it'll be too late when you die

"But Paul, you mattered to him. Look, I know what you're saying, because I felt it too. That distance. That reserve. That sense of a wall too high to get over. After a while I gave up trying, and after a longer while I gave up waiting for a door to appear in it. But behind that wall, he loved us both. I don't know how I know that, but I do."

a mother, speaking to her son about his father: her dead husband
still, "The memory keeper's daughter", Kim Edwards