From space, astronauts can see people making love as a tiny speck of light. Not light, exactly, but a glow that could be mistaken for light- a coital radiance that takes generations to pour like honey through the darkness to the astronaut's eyes.

In about one and a half centuries- after the lovers who made the glow will have long since been laid permanently on their backs- metropolises will be seen from space. They will glow all year. Smaller cities will also be seen, but with great difficulty. Shtetls will be virtually impossible to spot. Individual couples, invisible.

The glow is born from thousands of loves: newlyweds and teenagers who spark like lighters out of butane, pairs of men who burn fast and bright, pairs of women who illuminate for hours with soft multiple glows, orgies like rock and flint toys sold at festivals, couples trying unsuccessfully to have children who burn their frustrated image on the continent like the bloom a bright light leaves on the eye after you turn away from it.

-from Everything is Illuminated

My grandpa is probably dying. It's pretty sad, and I'm broken up for my mom because having your dad die is guaranteed to mess with your head. He has been in a lot of pain lately, though, and his health has rendered him pretty much a prisoner in his own home. Recently he told Mom, "As long as I can watch the football games and go to church I will be happy. I don't need much more than that."

After my grandma died, almost seven years ago, Grandpa has been a lesson in peace with death. He has waited patiently. Often he attends multiple funerals for friends in a single week. Each Christmas he assumes it will be his last with us. He takes great pains to impart his wisdom on his children and his grandchildren, and he has faced the indignities of a failing body with acceptance and honor.

I'm worried about all of the things people worry about at a time like this. How will the children deal with the material things? Will we still have a reason to gather the cousins and keep in touch without the patriarch? I didn't do enough to keep a relationship with Grandpa Babe in recent years. Dude, I haven't even seen him in a year. So many people will be so upset and it will disrupt so many lives.

This whole thing's been kind of rockin' my world today, so when I got home I attempted to do something mindless. I went into my bathroom and stripped my toenails of their polish, wishing to change its color to red, as I listened to the radio. A Canadian broadcaster was interviewing a Pakistani reporter about the return of Benazir Bhutto to her country from a long, self-imposed exile. There was something confusing about the story; the reporter was talking about "a hundred people" and blasts and carrying bodies. I pieced together that explosions occurred near Bhutto's motorcade. Fifty people are dead, and more are expected to die within the night.

We hear stories like this all the time. Cars explode in Fallujah. Planes crash in Greece, everyone on board flash-frozen to death. These stories are sad, and I think to myself, "Those poor people." I think briefly of children left behind. What I don't ruminate on is the profound effect a single stranger's death has on so many people.

Grandpa Babe has lived a long, full life. He is ready, and maybe even longing, to receive his last rites and, as he fully expects, join my grandma with God. It's so painfully beautiful, and the selfish part of his family and friends will never feel it's the right time, but they will be glad that they had him around for 85 years and that his pain is through. My mother will grieve him for the rest of her life, as will her sisters and brother, and I will think romantically/philosophically on the implications of his death for my future as the child of, if I'm lucky, one-day elderly parents. These sentiments and mental processes will be mirrored in three other families, and among Babe's friends.

Just imagine how many people mourn the loss of 50 victims of an explosion in a political rally. Imagine the pain, and tears, and violence that follows such a tragedy. Fifty bodies is a number. One person is a number, and it doesn't really matter unless it's your person. If you think, though, about just one of those fifty Pakistani people who died today, who woke up this morning and kissed his wife and head out to the streets of Karachi to celebrate the return of a political hero, you can just start to get a winking feeling of what it's like today for thirty people who knew him. And thirty people who knew his friend, who also died in the parade. And thirty people who knew 48 other people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And they are dead.

But before that, they were alive. Each on his or her own caused joy and pain and made love and cried out to their wives in Urdu that "Oh. God. That feels. So great!" Each one was responsible for thousands of decisions that influenced the lives of others in thousands of ways and so much minutiae resulted from so many individually unimportant people. And they are just one of billions of individually unimportant people who were on Earth this morning, and one of probably trillions of people who will ever be on Earth. And one just doesn't matter so much, or even a hundred or three thousand, unless they matter to you. What I'm tryin' to tell you, anxiously inarticulate though I may be, is that everyone matters immensely.

And I'm so happy to be alive.