You ever read so many horrible things that you just have to step back and say "fuck it."

[Journeyman]

13. No. When I was young, the Mother of one of my friends had passed through the death factories . . .

from Treblinka by way of Theresienstadt. She told me one day her life in sunshine was made possible by her capacity to love.

She and her husband, Viktor (who had also passed through the death factories), never had children of their own but instead adopted little ones who had been brutalized by life. For example, her son, my friend Ron, had been torched as a babe by his drug-addled mother. Another child, a daughter, was abandoned by her birth parents because she had an incurable disorder that took her life at 15.

And through it all, Sarah tried to make sense of the world and of what she had endured by giving freely of her love. So much had been taken, so very much denied, yet she found the capacity to make the world better, even if it was only within the confines of her small family and its duration admittedly ephemeral.

Everywhere I look in the world it is with hope. Having known and loved Sarah, what other option do I have?