Bag of Bones

by Stephen King

“Everything but the last line,” I said. “The book, such as it is, is dedicated to you, and I want you to put down the last bit.”

There was no weeping and wailing that night; I guess all that was out of my system. Instead there was a deep and wretched sense of loss—the empty chair where she used to like to sit and read, the empty table where she would always set her glass too close to the edge.

Things conceived by minds and made by hands can never be quite the same, even when they try their best to be identical, because we’re never the same from day to day or even moment to moment.

What if death drives us insane? What if we survive, but it drives us insane? What then?

I agree that clouds often look like other things—fish and unicorns and men on horseback—but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.