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Sam was hovering right beside me, watching my face intently. "You ok, sweetie?" I looked at him with a smile. "I did it! I just asked, and she started pushing. I had no idea it would be so easy. I mean, I figured there was some mental magic you had to pull to get people to die for you, but it's so easy! And she gave me all her life, just boom." He stared at me in shock for a moment, his eyes flicking between mine as I rambled on. Gently, he pulled me away from the neon reflection of the daughter and the grey silhouette of the corpse, easing me out of the room without saying a thing. That in itself was enough to make me worried, replaying what had happened over and over in my mind as I tried to figure out where I'd made some kind of horrendous mistake. "Sia?" he finally asked when we reached the hall. "You know it's ok to be sad about this, right?" "Why would I feel bad? I didn't know her." "Because her daughter was there?" I waved that away. "Her daughter was telling her to let go. The old woman was suffering, and I found a way to make it better." "You know you killed her, right?" Those words made me finally understand the problem. "Sam, that woman was going to die. She could've rolled around in pain, groaning in misery until her heart clenched or her lungs gave out. As her body failed her, she would've panicked. It's kinda what we do. Instead, I made her smile. In her last moments on Earth, I made her feel comforted and protected, like this was just moving to the next step. She wasn't afraid." He nodded, taking that in. "Ok?" "You don't get it because you can't die. Death? It's the monster in the dark. It's the one thing we all fear the most, and in her last seconds, she wasn't afraid. She was thrilled. She knew she'd had a good life, and seeing me proved it to her. That's all we want. People pray to die in their sleep so they don't have to face that one terrifying second. We think about it our whole lives, refusing to talk about it because no one knows the answer, but now I do. I finally understand, and I made her death into something beautiful. Something her daughter will look back on and think is proof that she's in a better place.
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