A Guide to Being Born Quotes

“Petra, people tell me that I will 'move on' and I can't believe it. But if it ever does happen, and I forget to feel this pressing absence of you, if I make it through a meaningless party and don't remember to hate everyone for their peaceful lives until the morning, please know that I am already sorry. I am going to try to be brave like you asked me to, but I don't have any idea yet what that means. Is it braver to allow the sadness of your leaving to spread into each of my bones until it is as big as you were to me? Or is it braver to let you drift out into what may very well be a brighter, finer place than this and be happy to think of your joy there? I hope, Petra, that I get it right.”
― Ramona Ausubel, A Guide to Being Born

“He let himself into the house and sat down with his back against the door, where the tiles were cool on his legs and he tried to hear, as he had earlier imagined, every single thing that his wife was not doing in their home on this Sunday night. He could hardly keep track of it all, she was so busy being absent. She was not pouring water into a glass or a pitcher. She was not kicking his shoes out of the hall. She was not switching the laundry into the dryer. She was not opening the screen door and going outside barefoot and calling for him to come look at the sunset. She was not putting lotion on her elbows or flattening the newspaper or picking up the ringing telephone, which would go on calling out the absence of Petra in nine-ring sequences dozens of times every day.”
― Ramona Ausubel, A Guide to Being Born

“You must have come from very far down," Alice says to the fish, "to have your own lantern.”
― Ramona Ausubel, A Guide to Being Born

“Now that she was gone, he did not know how to stand in this room right. He looked around at the familiar faces, some people he had known for decades, and was filled with the sense of being incomplete– not enough of a person to do his job. He was paid for his mind, but at this moment he did not know how to find his mind within the shimmering sorrow of his heart. The questions he had spent his career considering seemed like kickable little stones compared to the topography of his loss.”
― Ramona Ausubel, A Guide to Being Born

“We can do a cremation here, at the house?" I ask.
"We built a fire," my father says.
"Obviously. And I put the whole cat in the fire?"
"There isn't a whole cat," my mother says.
"What is there?"
"Parts of cat," they say together.
"Bones?" I ask.
"Mostly. And some fur. And some face.”
― Ramona Ausubel, A Guide to Being Born