“I watched my brother and my father. The truth was very different from what we learned in school. The truth was the line between the living and the dead could be, it seemed, murky and blurred.”

“I focused very hard on the dead geranium in his line of vision. I thought if I could make it bloom he would have his answer. In my heaven it bloomed. In my heaven geranium petals swirled in eddies up to my waist. On Earth nothing happened... I stood alone in a sea of bright petals.”

“Years passed. The trees in our yard grew taller. I watched my family and my friends and neighbors, the teachers whom I'd had or imaged having, the high school I had dreamed about. As I sat in the gazebo I would pretend instead that I was sitting on the topmost branch of the maple under which my brother had swallowed a stick and still played hide-and-seek with Nate, or I would perch on the railing of a stairwell in New York and wait for Ruth to pass near. I would study with Ray. Drive the Pacific Coast Highway on a warm afternoon of salty air with my mother. But I would end each day with my father in his den. I would lay these photographs down in my mind, those gathered from my constant watching, and I could trace how one thing- my death- connected these images to a single source. No one could have predicted how my loss would change small moments on Earth. But I held on to those moments, hoarded them. None of them were lost as long as I was there.”

“We stood-- the dead child and the living --on either side of my father, both wanting the same thing. To have him to ourselves forever. To please us both was an impossibility.”

“I live in a world where two truths coexist: where both hell and hope lie in the palm of my hand”

“Buckley followed the three of them into the kitchen and asked, as he had at least once a day, “Where’s Susie?”They were silent. Samuel looked at Lindsey.“Buckley,” my father called from the adjoining room, “come play Monopoly with me.”My brother had never been invited to play Monopoly. Everyone said he was too young, but this was the magic of Christmas. He rushed into the family room, and my father picked him up and sat him on his lap.“See this shoe?” my father said.Buckley nodded his head.“I want you to listen to everything I say about it, okay?”“Susie?” my brother asked, somehow connecting the two.“Yes, I’m going to tell you where Susie is.”I began to cry up in heaven. What else was there for me to do?“This shoe was the piece Susie played Monopoly with,” he said. “I play with the car or sometimes the wheelbarrow. Lindsey plays with the iron, and when you mother plays, she likes the cannon.”“Is that a dog?”“Yes, that’s a Scottie.”“Mine!”“Okay,” my father said. He was patient. He had found a way to explain it. He held his son in his lap, and as he spoke, he felt Buckley’s small body on his knee-the very human, very warm, very alive weight of it. It comforted him. “The Scottie will be your piece from now on. Which piece is Susie’s again?”“The shoe?” Buckley asked.“Right, and I’m the car, your sister’s the iron, and your mother is the cannon.”My brother concentrated very hard.“Now let’s put all the pieces on the board, okay? You go ahead and do it for me.”Buckley grabbed a fist of pieces and then another, until all the pieces lay between the Chance and Community Chest cards.“Let’s say the other pieces are our friends?”“Like Nate?”“Right, we’ll make your friend Nate the hat. And the board is the world. Now if I were to tell you that when I rolled the dice, one of the pieces would be taken away, what would that mean?”“They can’t play anymore?”“Right.”“Why?” Buckley asked.He looked up at my father; my father flinched.“Why?” my brother asked again.My father did not want to say “because life is unfair” or “because that’s how it is”. He wanted something neat, something that could explain death to a four-year-old He placed his hand on the small of Buckley’s back.“Susie is dead,” he said now, unable to make it fit in the rules of any game. “Do you know what that means?”Buckley reached over with his hand and covered the shoe. He looked up to see if his answer was right.My father nodded. "You won’t see Susie anymore, honey. None of us will.” My father cried. Buckley looked up into the eyes of our father and did not really understand.Buckley kept the shoe on his dresser, until one day it wasn't there anymore and no amount of looking for it could turn up.”

“Those clothes are Susie's,' my father said calmly when he reached him.Buckley looked down at my blackwatch dress that he held in his hand.My father stepped closer, took the dress from my brother, and then, without speaking, he gathered the rest of my clothes, which Buckley had piled on the lawn. As he turned in silence toward the house, hardly breathing, clutching my clothes to him, it sparked.I was the only one to see the colors. Just near Buckley's ears and on the tips of his cheeks and chin he was a little orange somehow, a little red.Why can't I use them?' he asked.It landed in my father's back like a fist.Why can't I use those clothes to stake my tomatoes?'My father turned around. He saw his son standing there, behind him the perfect plot of muddy, churned-up earth spotted with tiny seedlings. 'How can you ask me that question?'You have to choose. It's not fair,' my brother said.Buck?' My father held my clothes against his chest.I watched Buckley flare and light. Behind him was the sun of the goldenrod hedge, twice as tall as it had been at my death.I'm tired of it!' Buckley blared. 'Keesha's dad died and she's okay?'Is Keesha a girl at school?'Yes!'My father was frozen. He could feel the dew that had gathered on his bare ankles and feet, could feel the ground underneath him, cold and moist and stirring with possibility.I'm sorry. When did this happen?'That's not the point, Dad! You don't get it.' Buckley turned around on his heel and started stomping the tender tomato shoots with his foot.Buck, stop!' my father cried.My brother turned.You don't get it, Dad,' he said.I'm sorry,' my father said. These are Susie's clothes and I just... It may not make sense, but they're hers-something she wore.'...You act like she was yours only!'Tell me what you want to say. What's this about your friend Keesha's dad?'Put the clothes down.'My father laid them gently on the ground.It isn't about Keesha's dad.'Tell me what it is about.' My father was now all immediacy. He went back to the place he had been after his knee surgery, coming up out of the druggie sleep of painkillers to see his then-five-year-old son sitting near him, waiting for his eyes to flicker open so he could say, 'Peek-a-boo, Daddy.'She's dead.'It never ceased to hurt. 'I know that.'But you don't act that way.' Keesha's dad died when she was six. Keesha said she barely even thinks of him.'She will,' my father said.But what about us?'Who?'Us, Dad. Me and Lindsey. Mom left becasue she couldn't take it.'Calm down, Buck,' my father said. He was being as generous as he could as the air from his lungs evaporated out into his chest. Then a little voice in him said, Let go, let go, let go. 'What?' my father said.I didn't say anything.'Let go. Let go. Let go.I'm sorry,' my father said. 'I'm not feeling very well.' His feet had grown unbelievably cold in the damp grass. His chest felt hollow, bugs flying around an excavated cavity. There was an echo in there, and it drummed up into his ears. Let go.My father dropped down to his knees. His arm began to tingle on and off as if it had fallen asleep. Pins and needles up and down. My brother rushed to him. Dad?'Son.' There was a quaver in his voice and a grasping outward toward my brother.I'll get Grandma.' And Buckley ran.My father whispered faintly as he lay on his side with his face twisted in the direction of my old clothes: 'You can never choose. I've loved all three of you.”