I knelt down beside Emma, and when I placed a hand on her bony shoulders I started to cry. At twenty years of age, she had the body of someone of eighty or more. Her once-soft skin was stretched tight over her face, her hair dull and brittle. It broke me to remember how she’d used to laugh as we played together as children, how deeply in love she’d been with life and the world. Now, lying asleep on a hospital bed hundreds of miles from home, she was too old to be young, and always would be. She’d learned the cruelty of life, and no longer had room in her heart for anything but sadness and
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