The Storyteller

by Jodi Picoult

There are all sorts of losses people suffer—from the small to the large. You can lose your keys, your glasses, your virginity. You can lose your head, you can lose your heart, you can lose your mind. You can relinquish your home to move into assisted living, or have a child move overseas, or see a spouse vanish into dementia. Loss is more than just death, and grief is the gray shape-shifter of emotion.

“It doesn’t matter what it is that leaves a hole inside you. It just matters that it’s there.”

I was never a people person, but now I actively prefer to be alone.

“Every Wednesday night she would remind me to take the garbage can to the curb. In fifty years, I never once forgot, but she never gave me the benefit of the doubt. Drove me crazy. Now, I would give anything to hear her remind me again.”

“No mother should outlive a child.” “It’s no party to outlive your parents, either,” I reply.

Inside each of us is a monster; inside each of us is a saint. The real question is which one we nurture the most, which one will smite the other.

I don’t know what it is about death that makes it so hard. I suppose it’s the one-sided communication; the fact that we never get to ask our loved one if she suffered, if she is happy wherever she is now… if she is somewhere. It’s the question mark that comes with death that we can’t face, not the period.

Felt this in my soul

The reason I am still sitting at Josef’s kitchen table is the same reason traffic slows after a car wreck—you want to see the damage; you can’t let yourself pass without that mental snapshot. We are drawn to horror even as we recoil from it.

True love is like bread. It needs the right ingredients, a little heat, and some magic to rise.”

built of sighs and skin that is thicker than brick, stronger than iron. There is only you, and him, so impossibly close that nothing can come between. Not the enemy, not your allies. In this safe haven, in this hallowed place and time, I could even ask the questions whose answers I feared.

Sometimes all it takes to become human again is someone who can see you that way, no matter how you present on the surface.

Amen

“It’s missing,” I said. My grandmother smiled, and that was all it took for me to stop seeing the scar, and to recognize her again. “Yes,” she said. “But see how much of me is left?”

I love this part 🥹