In the brilliantly written series The Midnight Gospel, there’s a conversation between a son and his dying mother. She’s been told, more than once, to prepare for the end. She meets it straight on. She says that things appear and disappear, and that if you watch the world closely you see the same pattern everywhere. Humans are no exception. We are a part of the whole and everything in the whole transforms all the time.

He knows the argument. He knows about impermanence, about the appearing and disappearing, about the ego's trick of taking things personally. Fine, he says. None of that stops a broken heart. There's no way to make it stop. So what do you do?