These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.

Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.

Life is a perpetual yesterday for us.

There wasn't a lot of bullshit in my heaven.

This little girl's grown up by now," she said.Almost.Not quite.I wish you all a long and happy life.

She liked to imagine that when she passed the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was.