“. . .the world as we see it is only the published version. The subterranean realms, whether churches or hospital rooms or smoke-filled basements, are part of what hold up the rest.”

“The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I thught grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that graduallu receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity.”

“The rest of the family tree had a root system soggy with alcohol... One aunt had fallen asleep with her face in the mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving dinner; another's fondness for Coors was so unwavering that I can still remember the musky smell of the beer and the coldness of the cans. Most of the men drank the way all Texas men drank, or so I believed, which meant that they were tough guys who could hold their liquor until they couldn't anymore--a capacity that often led to some cloudy version of doom, be it financial ruin or suicide or the lesser betrayal of simple estrangement. Both social drinkers, my parents had eluded these tragic endings; in the postwar Texas of suburbs and cocktails, their drinking was routine but undramatic.”

“Near the end I asked him one night in the hospital corridor what he thought was happening, and he said, "Tell her everything you haven't said," and I smiled with relief. "There's nothing," I said. "I've already told her everything.”

“What they never tell you about grief is that missing someone is the simple part.”

“Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part--time and space and the heart's weariness are the blander executioners of human connection.”

“It's and old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too.”