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These stories were meant to be comforting, but in truth they were excruciating.
Once I looked at the coffin, my father’s death would become real and unalterable; I would have to accept it.
How hard the believers make it to get into heaven, I thought, when they have all this right here.
pain is a private business,
How strange the work of memory, I thought. What some people remembered and others forgot.
Growing up in this town, I had long ago learned that the savagery of a man named Mohammed was rarely questioned, but his humanity always had to be proven.
Humility had been drilled in me, as it was in most of the women I knew, and I found it hard to get rid of it, even though it was frequently mistaken for inability.
Whenever Max told me this story, he made it sound as though one event had led to the next, without his having played much of a role in what happened.
It wasn’t easy to accept that the man we loved had done terrible things, because love itself is a singling out of one person over countless others.
