I just finished a book that got so far inside of me, it may never come out.  I am listening to The Valley Song and I am praying it with a ferocity that comes out only when I am completely awake.  While I read it, I remembered.  I spent time in the western part of the continent, but the faces of the children, the smells, the way their eyes followed us with that question, they all came rushing at me. 

I grabbed coffee with my brother before his plane left and I asked him to tell me everything he could.  He spent time there after the destruction, time finding the remains of churches and villages and people.  Finding them and then helping them to begin again, to build on their brokeness.  He told me what he could, but it still does not feel enough.

This is the sort of story you read when you're having trouble being grateful for the pieces of life He has given you.  It reminds you to make yourself care when you start to feel empty inside.  It reminds me that struggling is the dearest sign of life. 

"I did not want to leave William K.  I wanted to die with him.  I was so tired at that moment, so bone tired that I felt that I could fall asleep as he did, sleep until my body went cold.  But then I thought of my mother and my father, my brothers and sisters, and found myself invoking William K's own mythic visions of Ethiopia.  The world was terrible but perhaps I would see them again.  It was enough to bring me to my feet again.  I stood and chose to continue walking, to walk until I could not walk.  I would finish burying William K and then I would follow the boys.

I could not watch the first dirt fall on William K's face so I kicked the first layer with the back of my heel.  Once his head was covered, I spread more dirt and rocks until it bore some resemblance to a  real grave.  When I was finished, I told WIlliam K that I was sorry.  I was sorry that I had not known how sick he was.  That I had not found a way to keep him alive.  That I was the last person he saw on this earth.  That he could not say goodbye to his mother and father, that only I would know where his body lay.  It was a broken world, I know then, that would allow a boy such as me to bury a boy such as William K."


What is the What, Dave Eggers