Fairness does not govern life and death. If it did, no good person would ever die young.
Death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed. We think such things are random, but there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole.
Lesson Two
Time is not what you think. Dying? Not the end of everything. We think it is. But what happens on earth is only the beginning.
Adam's first night on earth? When he lays down to sleep? He thinks it's all over, right? He doesn't know what sleep is. His eyes are closing and he thinks he's leaving this world, right? Only he isn't. He wakes up the next morning and he has a fresh new world to work with, but he has something else, too. He has his yesterday.
That's what heaven is. You get to make sense of your yesterdays.
Don't be angry over your sacrifice. Don't keep thinking about what you lost. Sacrifice is a part of life. It's supposed to be. It's not something to regret. It's something to aspire to.
Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it. You're just passing it on to someone else.
Lesson Three
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.
The damage done by Eddie's father was, at the beginning, the damage of neglect. As an infant, Eddie was rarely held by the man, and as a child, he was mostly grabbed by the arm, less with love than with annoyance. Eddie's mother handed out the tenderness; his father was there for the discipline.
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.
Lesson Four
She nodded and smiled, a gentle smile, and a the sight of it, his eyes began to moisten and a wave of sadness washed over him. Like a hidden grieving that rises to grab the heart, his soul was ambushed with old emotions, and his lips began to tremble and he was swept into the current of all that he had lost.
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.
The unspoken blame for this never found a resting place - it simply moved like a shadow from husband to wife. The shadow took a place at their table and they at in tis presence, amid the lonely clanking of forks and plates. When they spoke, they spoke of small things. The water of their love was hidden beneath the roots.
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 weaken, another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it. Life has to end. Love doesn't.
The Last Lesson
It is never hard to act ordinary if you feel ordinary, and the paleness of surrender becomes the color of Eddie's days.
He wailed then, and a howl rose within him in a voice he had never heard before, a howl from the very belly of his being, a howl that rumbled the river water and shook the misty air of heaven. His body convulsed, and his head jerked wildly, until the howling gave way to prayerlike utterances, every word expelled in the breathless surge of confession.
He was submerged in a strong but silent current. He felt his body being washed from his soul, meat from the bone, and with it went all the pain and weariness he ever held inside him, every scar, every wound, every bad memory. He realized all these colors, all along, were the emotions of his life.
A peace came upon him that he had never known before.
Lines formed at Ruby Pier - just as a line formed someplace else: five people, waiting, in five chosen memories, for a little girl named Amy or Annie to grown and to love and to age and to die, and to finally have her questions answered - why she lived and what she lived for.
Each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.
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