Page 1130 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

Plikt sat alone in her room, writing and writing. She had been preparing all her life for this day-- to be writing the oration for Andrew Wiggin's funeral. She would speak his death-- and she had the research to do it, she could speak for a solid week and still not exhaust a tenth of what she knew about him. But she would not speak for a week. She would speak for a single hour. Less than an hour. She understood him; she loved him; she would share with others who did not know him what he was, how he loved, how history was different because this man, brilliant, imperfect, but wellmeaning and filled with a love that was strong enough to inflict suffering when it was needed-- how history was different because he lived, and how also ten thousand, a hundred thousand, millions of individual lives were also different, strengthened, clarified, lifted up, brightened, or at least made more consonant and truthful because of what he had said and done and written in his life.
And would she also tell this? Would she tell how bitterly one woman grieved alone in her room, weeping and weeping, not because of grief that Ender was gone, but because of shame at finally understanding herself. For though she had loved and admired him-- no, worshiped this man-- nevertheless when he died what she felt was not grief at all, but relief and excitement. Relief: The waiting is over! Excitement: My hour has come!
Of course that's what she felt. She wasn't such a fool as to expect herself to be of more than human moral strength. And the reason she didn't grieve as Novinha and Valentine grieved was because a great part of their lives had just been torn away from them. What was torn away from mine? Ender gave me a few dollops of his attention, but little more. We had only a few months when he was my teacher on Trondheim; then a generation later our lives touched again for these few months here; and both times he was preoccupied, he had more important things and people to attend to than me. I was not his wife. I was not his sister. I was only his student and disciple-- a man who was done with students and never wanted disciples. So of course no great part of my life was taken from me because he had only been my dream, never my companion.
I forgive myself and yet I cannot stop the shame and grief I feel, not because Andrew Wiggin died, but because in the hour of his death I showed myself to be what I really am: utterly selfish, concerned only with my own career. I chose to be the speaker of Ender's death. Therefore the moment of his death can only be the fulfillment of my life. What kind of vulture does that make me? What kind of parasite, a leech upon his life ...
And yet her fingers continued to type, sentence after sentence, despite the tears flowing down her cheeks. Off in Jakt's house, Valentine grieved with her husband and children. Over in Olhado's house, Grego and Olhado and Novinha had gathered to comfort each other, at the loss of the man who had been husband and father to them. They had their relationship to him, and I have mine. They have their private memories; mine will be public. I will speak, and then I will publish what I said, and what I am writing now will give new shape and meaning to the life of Ender Wiggin in the minds of every person of a hundred worlds. Ender the Xenocide; Andrew the Speaker for the Dead; Andrew the private man of loneliness and compassion; Ender the brilliant analyst who could pierce to the heart of problems and of people without being deflected by fear or ambition or ... or mercy. The man of justice and the man of mercy, coexisting in one body. The man whose compassion let him see and love the hive queens even before he ever touched one of them with his