The Lovely Bones

by Alice Sebold

Something so divine that no one up in heaven could have made it up; the care a child took with an adult.

He would find his Susie now inside his young son. Give that love to the living.

“Yes, I’m going to tell you where Susie is.” I began to cry up in heaven. What else was there for me to do?

What did dead mean, Ray wondered. It meant lost, it meant frozen, it meant gone.

assiduous

Great care and perseverance

Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day.

I waited for him to sniff me out, anxious to know if here, on the other side, I would still be the little girl he had slept beside. I did not have to wait long: he was so happy to see me, he knocked me down.

When was it all right to let go not only of the dead but of the living—to learn to accept?

These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections—sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent—that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.

“Will you come smoke stinky cigarettes with me again?” “It’s a date,” my mother said.

I would like to tell you that it is beautiful here, that I am, and you will one day be, forever safe.