While reading You Are Going to Die, this really struck me:

I hadn’t realized, until I was forcibly divested of it, that I’d been harboring the idea that someday, when this whole crazy adventure was over, I would at some point be nine again, sitting around the dinner table with Mom and Dad and my sister.

It profoundly disappoints me to accept that my childhood is gone. Forever. As wonderful as it was, I can never have it back.