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It was June when Pinchas died and for a long time it ruined spring for me. He was six years old. I used to love the spring, when the weather was warm enough to play outside for hours, but not hot enough to make you cranky and tired. I always loved the smell of flowers blooming and grass that has just been cut. The spring air seemed so alive and full of possibilities. But then Pinchas died in June and the June that came after it brought fresh air that smelled just like the day he died, and I was scared the season would bring something bad again. And all the Junes after brought the same feeling
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“Life goes on. I wouldn’t believe it, but it does.”
The next world is for eternity; this world is so fleeting.”
I love the way a whole life was sucked into the letters and when I read them, the story pushes itself from the letters on the page, up into the air, and into my head. Each character is a life that could almost have been and with that, truths, dreams, love, and hate.
you have to believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy,”
‘We can know that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.’ Tolstoy wrote
“I don’t do anything special.” “You are special for who you are.”
I am grateful to have her there because I still feel surrounded with love even through all the pain.
“All destruction comes from thinking about others as different than you. To be cruel to someone, you cannot think of them as yourself. So, we make them a stranger in our eyes. As if we don’t all have the same blood in our veins, as if we don’t breathe the same air. No one can be cruel unless they really view someone as different but that rips the world apart. We cannot be different. We are all part of the same God. We are never alone.”
The entire world as we know it will fracture at its seams and explode into smithereens, causing destruction to everyone and everything in its wake. All because we haven’t yet learned to view each other as ourselves . . . that we are the furthest thing from strangers . . . that we are all part of one whole. But some people will want to remain separate, and by pulling us apart, they will unravel the very essence of what keeps the world whole, until it has no choice but to explode. Like a cancer, splitting the body’s own cells until every organ breaks down and the body, by doing to its own, dies.
How can some people be so good, and some people be so bad? Aren’t we all the same people?” “That’s a good question, my little philosopher. That is the power of free choice. You choose what you want to be.” “So, someone who is cruel, chose to be that way?” “Yes of course, maybe not all at once, but with the everyday decisions he made he molded himself into the person he is today.”
“Think of it as the greatest gift of all. You don’t wait to see what kind of life you lived or what kind of person you became, you choose for yourself no matter what you are going through. You don’t wait for life to happen to you, you happen to life. With every move you make you can choose to make it what you want, what you believe in, even if it is the harder choice.”
We are together, so we are warm enough.
Each one of these children is a world in themselves. Each one laughs, loves, and has revelations of their own. For each, it is as if the world was created just for them.
If you are reading this now, you are alive, and for you, too, the world was created for you alone. All the beauty of the world was created just for you, and for each one of us.
Evil does not only happen when a person is abnormally bad. Evil happens when good people do not see the good in other people. Evil happens when we judge each other. Evil happens when we put ourselves higher than others. Evil happens when we stand by someone else’s evil and do not speak up.
My grandmother wants you to know what she went through so you can change the way our future looks. She wants you to know you can never let this happen again. She wants you to know that it doesn’t matter what race you are, or the color of your skin, or what religion you practice; we are all one. She wants you to treat others with respect and she wants you to stand up for those who are being treated unjustly, no matter who they are. She wants you to remember, so you can stand up for peace.
