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“I do not want to tell this part of the story because part of me still doesn’t want it to be true. I still don’t want Rayya to become who she became toward the end of her life. I want her to remain how I saw her for all those years before—heroic, brave, commanding, honest, astonishing, cool. And I still don’t want me to become what I became at the end of her life—desperate, clinging, resentful, lost, powerless, degraded, insane. I want you, dear reader, to love and admire Rayya, and I want you to love and admire me. I want you to see us as beautiful and undefeatable. I want this to be the most inspiring book of the year. I want this to be a thoughtful book about death and dying, written by a wise and spiritual woman who accepts the reality of mortality with a sense of compassionate detachment. I want this to be a tale of two courageous and amazing souls who faced down death with a sense of creativity and wild adventure, and who did enough living in the last months of Rayya’s life to resonate love across the cosmos for a thousand more lifetimes. I want to tell you that our bond was never broken—not even by the ravages of cancer, or by mortality. I want to forget how things actually went down.” — Elizabeth Gilbert