Change of Heart

by Jodi Picoult

I wanted to take them on a field trip to see Elizabeth’s bedroom, with its Tinker Bell night-light and dress-up clothes; I wanted them to bury their faces in Kurt’s pillow, breathe him in. I wanted them to live my life, because that was the only way they’d really know what had been lost.

In the space between yes and no, there’s a lifetime. It’s the difference between the path you walk and one you leave behind; it’s the gap between who you thought you could be and who you really are; it’s the legroom for the lies you’ll tell yourself in the future.

At three in the morning, when I woke up as per my usual insomnia, the scent of chocolate was so strong that the brownie might as well have been sitting in my cell instead of Shay’s. “Why don’t you just eat the damn thing,” I murmured. “Because,” Shay replied, as wide awake as I, “then there wouldn’t be anything to look forward to.”

After all, surely a child who grew out of grief would be born with a heavy heart.

I walked through the metal detector, holding my breath, as if I had something to hide. And I suppose I did, but my secrets wouldn’t set off those alarms.

“But for the most part, you’re all right?” After I said it, I wanted to kick myself. You didn’t ask a dying man how he was feeling. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, I thought, how was the play?

“Who says that if you want to find God on a Sunday morning, you ought to be looking in church?” my grandfather murmured.

I watched them move Shay down the tier. Speak from your heart, I thought, watching him go. So that she knows it’s worth taking.

“I know God will not give me anything I can’t handle. I just wish He didn’t trust me so much.” —MOTHER TERESA

For me, and any other agnostic—the jury’s still out. Religion is intriguing, but in a historical sense. A man should live his life a certain way not because of some divine authority, but because of a personal moral obligation to himself and others.”

As Irv led me to the steps of another ambulance, he spoke, words that at the time felt as solid and square as bricks, layered sentence upon sentence to build a wall between life as I’d known it and the one I would now be forced to lead.

This is what it always comes down to, I realized. There are the ones who believe, and the ones who don’t, and caught in the space between them are guns.

“This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.”

don’t belong to a religion. Religion’s the reason the world’s falling apart—did you see that guy get carted out of here? That’s what religion does. It points a finger. It causes wars. It breaks apart countries. It’s a petri dish for stereotypes to grow in. Religion’s not about being holy,” Shay said. “Just holier-than-thou.”

How could I not have known it would be Him how could I not have known that you see God every time you look at the face of the person you love.