomes so entrenched it becomes the truth, hidden away in the deep recesses of the mind until death erases it, leaving the world a little different. Secrets and lies can take on a life of their own, they can be twisted and manipulated, or they can burst into the world from the mouth of someone just as they are starting to lose their mind.
Desire in the dying is a cruel trick.
“No, you’re right, and there is nothing more I can say to defend how I’ve behaved, except I’m sorry.”
Time quickens the older you get, as if the universe is trying to push you toward the finish line, to make room for the younger, the stronger, to mark your brief place in history and move on.
“Anger is exhausting. Holding on to it will drain the life out of you.”