Nineteen Minutes

by Jodi Picoult

If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn’t be filled?

“The death of a loved one can shake us to our very foundations. When the person is so young and so full of potential and skill, the feelings of grief and loss can be even more overwhelming. At times such as this we turn to our friends and family for support, for a shoulder to cry on and for someone to walk that road of pain and anguish with us.

But true character showed when you could find something to love in a child everyone else hated.

He started wondering if there were exceptions to the rule: if happy people might be hopeful, if the unhappy might have given up any anticipation that things might get better.

Maybe empathy, like any unused muscle, simply atrophied.

She wondered if grief could make time run faster, like a glitch in a clock.