The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

by Laura Pearson

Sometimes it feels like the world is unimaginably big, and other times it feels like you could hold it in your hand.

There will always be tough years in a marriage this long. It’s guaranteed. The best you can hope is you have someone who cares enough to weather them with you.

I’ve always loved that about reading. Being able to experience a different time or place, but mostly getting a chance to experience being a different person altogether. One who’s braver, who knows what she wants and reaches for it without apology, or one who doesn’t have regrets.

There was a time when it seemed everyone I knew was having children, and then I lost them all to that life. It’s not for the faint-hearted, parenting.

It strikes me that luck is a relative thing, that it’s not something you can pin down and be sure of. That it can be something you have and then lose. Or the other way around.

How much time have I wasted, over the years, caring about the thoughts of people I don’t know and never will?

You should try everything. You won’t regret it. It’s so different from the way I’ve lived my life. But I’m starting to think it’s right.

The price of living a long life, I think, is the sheer weight of the losses you have to suffer. You carry each loved one you lose, and they stack up, and it becomes unbearable.

You can’t live in the past, I tell myself, but you can visit. And you can bring bits of it into the present, when you need them. All this time, I’ve thought of every year since Dot left as wasted, but perhaps it isn’t as bleak as all that. There have been pockets of happiness, there has been laughter and a certain kind of love. Raging bliss isn’t the only thing that’s real.

And I don’t feel daunted by it, this offer I made, on a whim. I might learn something. And that’s a privilege, at my age. To change something, or learn something. To keep growing.

Life doesn’t always take the expected, straight path. I know that now.

It isn’t possible, to erase the lives we’ve lived. We only have today, and whatever future we’re granted.