My daughter is reading The Wanderer, an adventure-filled young adult book about a brave girl's journey across the sea.
This Newberry Honor Book by Sharon Creech, tells the story of 13-year-old Sophie, a girl who sails across the Atlantic with her three uncles and two cousins. When they get to England she will see her beloved grandfather.
The book is told through the alternating journals of Sophie and her cousin, Cody, who is considered a "knuckleheaded doofus" by everyone but is really so much more. Sophie and the crew go through a lot of tough and scary times; there are near death experiences and gigantic waves that nearly kill them.
In this passage, Sophie writes about death.
Last night Cody and I got into this very serious talk about Life. We wondered if maybe people never die, but simply live on and on, leaving other planes behind. When you come near death, you die on one plane—so to everyone you are with, you are dead, but you—the you in you—doesn't stop existing. Instead, you keep living the same as always and it just seems as if you've had a close call. We wondered if maybe we're not just one person, but many people existing on millions of different planes, like a line that branches off and branches again and on it goes, it always has one central trunk.
I was getting a headache from so much thinking, and then Cody said, "At night on the ocean, a person thinks strange things. Let's not think anymore. Let's juggle."
So we did. We juggled wet socks.