The truth.

For my grandmother.

If I’d had any extra time on my hands that wasn’t spent thinking about Alma, I might have spent them worrying about death. But the truth was that I learned to put a wall up against such thoughts. Each new thing I learned about the world was a stone in that wall, until one day I understood I’d exiled myself from a place I could never go back to. And yet. The wall also protected me from the painful clarity of childhood. Even during the years when I hid in the forest, in trees, holes, and cellars, with death breathing down my neck, I still never thought about the truth: that I was going to die. Only after my heart attack, when the stones of the wall that separated me from childhood began to crumble at last, did the fear of death return to me. And it was just as frightening as it ever was.

The History of Love, Nicole Krauss
2005