Nothing prepares you for the death of a child. Nothing teaches you how to live with it. - Maureen F. McHugh

That is what lives are, aren’t they? Attempts to fill our time with activity designed to prevent us from realizing that there is no meaning?

So he starts by asking me what I know about capitalism.
“People were rich and there was a lot of corruption and a lot of crime,” I say. “And now we have socialism and people are poor and there’s a lot of corruption and a lot of crime.”
He laughs. Anything I say about politics makes him laugh.

One Christmas my dippy older sister was talking about God protecting her from some minor calamity, some domestic crisis involving getting a dent in her husband’s Ford pickup, and later, as we drove home, Allan said, grinning, “I’m so glad that God is looking after Matt’s pickup. Makes up for whatever he was doing during, you know, Cambodia, or the Black Plague.”