you begin to die when you see your own death. Your own death: It isn’t something that is prompted by bad health, not necessarily. It is something you can see in another person’s death, or in the death of a star, or the last stubborn falling leaves of November, or in the grayed exoskeleton of a crayfish on the beach of your spring break vacation, or in the proper final withering of every idea you hatched at age fourteen and defended ever since against any evidence to the contrary about what love should mean or do or feel like, or how long it should last, or why.
