The God of Endings


 Contents
 
 Title Page
 Copyright Notice
 Dedication
 Epigraphs
 Chapter I
 Chapter II
 Chapter III
 Chapter IV
 Chapter V
 Chapter VI
 Chapter VII
 Chapter VIII
 Chapter IX
 Chapter X
 Chapter XI
 Chapter XII
 Chapter XIII
 Chapter XIV
 Chapter XV
 Chapter XVI
 Chapter XVII
 Chapter XVIII
 Chapter XIX
 Chapter XX
 Chapter XXI
 Chapter XXII
 Chapter XXIII
 Chapter XXIV
 Chapter XXV
 Chapter XXVI
 Chapter XXVII
 Chapter XXVIII
 Chapter XXIX
 Chapter XXX
 Chapter XXXI
 Chapter XXXII
 Chapter XXXIII
 Chapter XXXIV
 Chapter XXXV
 Chapter XXXVI
 Chapter XXXVII
 Chapter XXXVIII
 Chapter XXXIX
 Chapter XL
 Chapter XLI
 Chapter XLII
 Chapter XLIII
 Chapter XLIV
 Acknowledgments
 About the Author
 Newsletter Sign-up
 Copyright
 
 
 
 Guide
 
 Cover
 Title Page
 Dedication
 Chapter I
 Acknowledgments
 Contents
 Copyright
 start of contents
 
 
 
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 Begin Reading
 Table of Contents
 About the Author
 Copyright Page
 
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 For my children,who taught me what love is and also fear
 
 
 Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
 Teach us to care and not to care
 Teach us to sit still
 Even among these rocks
 —T. S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday
 Then [The Lord] spoke to [Job] out of the storm:
 “Who is this darkening my plans
 With his ignorant words?
 Stand up like a man, and brace yourself;
 I will ask questions; and you, give the answers!
 “Where were you when I founded the earth?
 Tell me, if you know so much.
 Do you know who determined its dimensions
 Or who stretched the measuring line across it?
 On what were its bases sunk,
 Or who laid the cornerstone,
 When the morning stars sang together,
 And all the sons of God shouted for joy?”
 —Job 38:1–7, Complete Jewish 
 
 • I •
 
 WHEN I was a child, the dead were all around us. Cemeteries were not common in the early years of the 1830s. Instead, small, shambling family graveyards butted up against barns, or sprung up like pale mushrooms at the edges of pastures, in the yards of church, and school, and meetinghouse—until eventually you could look out across the village, see all those gravestones like crooked teeth in a mouth, and wonder who the place really belonged to, the huddled and transient living or the persistent dead?
 Many folks found this proximity to death and its souvenirs discomfiting, but my father was the first gravestone carver in the village of Stratton, New York, which meant that the distillation of death and grief into