I shook off Aunt Mary and rested my cheek on his hand that I was holding with both of mine. I looked up at him and said, I will miss you so terribly Greenie, but I will be okay. I said: You can go. I wished I hadn’t because right then, with those tiny words — only eight letters in all — still vibrating in the air between us, there was the slightest change in his being, the stillness that is called death, and the world was as quiet as it had ever been. I was alone for the first time in my life and I understood that everything dies, even people, even people we know.
