Nouran Abdeen

“You know what happens when someone dies?' Delia said suddenly, startling me a bit. I kept putting together my sandwich, though, not answering: I knew there was more. 'It's like, everything and everyone refracts, each person having a different reaction'...'When Wish died, it just knocked the wind out of me. Truly. It's like that stupid thing
bert and Wes do, the leaping out thing, trying to scare each other: it was the biggest gotcha in the world.' She looked down at the sandwiches. 'I'd just assumed she'd be okay. It had never occurd to me she might actually just be... gone. You know?'...'And then she was,' Delia said, her hand on the bread bag. 'Gone. Gotcha. And suddenly I had these two boys to take care of, plus a newborn of my own. It was just this huge loss, this huge gap, you know'...'Some people... they can just move on, you know, mourn and cry and be done with it. Or at least seem to be. But for me... I don't know. I didn't want to fix it, to forget. It wasn't something that was broken. It's just ... something that happened. And like that hole, I'm just finding ways, every day, of working around it. Respecting and remebering and getting on at the same time.'
I envied Delia. At least she knew what she was up against. Maybe that's what you got when you stood over your grief, facing it finally. A sense of its depths, its area, the distance across, and the way over or around it, whichever you chose in the end.”
― Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever