——How do people choose their final words? Do they realize their gravity? Are they fated to be wise?
When your time came, it came, and that was that. You might say something smart on your way out, but you might just as easily say something stupid.
——In the stories about life after death, the soul often floats above the good-bye moment, hovering over police cars at highway accidents, or clinging like a spider to hospital-room ceilings. These are people who receive a second chance, who somehow, for some reason, resume their place in the world.
—–People often belittle the place where they were born. But heaven can be found in the most unlikely corners. And heaven itself has many steps.
—–There are five people you meet in heaven. Each of us was in your life for a reason. You may not have known the reason at the time, and that is what heaven is for… For understanding your life on earth.
—–People think of heaven as a paradise garden, a place where they can float on clouds and laze in rivers and mountains. But scenery without solace is meaningless.
—–This is the greatest gift God can give you: to understand what happened in your life. To have it explained. It is the peace you have been searching for.
—–Why people gather when others die? Why people feel they should?
It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn’t just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.
—–No life is a waste. The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.
—–Young men go to war. Sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they want to. Always, they feel they are supposed to. This comes from the sad, layered stories of life, which over the centuries have seen courage confused with picking up arms, and cowardice confused with laying them down.
——ich vermisse neunzehn!-
Later that night, Eddie walks Marguerite along the promenade. He knows the names of every ticket taker and food vendor and they all wish him luck. Some of the older women get teary-eyed and Eddie figures they have sons of their own, already gone,
He and Marguerite buy saltwater taffy, molasses and teaberry and root beer flavors. They pick out pieces from the small white bag, playfully fighting each other’s fingers. At the penny arcade, Eddie pulls on a plaster hand and the arrow goes past “clammy” and “harmless” and “mild”, all the way to “hot stuff”.
“You’re really strong,” Marguerite says.
“Hot stuff,” Eddie says, making a muscle.
At the end of the night, they stand on the boardwalk in a fashion they have seen in the movies, holding hands, leaning against the railing. Out on the sand, an old ragpicker has built a small fire from sticks and torn towels and is huddling by it, settled in for the night.
“You don’t have to ask me to wait,” Marguerite says suddenly.
Eddie swallows.
“I don’t?”
She shakes her head. Eddie smiles. Saved from a question that has caught in his throat all night, he feels as if a string has just shot from his heart and looped around her shoulders, pulling her close, making her his. He loves her more in this moment than he thought he could ever love anyone.
A drop of rain hits Eddie’s forehead. Then another. He looks up at the gathering clouds.
“Hey, Hot Stuff?” Marguerite says. She smiles but then her face droops and she blinks back water, although Eddie cannot tell if it is raindrops or tears.
“Don’t get killed, OK?” she says.
——Time is not what we think. Dying? Not the end of everything. We think it is. But what happens on earth is only the beginning.”
——Sacrifice is a part of life. It’s supposed to be. It’s not something to regret. It’s something to aspire to. Little sacrifices. Big sacrifices. A mother works so her son can go to school. A daughter moves home to take care of her sick father.
—–Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you’re not really losing it. You’re just passing it on to someone else.
——All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.
——Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away. The moments that used to define them – a mother’s approval, a father’s nod – are covered by moments of their own accomplishments. It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives.
——-Silence was an escape, but silence is rarely a refuge.
——Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves.
——No one is born with anger. And when we die, the soul is freed of it. But now, here, in order to move on, you must understand why you felt what you did, and why you no longer need to feel it.
—–People say they “find” love, as if it were an object hidden by a rock. But love takes many forms, and it is never the same for any man and woman. What people find then is a certain love. We found a certain love, a grateful love, a deep but quiet love, one that we knew, above all else, was irreplaceable.
—–Love, like rain, can nourish from above, drenching couples with a soaking joy. But sometimes, under the angry heat of life, love dries on the surface and must nourish from below, tending to its roots, keeping itself alive.
——Lost love is still love. It takes a different form, that’s all. You can’t see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. But when those senses awaken, another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it. Life has to end… love doesn’t.
