I’ll never know, and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.

If I had led a sad life as a result of my sister's death, then it would have been as if her death had caused it. So, I thought I mustn't allow that to happen. I swore to myself that I would make sure that I was happy. My joy would be the legacy of my sister's life.

How will the fact of being women have affected our lives? What precise opportunities have been given us, and which ones have been denied? What destiny awaits our younger sisters, and in which direction should we point them?

Knowing what I now know, if I could go back in time, would I make the same choice?

"But why didn't you leave? Why didn't you take my sister and go to New York?" she would say it didn't matter, that she was lucky to have my sister and me. If I pressed hard enough, she would add, "If I'd left, you never would have been born." I never had the courage to say: But you would have been born instead.

I often wonder what would have happened to me if I hadn't made that decision. I suppose I would have sunk. I suppose I would have found some kind of hole and tried to hide or pass. After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities. I would have hidden in my hole and been crippled by my sentimentality, doing what I was doing, and doing it well, but always looking for the wailing wall. And I would never have seen the world as the rich place that it is. You wouldn't have seen me here in Africa, doing what I do.

If it had been any different, if I had been born just one minute later, or been in the wrong pace at the right time or vice versa, the life that I've lived and come to love would not exist. And that is a situation that I would not want to consider in the slightest.

Having made the decision to love, had I chosen life instead of death?

Every night my plan was to make it to dawn and then feel out the options. But that was just it — there were no options. There had been options, before the baby, but none of them had been pursued. I had not flown to Japan by myself to see what it was like there. I had not gone to nightclubs and said Tell me everything about yourself to strangers. I had not even gone to the movies by myself. I had been quiet when there was no reason to be quiet and consistent when consistency didn't matter. For the last twenty years I had lived as if I was taking care of a newborn baby.

لم انلها ابدا كاملة..كانت شبه الحياة

It would have been better far for men To have got their children in some other way, and women Not to have existed. Then life would have been good.

Do you regret those days?'
'No,' replied Marcelle acidly: 'but I regret the life I might have had.

Ah, had I not taken my life up and given
All that life gives and the years let go,
The wind and honey, the balm and leaven,
The dreams reared high and the hopes brought low?
Come life, come death, not a word be said;
Should I lose you living, and vex you dead?
I never shall tell you on earth; and in heaven,
If I cry to you then, will you hear or know?

She taught me that life goes on, and that I had a choice. To lament what I no longer had or be grateful for what remained.