Before Your Memory Fades (Before the Coffee Gets Cold, #3)

by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

“Well, surviving alone is much the same as dying alone, don’t you think?”

“You should be proud of yourself for sticking with it and never giving up. You were impressive in your persistence. It didn’t happen by magic! Remember when I called out to you on that day? Your life didn’t suddenly transform by itself, did it? None of your problems suddenly fixed themselves, did they? But you looked to the future and persevered. You have what you have today because you never gave up telling yourself that you had to be happy.”

“Even though I die, as long as you don’t forget me, I’ll always be in your heart. The reason you kept working hard even after I died was that I was still in your heart, right?”

...thought it was all over when you died.

People’s true feelings are not in plain sight. The other person might not be thinking anything, but there is a tendency to just assume what the other is feeling without reaching out and asking.

how important the ordinary life that we take for granted is and how much happiness can be experienced from having someone you care about by your side.

Something I strongly believe is that we mustn’t allow the death of a person to be the cause of unhappiness. The reason for that is simple: if we let everyone who dies be a cause for unhappiness, that would mean people are being born to become unhappy. But the opposite in fact is true. People are always born for the sake of happiness.