He's filled with a sense of childish release, the old feeling that because you are sick, all your trials and obligations have been suspended. - Michael Cunningham

Dear Leonard. To look life in the face. Always to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it. To love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard. Always the years between us. Always the years. Always the love. Always the hours.

But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another.

What he remembers with perfect clarity is sitting on a train headed for Madrid, feeling the sort of happiness he imagines spirits might feel, freed of their earthly bodies but still possessed of their essential selves.