[Charlie is dying:]<br />After what seemed a long while, but hadn’t been, Marsh gave Paulette’s hand a warm and caring squeeze. “They’re here for him,” she said.<br />But their heavenly visitors didn’t take him right away. They had to make room for the chaos of modern medical urgencies. To get out of the way of well-trained professionals who had dedicated their lives to holding back Heaven.<br />Choppers are just as noisy and turbulent as we imagine them to be. One tore in over the hills and shattered every bit of peace Charlie otherwise could have lost himself into.<br />In an instant the Med-Evac team was all over him. In the midst of that blatant orchestrated chaos Paulette fought to find her peace, and to hold him inside it.<br />“Hang on, buddy,” techs kept telling him. “Don’t go leaving us now. You just hang in there.”<br />But they didn’t understand, Paulette thought. It was his time.<br />The chopper made a horrible racket carrying him off. Marsh, Paulette, and Ailana held their peace as its winds whipped their world into a froth.<br />Harve’s face twisted with something that might conceivably have been rage.<br />Then, all of a sudden, the birds sang, as though someone had given them a cue.<br /> “So that’s what it’s like,” Marsha said, very softly.<br />“The afterlife.<br />“My God, it’s so beautiful.