Benjamin’s Reviews > The Bigness of the World > Status Update

"I have since come to understand that this—the need to imagine our pain worthy of another's anguish, our circumstances capable of invoking sacrifice or even despair in another human being—is a basic human need, one felt even more deeply as we confront our own shortcomings in meeting this need for others."

"We missed her terribly in the beginning, my father most of all, though I believe that he grieved not at being separated from her but because the person she was, or that he had thought she was, no longer existed, which meant that he grieved almost as though she were dead."