The Shining (The Shining, #1)

by Stephen King

Masterton might show up tonight to watch some TV and drink Hallorann’s Bushmills, or he might not. Either way was all right. But seeing him mattered. Every time it mattered now, because they weren’t young anymore. In the last few days it seemed he was thinking of that very fact a great deal. Not so young anymore, when you got up near sixty years old (or—tell the truth and save a lie—past it) you had to start thinking about stepping out. You could go anytime. And that had been on his mind this week, not in a heavy way but as a fact. Dying was a part of living. You had to keep tuning in to that if you expected to be a whole person. And if the fact of your own death was hard to understand, at least it wasn’t impossible to accept.

The boy would have to shed his tears again and again, he knew, and it was Danny’s luck that he was still young enough to be able to do that. The tears that heal are also the tears that scald and scourge.