When I wept and told him I was afraid I was too intense, too much, he interrupted my tears and said, “If someone came down from above and told me I could keep only one thing about you, it would be your too-muchness.

Most of us wander in and out of one another’s lives until not death, but distance, does us part – time and space and the heart’s weariness are the blander executioners of human connection.

The real hell of this,” he told her, “is that you’re going to get through it.

Real change, though, is forgiving enough to take a little failure, strong enough to take despair in small doses.

On my better days, I could feel free and tough and proud of myself; on the bad ones, I was alone as hell.

I’d confused need with love and love with sacrifice.

That sometimes the smartest person in the room is the one who says, “I have no idea.

Most of all I told this story because I wanted to say something about hope and the absence of it, and how we keep going anyway. About second chances, and how they’re sometimes buried amid the dross, even when you’re poised for the downhill grade. The narrative can always turn out to be a different story from what you expected.

That she was irreplaceable became a bittersweet loyalty: Her death was what I had now instead of her.

Mostly I couldn’t bear... the paltry notion that memory was all that eternal life really meant, and I spent too much time wondering where people got the fortitude or delusion to keep on moving past the static dead.