. . . . We lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous . . . .

Ann Druyan is an American author and Emmy Award–winning writer, producer, and director. She cowrote the 1980 PBS documentary series Cosmos, hosted by astronomer Carl Sagan. As the founder and CEO of Cosmos Studios, she also was the creator, producer, and writer of the 2014 sequel, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey and its sequel series, Cosmos: Possible Worlds. She was program director of the first solar sail deep space mission.