As we sit on this couch together I remember the time I lounged on it while watching a Saturday afternoon basketball game, heedless of how little time we had left with our daughter. Caroline had flitted between Celeste and me that afternoon, each of us absorbed in something that seemed more important at the time, until she could stand it no longer. She stood in the middle of the living room and burst into tears, saying: "I want someone to play with me!"

So I played with her, but I begrudged her that, because I wanted to see that stupid game, because I worked an irritating job and felt like I deserved some free time, because I was unable to see how the things we love can vanish like breath. 

This makes me think of every time I was harsh or impatient with her, and I am so filled with shame that I can barely watch her on the television screen. 

"I love these little people," says the narrator in Charles Dicken's The Old Curiosity Shop, "and it is not a slight thing, when they, who are so fresh from God, love us." It is no slight thing at all, is it? It's also no slight thing that these little ones - perhaps because they are infused, if only for a while, more greatly with the spirit of heaven than the spirit of this world - forgive us everything, even before we ask. Forgive me, Caroline. This is what I've asked a thousand times since she died, for all the things I got wrong. Each time I do this I try to remind myself that she forgave everything, and so does God, and that the only person still keeping accounts is me.

- Tony Woodlief "Somewhere More Holy"