you can’t have it all
Last summer, during the time when melanoma surgery had confined me to the chaise on our porch with my leg elevated above my head, I came across a poem that saved me. Or so it seemed, as I read it over and over again, suddenly seeing what felt like the unluckiest time of my life through a new lens.
Funny, how one simple phrase can lodge in the mind, take up residence in the heart, and offer a kind of solace and sustenance that even a whole book couldn’t provide.
“You Can’t Have It All” is the title of the poem, and these are the words I grabbed like a life ring, the simple truth that got me through.
As I read Barbara Ras’s lovely, whimsical litany of the small blessings she could celebrate in her ordinary, imperfect life, I knew I wanted to make a list of my own. There were so many things I couldn’t have in that hard moment – a shower, a walk, a trip to the store – but I began to notice the countless gifts that were still mine for the taking. All through August and September, as I drove back and forth to doctors’ appointments and daily radiation treatments, I composed new versions of the “You Can’t Have It All” poem in my head, realizing that every day I could write an entirely different one. We all could.
This week, with my various medical dramas behind me at last, I retreated to my family’s house in Maine for a couple of solitary days before my birthday. Sixty-seven is nothing special, but it feels like a milestone to me, as I round the corner toward seventy with more challenges ahead and a greater awareness of just how little any of us ever know about what our futures will hold.
In 2024, I spent one week of every month, from April through October, in Maine with my parents, happily chauffeuring them to and fro, shopping and cooking, delighted to spend time with them in this house full of memories, the place we all love best. This year, cancer treatments kept me at home and it’s become harder for my parents to travel. So much has changed, and change these days feels like another word for loss. To have even a few days to slip away by myself has felt kind of miraculous.
I can’t have it all, but I am here. And so, for my birthday, I’ve finally written my own version of Barbara Ras’s wondrous, grounding poem. Maybe you’ll be inspired to do the same.
You can’t have it all.
But you can have the hour before dawn in a house by the sea. You can have the luminous moon framed by your window, its milky cone of light flung across the glistening dark water. You can have the delicious ease of your own warm body stretched out under the covers like a star. You can have the blue painted rock that says “best Ma ever” on the table by your bed.
You can have your coffee, dark and strong, in the old blue pottery mug that feels like satin and fits your cupped hands just so. You can have a peach. Tender and weighty, and all the sweeter for being the last one of the season. You can have contentment.
You can’t have a promise of tomorrow, but you can have every moment of today, and you can have it all to yourself. You can’t know if your cancer will return, but you can live without knowing.
You can have Dr. Malik, who showed you the hole in your heart, who closed it for you, and then later came to your bedside and pressed his hand to your wound to help slow the bleeding. You can have Dr. Ryan, who treats you like a friend, who carefully carved the tumor out of your breast and, with the tiniest of stitches, sewed you up again. You can have her nurses, who always, still, call you back. You can have kindly technicians who greeted you by name and covered your legs and bare arms with warm blankets and sent beams of radiation deep into your chest every day for twenty days, and who posed with you for a photo when it was all over. You can have Dr. Park, in her rhinestone-encrusted Apple watch and red high heels, who knows your oncotype number by heart, who listens with her whole body, who hugged you hard when tears welled in your eyes. You can have Dr. Zipoli, who said he was sorry before he cut the wide, deep circle out of your calf, who gently put his hand on your back and asked if you were ok, who saw you at 8:15 am for ten straight Tuesday mornings to patiently debride the wound and apply a fresh graft to that painful, slow-to-heal spot. You can have Medicare.
You can’t have a charmed life. But you can have friends at your side for your life as it is. You can have loved ones who show up for for all of it. Who counted down the days with you, who held you from afar and brightened your hardest days with texts and flowers, with cards and care packages, meals and phone calls. And who were there to cheer you across the finish line as if you’d run a marathon, which of course you didn’t, although, in truth, it kind of feels as if you did, and the people who love you know that, which means a lot.
You can’t have it all. But you can have a break. You can have three months off from doctors and cancer drugs, and three months feels like enough, enough time to heal, to rest, to play, to gather strength for what comes next.
And now that it’s October, you can have autumn. You can have autumn in abundance. You can have apples with names like Gravenstein and Pippin and Northern Spy. You can have red maple leaves and acorns, blue skies and starlight. You can have sweater weather. You can have asters blooming by the roadside, milkweed bursting from swollen pods, the fragile petals of wild roses, tumbling hydrangeas in fading shades of dusky pink and heathered violet. You can have a single Monarch sailing through sun-warmed air. You can have crows, and their endless cacophonous conversations in the twisted pine tree that miraculously survives every storm. You can have frilled cosmos and a handful of late lavender to cut for a bouquet.
And you can have a table by the roadside laden with the last gleanings from someone’s island garden, tomatoes and dahlias in green plastic cups, a jumbled pyramid of miniature squash and motley eggplants, and a jar for the dollar bills you might wish to leave behind. You can have a bit of your faith in ordinary goodness restored.
You can have a long walk to the beach, past boats dry-docked in yards and silent, empty houses closed up for the season. You can have this beautiful world, the one that’s been here all along, just waiting for you to return to it. You can try not to miss anything. You can have a chip of blue sea glass and a smooth gray stone to tuck in your pocket. You can take off your shoes, step into the icy waves lapping the shore, and relish the cold shock of it, your toes cramping as shivers run through your limbs. And even though you had a summer without swimming, you can have this, your feet in the water on the last day of your 66th year.
You can’t have it all, but you can have two days in Maine, eating avocado toast for dinner with your book propped up. You can steep in silence and your own company. And you can realize you are still you, which is to say ok, but also different. Here, alone, you can look back on what you’ve just been through and marvel a little at how, in the unlikely way of some hardships, these things have changed you, probably forever and probably for the better. You can love your life with a little more tenderness. You can understand, in a way you never did before, how fragile it is. And how precious.
You can have a birthday without a party and still it will feel like a celebration. You can have your husband meet you at the farmer’s market on a fine fall morning and you can greet him with a kiss. You can buy donuts to share as you wander the rows, gathering salad greens, bread, and fish for the dinner you will make. You can create a day together, back at the house where you fell in love four decades ago, where you spent your first married night, and where your wedding dress still hangs in its plastic bag at the back of the closet nearly forty years after you took the vows that bound you to each other in sickness and in health. You can have Jackson Browne on the dusty black turntable, the first birthday gift he ever gave you, which still works. You can have this long marriage, this man, the life you’ve built, the sons you raised, the soul daughter you chose, your parents, who are still here to tell you the story of the day you were born.
You can’t have it all. But you can have grace in all its guises. You can see beauty in today’s small doings. You can be kind and you can receive kindness in return. You can have what Mary Oliver calls “the imponderables, for which we have no answers, yet endless interest, all the range of our lives.”
You can’t have it all, but you can have a really good book
Every once in a long while, a novel comes along that I want everyone I know and love to read. Patrick Ryan’s epic, generous, gorgeously written, heart-expanding “Buckeye” is that novel. And because I adore it so, I’m buying one copy to give away here to one of you.
Enter to win by leaving a comment. Want to share something you do have, even though you can’t have it all? Do it below, and perhaps I’ll draw your name at random. I’ll pick a winner on November 3. And if you don’t want to chance it, please, just treat yourself to this book. I promise, you’ll be glad you did.
You can order “Buckeye” from Amazon (an affiliate link) here. Or order from Parnassus Books, which stocks signed copies, here. (In fact, “Buckeye” is dedicated to Ann Patchett and her husband Karl.) Barbara Ras’s book of poetry, “Bite Every Sorrow” is available here , and you can read the original poem here.
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