Maggiebeth

“My mother has followed us into the house. My mother is the name I’ve given his grief. She was gone long before I knew what death was so, for me, she is an abstract loss, a game of guessing at the life I might have lived. My mother is a collection of stories and inanimate objects. She is a wedding ring in my father’s bedside drawer, a rosehips-flavored tea bag in the back of our kitchen cupboard that we both refuse to use or throw out. She is a picture of someone standing on the rims too far away to see. She is a book underlined only to page seven. She is a pair of burnt rosebushes in the yard that Pop won’t dig up. She is the line between his eyebrows, the groove where his smile would be. She is a feeling in the gut I can’t name or move.”
― Susan Henderson, The Flicker of Old Dreams

“Maybe she could quit her big job of being responsible for everyone else's feelings...She imagines it—letting go. Handing the heavy stuff back to the people it belongs to.”
― Deb Caletti, A Heart in a Body in the World

“You still have a lot of time to make yourself be what you want. There’s still lots of good in the world. Tell Dally. I don’t think he knows.”
― S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders

“That was the first time her grandfather had leaned down and whispered, Be brave, into her ear. And then, Or pretend to be. It’s all the same.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Four Winds