The Book of Two Ways

by Jodi Picoult

Life asked death, “Why do people love me but hate you?” Death responded, “Because you are a beautiful lie and I am a painful truth.” —Unknown

I once read that every story is a love story. Love of a person, a country, a way of life. Which means, of course, that all tragedies are about losing what you love.

“I promise you that you categorically will not have to tape down my erection when I die.”

We all have stories we tell ourselves, until we believe them to be true.

It’s just how she is made, and if that isn’t everyone’s standard of perfect, then maybe they just have to revise their damn standard.

Adolescence is like summer weather in Boston—storms chased by sunshine, in the span of a minute. Occasional hail. And every now and then, a cloudless sky.

How can you go for over a decade without holding someone’s hand, and still have the feeling of it imprinted on you so firmly?

Ancient Egyptians believed that the first and most necessary ingredient in the universe was chaos. It could sweep you away, but it was also the place from which all things start anew.

In every fairy tale, the only way out is to keep running forward. To never look back.

very problem with death in the first place. We don’t know how to talk about it. We use euphemisms and discuss pearly gates and angels while glossing over the fact that we have to die to get there. We treat it like a mystery, when in fact, it’s the one experience all of us are guaranteed to share.

“What’s love, if not art?”

There’s something to be said for being someone’s safety zone. Even if, sometimes, it means a kick or a punch or a rush of angry words.

The thing about death is that we’re all terrified of it happening, and we’re devastated when it does, and we go out of our way to pretend that neither of these things is true.

“Well, as long as someone remembers you, you never really die.”

“Every beginning is already the start of the end,”

“I’m thinking that I came to the desert with a lioness,” Wyatt said softly, “and ended up with a goddess in my arms.”

I was so busy trying to figure out what made me better than you that I didn’t pay attention to what we had in common. Every time I looked five years out, there you were. I thought it was a threat. But what if, all this time, it’s because you’re supposed to be wherever I am?” He stepped away from me, breathing hard. “Stop bloody trying to save me from yourself.”

Life and death are heads and tails. You can’t have one without the other.”

“Art isn’t what you see. It’s what you remember.”

Someone does not have to die for you to miss them.

“You’re here. Thank Albert.” He doesn’t believe in God, but he does believe in Einstein.

Love isn’t a perfect match, but an imperfect one. You are rocks in a tumbler. At first you bump, you scrape, you snag. But each time that happens, you smooth each other’s edges, until you wear each other down. And if you are lucky, at the end of all that, you fit.

Don’t forget: No one knows what to say to someone who’s dying. Everyone is afraid of saying the wrong thing. It’s more important to be there than to be right.

“I managed to hurt the person I love most in the world. And I want to ask my best friend how to fix it,” Brian says. “But they’re one and the same.”

I don’t know what makes people see what they do before they die. It may be dopamine, or oxygen deprivation. It may be meds. It could be brain cells firing one final time or a short circuit between synapses. Or maybe it’s a way of saying that you may not know what comes next, but it’s still somehow going to be all right.

When you look at someone whose life has just ended, you don’t see horror or pain or fear. You see peace. Not just because the muscles relax and the breath has left—but because there’s a deep satisfaction, a conclusion. It never fails to move me, what a privilege it is to be at this moment, to be the bearer of their story.

“You love her through death,” I correct gently. “You don’t stop loving someone just because they’re not physically with you.”

It isn’t until you lose a parent that you become an actor in the play of your own life.

Even in divorce, Egyptian women could take a third of the property and full custody of the children. In fact, divorce law was so fair to women in Egypt that Greek women took Egyptian names, preferring to marry and divorce under Egyptian law.

9x−7i>3(3x−7u)

“Have you ever heard of l’inconnue de la Seine?” Wyatt shakes his head. “She drowned in Paris, in the 1880s. Someone at the morgue made a death mask of her face, and it’s…beautiful. She looks like she fell asleep smiling, even though it was probably a suicide. She was compared to the Mona Lisa, and rich people had copies of the mask on their walls as art. In the 1960s, it was used as the face of the first CPR mannequin.”

What if the piece of you that’s missing is the critical one?

He rolled me on top of him, so that I straddled his body. “You know what they say,” Wyatt murmured. “Beneath every powerful woman is a very, very lucky man.”

I know this much: morality is meant to be a clear line, but it’s not really. Things change. Shit happens. Who we are is about not what we do, but why we tell ourselves we do it.

“You get close to people who inevitably leave you. The difference is that you call it work. I call it love.”

“No part of you lacks in divinity.”

“My grandmother used to say that cooking was love,” he said. “I don’t know if coffee counts as food, but still…thanks. For the cup of love.”

Emotional tears, for example, have protein-based hormones in them, including a neurotransmitter called leucine-enkephalin, which is a natural painkiller. Onion tears are less sticky, and disappear more quickly from a person’s cheeks.

Although all tears have salt, water, and lysozyme—the main chemical in tears—how the crystals form differs, due to other ingredients. So onion tears look as dense as brocade. Tears of change resemble the fervent swarm of bees in a hive. Laughing tears are reminiscent of the inside of a lava lamp, with smarter angles. And tears of grief call to mind the earth, as seen from above.

“Close your eyes. Now picture the person you thought you’d wind up with.” I can see him as if he’s standing in front of me. Drinking from a water bottle, his head tipped back, his throat working. His smile, when he catches me staring. “You can ask that of anyone, and they always have someone in mind. Always. And here’s the thing, Dawn—it’s rarely the person they’re going home to that night.”

“After fifteen years, love isn’t just a feeling,” he says. “It’s a choice.”

I guess that’s the part no one ever tells you. You can love someone so much your teeth ache, so much that it feels like he is carrying your heart in his own rib cage, but none of it matters if you can’t find a practical way to be together.

The opposite of love, you think, isn’t hate. It’s complacency.

When you fall in love, it’s because you find someone who fills all your empty spaces. When you fall out of love, it’s because you realize that you’re both broken.

I believe that there are five things we need to say to people we love before they die, and I give this advice to caregivers: I forgive you. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you. Goodbye. I tell them that they can interpret those prompts any way they like, and nothing will have been left unsaid.

When you lose someone you love, there is a tear in the fabric of the universe. It’s the scar you feel for, the flaw you can’t stop seeing. It’s the tender place that won’t bear weight. It’s a void.

“Love is messy,” I tell her. “Sometimes you hurt the people you love. And sometimes you love the people who hurt you.”