We scrape through every day blindly, always getting stumped on something we should know—how to plunge a toilet, how to boil corn, his Social Security number, the date of our father's birthday—such that every day that he gets to school, that I get to work and back in time for dinner, each day that we cook and eat before nine and he goes to bed before eleven and doesn't have blue malnourished-looking rings around his eyes like he did for all those months last year—we never figured out why—feels like we've pulled off some fantastic trick—an escape from the jaws of death, the hiding of the Statue of Liberty.

~ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius