Mia Warren Quotes

I think about all my patients who've died. Older people, most of them. But not all. Looking back, I try to remember if the young ones were marked somehow. Whether they might have done something to bring their fates down on themselves. But they didn't, Danny. One day God or Fate just said, 'I will not let you be happy. I will not give you children. I will not let you breathe another day. I will take away your ability to move."'" "Warren-" "No, listen. This is important. I've tried to believe, all my life. To have faith that there was justice in life, some larger plan or meaning. But I can't do it any more. I've watched some of the best people I ever met get crippled or taken before they reached thirty, forty, whatever. Babies, too. I've watched babies die of leuke mia. I've watched infants die from infections, bleeding from their eyes and ears. Terrible birth defects...I look for a reason, a pattern, anything that might justify all that. But nothing does. Nothing does. Until I got sick myself, I played the same game of denial that all doctors do. But, Danny, my cancer ripped the scales from my eyes. I go to these funerals and listen to smug preachers telling grieving people that God has a plan. Well, that's a lie. All my life I've followed the rules. I've toed the line, given to the less fortunate, followed the Commandments . . . and it hasn't mattered one bit. And don't tell me about Job, okay? If you tell me God is testing me by killing me... that's like saying we had to destroy a village in order to save it. It's a cruel joke that we play on ourselves. And don't tell me it's all made right in the afterlife, because you know what? The agony of one infant dying senselessly mocks all the golden trumpets of heaven. I don't want to sit at the right hand of a God who can torture children, or even one who sits by and allows them to be tortured. Free will, my ass. I made no choice to die at thirty seven. This one's on God's account, Major. We look for meaning where there is none, because we're too afraid to accept randomness. Well, I've accepted it. Embraced it, even. And once you do that, the world just doesn't look the same anymore.

Why this cover-up? “Closing the case” on POWs and MIAs helps Americans to return to peaceful lives after the war. After World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, the U.S. government declared all prisoners of war and men missing in action dead. It refused to release documents on POWs and MIAs. We can understand the desire for this, but it reflects a greater willingness to make our own lives peaceful than to make sure that the men who preserved our freedom and peace are alive.

Even her beloved Warren gave up at that point -- "I don't need to know how it works, Mi," he told her at last, "I just want to see the pictures" -- and Mia realized that she was crossing into a place she would have to go alone.

Only her brother, Warren, seemed to understand the hidden layer she saw in things, but then they had always had an understanding, since before he had been born. “My baby,” Mia would say to anyone who would listen, tapping her mother’s belly with a finger, and infallibly Warren would kick in reply. “My baby. In there,” she informed strangers in the grocery store, pointing. When they’d brought him home from the hospital, she had immediately claimed him as her own.