“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.” ~ William Shakespeare

I love these words that Hae Min Lee’s mother gave to her grief. They speak so strongly to my own:
On this day, through a translator, Hae’s mother speaks. She tells the court about her daughter. She tells the court about a Korean proverb that says, when parents die, they’re buried in the ground, but when a child dies, you bury the child in your heart. “When I die, when I die my daughter will die with me. As long as I live, my daughter is buried in my heart.”

I’ve also enjoyed small glimpses into Adnan’s magical thinking: Could the girl he sees in a magazine really be Hae? How can Hae be dead, if her number is still in Aisha’s phone?

I still have bouts of magical thinking and bargaining. Usually, for me, it’s the very real sense that if only I can explain Sacha’s illness and death in the right way, to the right person, they will be able to save him. All I need is the right explanation, and the right person. Then I’ll have Sacha back.

It doesn’t quite register that what I need, more urgently and impossibly than anything else, is to have had those things in the right moment – both the right moment in Sacha’s particular life, and also the right moment in the progress of medical development (those two moments may have barely coincided… but more likely, they missed one another by a few years). I know I can’t mix and match my timelines, the way that Jay does. Not in real life. But sometimes, I forget.

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