The only thing you have to do in this life is die," said Mrs. Pinsky..."everything else is a choice.

We were like wanderers in a desert, blessed with a rare downpour, but unable to store the rain.

But the past is long, and the future is short.

This was the first time I noticed it, the inevitable space between father and man.

It requires a certain kind of bravery, I suppose, to choose the status quo. There's a certain boldness to inaction.

I could no longer remember the way my mother's eyes looked before the slowing. Had they always been so red around the edges? Surely, those pockets of gray beneath her lower lashes were new. She still wasn't sleeping well, but perhaps what I was seeing was just age, a gradual shift that I'd failed to register. I sometimes felt the urge to study recent photographs of her in order to locate the exact point in time when she had come to look so weary.

He'd grown eager to hand off his things, as if the weight of his possessions kept him tethered to this earth, and by giving them away, he could snip those strings.

I'd grown up hearing stories about the special hazards that girls faced. I knew where the bodies were found: naked on beaches or cut into pieces, parts frozen in freezers or buried in cement. These stories were never kept from us girls. Instead they were spread around like ghost stories, our parents hoping that fear would do the job that our judgment might not.

We were a different kind of Christian, the quiet, reasonable kind, a breed embarrassed by the mention of miracles.