Sarah Dessen

The Truth About Forever

Hill

Sarah Campbell

It felt so weird, to be on the other side, where you were the one expected to offer condolences, not receive them. I wanted my "sorry" to sound genuine, because it was. That was the hard thing about grief, and the grieving. They spoke another language, and the words we knew always fell short of what we wanted them to say.

"Some people," she said, and I wasn't even sure she'd heard me, "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 remembering and getting on at the same time. You know?”

I felt something catch in my throat, a sudden surge of sadness that caught me unaware, almost taking my breath. That was the thing. You never got used to it, the idea of someone being gone. Just when you think it's reconciled, accepted, someone points it out to you and it just hits you all over again, that shocking.

The Truth About Forever quotes

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