The Stranger in the Lifeboat

by Mitch Albom

I wonder if this is what dying is like, Annabelle. At first, you are so tightly connected to the world you cannot imagine letting go. In time, you surrender to a drifting phase. What comes next, I cannot say.

Some would say that you meet the Lord.

It had survived. And witnessing survival can make us believe in our own.

Even on a lifeboat, people have their modesty. The explosion had come during a dinner party, and the sight of most of us in dress clothes, now soaked and ripped as we huddled inside a raft, was a grim reminder of how little the natural world cares for our plans.

It is a unique suffering to be denied the thing your body most craves. All your concentration funnels down to one thought: How can I get it?

And those you idolize as a child can hold sway over you years later, even when you should know better.

I often felt she stared at things but saw something else. Broken people do that. My mother’s most repeated advice to me was this: “Find one person you can trust in your life.” She had been mine for my turbulent childhood, and I tried to be hers in the years she had left. After she died, I felt heavy all the time. My breathing was labored, my posture stooped. I worried that I was ill. I realize now this was merely the weight of love that had nowhere to go.

It takes so much to make you feel big in this world. It only takes an ocean to make you feel tiny.

“Forgive yourself,” she said. “Then use this grace to spread my spirit.”

“This world can be a trying place, Inspector. Sometimes you have to shed who you were to live who you are.”