Leni had never known anyone who had died before. She had seen death on television and read about it in her beloved books (Johnny’s death in The Outsiders had turned her inside out), but now she saw the truth of it. In literature, death was many things—a message, catharsis, retribution. There were deaths that came from a beating heart that stopped and deaths of another kind, a choice made, like Frodo going to the Grey Havens. Death made you cry, filled you with sadness, but in the best of her books, there was peace, too, satisfaction, a sense of the story ending as it should.
