-Twain

"The coffee mill shone like a monstrance.

Fear vanished.

In the bottom of my mind I knew it would return,

but not right away.

I felt a promise of something like

happiness -

that the future did not exist and would not

exist for a while, because I would soon

die a beautiful death, having known,

briefly,

something greater than death.

Nadia helped me,

and together we carried it off with the help of God.

But that was not really the point.

The point was that, face to face with death,

she gave me what she had and what she felt

was the ultimate gift she could give.

She gave me herself, "

(Josef Skvorecky, The Engineer of Human Souls)