And hadn’t I always known this? That to be human was to love and love and love, knowing it could only end in tragedy? Every babe in arms was born to this terrible fate, every parent and child, every spouse, every friend and lover and sibling, every uncle and aunt and great-great-grandfather, every found family, all of us bound to the perpetual cycle, all of it so awful and wonderful and inescapable. To love was to live, and to live was to die.
