“He suggested a closed casket, smiling an odd smile – fixed and dim-witted, like a porpoise’s. If I had just agreed to go to college, I thought, then she’d be alive. Things would be normal. “You’re normal!” she’d said. Maybe in death she finally knew: I killed babies, mothers. I deserved this pain, was owed my misery.”

“He suggested a closed casket, smiling an odd smile – fixed and dim-witted, like a porpoise’s. If I had just agreed to go to college, I thought, then she’d be alive. Things would be normal. “You’re normal!” she’d said. Maybe in death she finally knew: I killed babies, mothers. I deserved this pain, was owed my misery.”

— Wally Lamb