Page 95 of Lost and Found

Merritt searched him.“Exactly. She deserves someone who knows it.”

Silas only gave her a solemn nod, meeting her eyes once more, and Merritt knew he’d make good on that promise, somehow. She knew it in the same way she knew she was dying. Something in her flesh and bones.

The rest of Merritt’s time was spent in and out of more moments with the people she loved keeping vigil.

Merritt thought of the wet slide of a kiss in a back seat, the icy ocean biting at her ankles, a full-bodied scream up at the night sky. The ocean sucking away the sand beneath her feet until she sank deeper and deeper, grew number and number. How it felt to walk through the door of her childhood home as an adult after she’d moved away. The sounds of her dad tinkering in the garage and her mom in the kitchen, humming to the same songs she still loved, making Merritt’s favorite meal. The smells. God, she loved the smells. She loved that moment before anyone realized she was there, when she could pretend she was just a kid again, getting home from school. No bills or big questions about what her life meant or worrying about what she should have been doing with her time. She hopedthisis what dying would feel like. Like stepping into a warm home where someone, something—even if that something was peace—was waiting to welcome her.

It’s our moments that we’ll keep going back to. Things we mourn as they’re happening because we don’t want them to slip away, and things we don’t realize are significant at all, at the time.

Sometimes those moments have a ripple effect of impact that we’ll never realize. Circles that keep expanding through our lives and continue after we’re gone.

Moments like:

Two young women in a hospital bed, comforting each other and whispering, “We were girls together.” A nurse overhears it and is inspired to call the sister she hasn’t spoken to in three years.

A little girl on a bus, embarrassed on her first day of school in a new town. A little boy handing her his flannel. Neither of them knows it, but helping her instills some foundational element in him. One day, the idea of becoming a firefighter will present itself, and he’ll think,Yeah, that’s it. I want to help, too.The connection that little girl forms with that boy is one thread ina gorgeous tapestry of life, picked up and added to by countless others.

A curly-haired baker sees a news story about a wildfire and a pair of horses at the exact right moment in time. It drives her to send a package and a letter. A man picks it up at the right moment, and it leads him to forge his way back to his wife.

A little boy is encouraged to dance by his nanny, and it allows him to stay true to himself, to carry that confidence for the rest of his days and to spread that same confidence to a hundred others.

A red-haired woman holding her brown-haired baby girl for the first time. A hundred thousand moments when her baby laughs and sounds so much like her dearest friend it steals her breath away. The grandparents and aunts and uncles whose lives that baby lights up. The moment her gummy smile unites a grieving sister and a grieving friend and turns them into a family. The moments that red-haired mother feels her heart expanding again and again, doubling in size to make room for so much unfathomable love. Like when her best friend becomes her husband. With tears in his eyes, he kisses her before the officiant tells him he can do so, and the room full of people sparks into laughter. When he makes her a mother again. When she gives him a son that looks exactly like him and drives him insane, the same way he drove his own parents mad with unbound joy. When she comes home from her regular job on a regular weekday and sees her family in the front yard during summer. All three of them shirtless and in boots or diapers or tutus and watering the plants bordering their front porch, their cat keeping watch from the top step.

When that dad lets their babies color in his scars until he looks like a stained-glass window, making him truly grateful for them for the first time.

A man who loved baseball never felt it loved him back until he finds a new lens to see it through—as a coach. He inspires so many others directly and indirectly, whether through his own coaching or through witnessing his sheer passion for it.

A girl meets a goose who brings her out of her shell, makes her believe in good things again.

The moment a food critic finds meaning in his profession.

A burned-out chef rediscovers his love for feeding people.

When a 911 call is the beginning of a love story instead of a tragedy.

When a woman takes a chance on herself and starts a business selling flowers. When she embraces her softness as a strength.

When a young mom is isolated during a pandemic and finds herself hungry for community and an escape, so she starts writing stories to give herself both. One day, she tells a friend she’s written a book. That friend demands she share it with others. You pick it up and feel seen. Maybe something in it makes you want to apologize to someone, or you realize you’re settling for treatment you don’t deserve. It makes you ache for more. It makes you slow down and see the beauty in small things. It ignites new gratitude for your family or opens you up to finding one for yourself. You shout to your friends, and you make new ones, bonding over your shared love for it. You even send messages to the author, whose community grows to proportions she can’t fathom. You change her life. For the first time in all her years, that author is happy she never stopped being Weird. That she played pretend so hard she made a family in a small, rainy Oregon town, built on puns and imperfect love.

When you became family, too.