"I think," Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, "that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed."
— Tehanu in Ursula LeGuin's The Other Wind, chapter 5, "Rejoining."
And gosh, it would be really nice to believe that all those things – all those infinite but unrealized possibilities – don't just go to waste. Artistically it's a little hard to believe that a woman as young as Tehanu has spent so much time thinking about death (and has come up with a doctrine so comfortable to old farts like me) ... but what the hell? I'll take it.
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