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as a child, Megan knew this to be paradise. Because, she could see with hindsight, her mother told her so. Her mother existed entirely in the moment. And she made every moment sparkle. No one in Megan’s family was ever allowed to forget how
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“Once I was blown up in a Humvee in Afghanistan and avoided injury because the bomb went off under the engine block instead of the crew compartment—a difference of about ten feet. I was jacked with adrenaline for the next few hours and then went careening into a depression that lasted days. I became paranoid about almost everything: where I sat, where I walked, what I sat behind. It was the ten feet that got me—the fact that “so much could be determined by so little,”
― In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife
― In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife
“I look at my girls, my brilliant young women. I want them to think I was better than I was, and I want to tell them the truth in case the truth will be useful. Those two desires to not neatly coexist, but this is where we are in the story.”
― Tom Lake
― Tom Lake
“Like every other mother in the history of time, I wondered if I would ever be able to love another child as much as I loved her.”
― Tom Lake
― Tom Lake
“Eventually you will be all alone with doctors shrugging because they’ve run out of things to do, and the person you really are thumping frantically in your chest: the successes and catastrophes and affairs and hangovers and genuine loves and small betrayals and flashes of courage and the river of fear running beneath it all, and of course the vast stretches of wasted time that are part of even the most amazing life.”
― In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife
― In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife
“You will know yourself best at that moment; you will be at your most real, your most honest, your most uncalculated. If you could travel back in time to make use of such knowledge during your life, you would become exactly the person you’d always hoped to be—but none of us do that. We don’t get that knowledge until it’s too late because then it can’t be tainted by vanity or pride or desire.”
― In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife
― In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife
Cynthia’s 2025 Year in Books
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