I share this confession with you because I recognize that we share the same restlessness. We long to reveal the wonders this world has to offer and are unsatisfied with the mundanities of modern life. We are neither credulous nor wholly skeptical. Though you came of age in a time of science, and I in a century of superstition, we both yearn for the miraculous, even while we recognize that miracles do not exist.
You will encounter death in this story. Death has been the defining event in my life, and as my own death approaches it will play a bigger role still. Often, the deaths around me have felt endless. There is no limit to how much grief we will need to endure, no benevolence that sighs, “She has lost too many already, let us spare her more sadness.”
Yet there is also love in this story. I feel love keenly, not only for my family and friends, but for the whole unbroken chain of humanity that led to you and me. At times the strength of that love overwhelms me; now undammed, it has become an unstoppable force, a great wave that breaches old seawalls of propriety and solitude. My spirit may not be eternal, but it has become powerful, and my visions of love spill out of the page. At times they cannot even be contained by ink or thread.
Some of these recollections will elicit smiles of recognition; others will surprise or even shock you. You are resilient, though, and I know you will withstand what I reveal to you. I smile when I imagine you reading these pages once I’m gone, my life after death in truth.
Maybe others will read this too, in time. Other women, other men—citizens of our fragile Earth. And why stop there, when I so delight in imagining planets beyond our own? I am certain there are many in the universe. Surely all those stars watch over more worlds than ours.