Just because you're an atheist, that doesn't mean you wouldn't love for things to have reasons for why they are. - Jonathan Safran Foer

I hated myself for going, why couldn't I be the kind of person who stays?

The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.

Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she slept a good night's sleep, and will be able to eat breakfast, and doesn't hear her husband's ghost all the time, but only some of the time. Her grief is replaced with a useful sadness. Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your great-great-great-grandchildren's will be. But we learn to live in that love.