Status Updates From A World Lost: A Novel (Port...

Perhaps it was from thinking about him after his death, discovering how much I remembered and how little I knew, that I learned that all human stories in this world contain many lost or unwritten or unreadable or unwritable pages and that the truth about us, though it must exist, though it must lie all around us every day, is mostly hidden from us, like birds’ nests in the woods.

Miss Iris said, “Honey, I loved your uncle Andrew. We’ll miss him, won’t we?” She bit her underlip and looked away.
Some of the others said things too. It was a little as though they wanted to ensure that their love would last by telling it to somebody young.

For a long time then I just sat in the grass, feeling clean and content, thinking perhaps of nothing at all. I was nine years old, going on ten; having never needed to ask, I knew exactly where I was; I did not want to be anyplace else.
[I can feel Berry’s presence in these words, reliving his childhood]

When I got out to the deep place I sucked in a big breath and dived. Way down where the water was black and cold it was revealed to me that if I drowned before I lived to be grown I would be sorry, and I kicked and stroked at the dark, watching the water brighten until my head broke out into daylight and air again.
I swam back into shallow water. This partial concession to my mother’s fears made me feel absolved..