1.

Last Sunday, the beautiful woman on TV, the soldier home from Iraq with shrapnel still deep in her brain, said doctors gave her one chance in a hundred to wake, one in a thousand to do more than bob and babble. And here she was, radiantly amazed, smiling sweetly.

Somebody had to be the one, she said. Why couldn't I do it?

In a tent, in a field hospital outside Baghdad, Jodee Beddia's surgeon cut a piece of bone from her skull so her swelling brain wouldn't kill her. Sewed it inside my abdomen, she said. To keep the bone alive. So nobody would lose it. Jodee Beddia flew home in a coma.

Now the bone is back in her head—she's stapled and sutured. Pain, yes, always. Like light, she says, cutting through me. She traces a line from between her eyes, up over the crown, through both temples. She smiles. It's only pain, a friend if you call it that, not so bad to be awake, alive today to feel it.

2.

The chickadee comes to the feeder. Even now, so close to twilight! Less than half an ounce of feather and hollow bone, ten drops of blood, heart smaller than a fingernail—yet she survives all night, every night, all winter.

3.

One bright day last fall, thirteen-year-old Rosanna Rios arrived at the hospital in time to give her heart and lungs—liver, spleen, pancreas, kidneys. In time to surrender her perfectly clear corneas and twenty-six inches of unscarred skin to save the lives, restore the sight, heal the burns of seven others.

Why should a sixty-nine-year-old man receive the heart of a child?

4.

Rescuers find one bruised baby in a field of tall grass, alive and unafraid after a tornado, this one of nine hundred lifted up and set down, everything destroyed around her.

5.

The tanager swoops tree to tree, gold and orange, black-winged, silent. Frogs chirp at dusk, and swallows dive, catching insects. Everything loves life:
bird, child, fish, mosquito—you hear the fluttery whoosh of your own heart:

Let your body rise.

Let the wind blow through you.

You will die. But not tonight. Tonight the whole world is here alive inside you, everything you've loved and lost: the white horse haloed in morning light; your child; your father; violet pansies blooming under snow, the ones you found in your mother's garden.

The thrush hidden in the woods holds one shimmering note so bright and clear you think the bird will shatter—and then it does shatter: into a heart-sparking ripple of song that splits down your bones and bursts from your body.

You speak now because you too are shattered, because the heart breaks, and breaks open. The people whose stories you hear, the miraculous beings you encounter, have fallen inside, and now, before you die, you hope to learn to love them. Imagining their lives is the path you walk to do this.