The Cliffs

by J. Courtney Sullivan

She had read somewhere that mothers mourned

past versions of their children. It was impossible to know if it was the last time you would ever change a diaper, or rock your baby to sleep or carry him from one room to the next, until you were on the other side of it. Sometimes the child who greeted you in the morning was somebody altogether

different from the one you kissed...

Did the living matter as much to the

dead as the dead did to the living?

Sometimes the tragedies of a person’s life didn’t happen neatly, single file, one at a time, but all at once, so that it was impossible to know how you felt about any part of the whole.

History could only ever be as meaningful as those alive were willing to make it.

The definition of a lifetime, as she saw it, was when the people most important to you wouldn’t recognize the ones who previously filled their roles.

Do all your work as if you had a thousand years to live and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow.

In every graveyard in every town in all the world, there lie buried stories more remarkable and strange than a name, a date, a designation on stone could ever in a million years convey.

Human beings did so much damage to one another just by being alive. To the people they loved most, and to the ones they knew so little about that they could convince themselves they weren’t even people.

Emily Dickinson tattooed on her wrist: That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.