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The truth is that people never
realize their lives are about to change in unforeseen ways—that’s just the nature of unforeseen ways.
they’d never had love and patience at the same time. We had both.
I sensed that something was about to happen beyond the control of love, patience, or any of us, and this was my last chance to fix time.
It’s a book about setting things in motion and then being too proud and stubborn to apologize and to change course.
It’s about thinking that being raised a certain way gives you the right to behave badly.
antibiotics. Everything would be all right, everything would be possible, anything could be salvaged or averted, as long as we all kept running around.
And yet the calls were exponential—every conversation was relayed to everyone else, leading to ever more calls, calls upon calls, calls about calls. We all spent time on the Web and read the same grim things about this particularly vicious cancer.
I could think about was whether things could have been different if we’d made Mom see more doctors earlier, or whether, perhaps, she’d had an appointment in Samarra and nothing could have changed that.
Was it selfish to go or selfish to stay—or did that word even apply? A self is not; not a self [is not].
One of the many things I love about bound books is their sheer physicality. Electronic books live out of sight and out of mind. But printed books have body, presence.
“This is an important thing, which I have told many people, and which my father told me, and which his father told him. When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation?”
Evil almost always starts with small cruelties.”
feeling was never a useful substitute for doing, and she never let the former get in the way of the latter.
It was as if we were reading the same book, but one of us had gotten ahead of the other: they’d made it to the end, and I was still somewhere in the middle. The “How are you doing?” was really “I think I may know how you are doing.”
even the simplest exchange around the topic of how I was feeling about Mom’s health seemed forced and awkward and uncomfortable, so I found myself changing the subject as quickly as possible. The awkwardness had lots of causes: She was dying but not dead—so allowing or expressing too much grief made me feel and sound as though I already had her in the grave, prematurely, and had given up all hope of more time.
“We all owe everyone for everything that happens in our lives. But it’s not owing like a debt to one person—it’s really that we owe everyone for everything. Our whole lives can change in an instant—so each person who keeps that from happening, no matter how small a role they play, is also responsible for all of it.
choices she and her colleagues had needed to make about whom to trust. “You don’t always. And sometimes you think you do and you’re wrong. But you travel with them, you continue to work with them, you see their humanity, and you pay attention to the stories they seek out.
But sometimes you just can’t know what’s going to happen, even when you know everything there is to know. So you prepare for the worst but hope for the best.”
You just do your best, and that’s all you can do. Too many people use the excuse that they don’t think they can do enough, so they decide they don’t have to do anything. There’s never a good excuse for not doing anything—even if it’s just to sign something, or send a small contribution, or invite a newly settled refugee family over for Thanksgiving.”
