Even when you know someone is dying, even when you can see they are suffering and you wish for them not another moment of painful breath, nothing can really prepare you for the moment. Not the moment they depart this life, but the moment you realize you must continue to exist, even though they are gone. Why do the birds go on singing, as though nothing has changed? Why do the children continue playing as though everything has not just been ripped asunder? “I don’t know why this heart of mine should go on beating when Katharine’s heart is ashes,” Katie wrote in her diary. “But it does.”[17]
