Rowan

“Leni had never known anyone who had died before. She had seen death on television and read about it in her beloved books...but now she saw the truth of it. In literature, death was many things -- a message, catharsis, retribution. There were deaths that came from a beating heart that stopped and deaths of another kind, a choice made, like Frodo going to the Grey Havens. Death made you cry, filled you with sadness, but in the best of her books, there was peace, too, satisfaction, a sense of the story ending as it should. In real life, she saw, it wasn't like that. It was sadness opening up inside of you, changing how you saw the world. It made her think about God and what He offered at times like this. She wondered for the first time what her parents believed in, what she believed in, and she saw how the idea of Heaven could be comforting.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone