We need to acknowledge the strange wonderfulness of these accounts, and the wonder of resilience in circumstances of extreme adversity, and the wonder, sometimes, of recovery.

When I came up gasping, my father grabbed me and tossed me back in. When I remember that day, I remember soaring through the air and landing with a splat. I remember myself unattached from everything and yet made of everything. I was the air and the water. I was made of living fragments. I was past, present, and future at once. I felt, more than ever before, and perhaps ever since, deliciously free.

How ordinary and how strange human life is. And how delicately poised. Your own end might lie just in front of you, under your feet. This plane breaking up into a million flaming pieces, one moment from now.

The world is a wild and wondrous place, it cannot be mastered, but within the dimensions of a painted picture, large or small, some of its complexity can be contemplated and some of its strangeness can be enjoyed.

A lot of the suffering we will witness in life will be greater than ours. There’s the question of what we can do to help and the different question of what to do when we can’t help. Often one thinks of another’s suffering: my dear friend you have so much life due you, how can this be happening? (I’m at Mass General waiting to see Emily.) For the sake of loyalty we keep in our minds the imagination of their private anguish. We cycle through all the emotions with them but often we also think—or behave as if we think—the abyss is remote for us.