maude lin

When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer,
many people would come up to me — it still sometimes happens — and ask me if Carl
changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I
think I will see him again.

Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The
tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don’t ever expect to be
reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty
years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never
trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting.
Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous — not
miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries
of chance… That pure chance could be so generous and so kind… That we could find each
other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the
immensity of time… That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which
sustains me and it’s much more meaningful…

The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and
our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him
someday. I don’t think I’ll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found
each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.
-Ann Druyan on Carl Sagan

read this so many times, i couldn’t help but memorize it.