Sandwich

by Catherine Newman

“It’s so crushingly beautiful, being human,”

“But also so terrible and ridiculous.”

People who insist that you should be grateful instead of complaining? They maybe don’t understand how much gratitude one might feel about the opportunity to complain.

Jamie is going to kill me.

Who wants a guy to last longer? Finish up is my feeling. My library book’s not going to read itself!”

“Ew,” Willa says. “I know I asked. But, just, ew. Not you. Just picturing you with douchey guys who were too precious to use a condom or whatever.” “Yeah,” I say. “It’s one of the many reasons I’m so happy you’re gay.”

And this may be the only reason we were put on this earth. To say to each other, I know how you feel. To say, Same. To say, I understand how hard it is to be a parent, a kid. To say, Your shell stank and you’re sad. I’ve been there.

What does loss look like, in your body? Where is it? It feels like an air bubble stuck in your psyche. It feels like peering down into a deep hole. The vertigo of that. The potential for obliteration. It’s in your stomach. Your spleen. Or it’s just your heart losing its mind.

I’ve heard grief described as love with nowhere to go.

There are so many ways to lose our children, and I have imagined most of them—imagined the near ecstasy of it, the violins sawing out grief’s unfathomable song.

Maybe grief is love imploding. Or maybe it’s love expanding. I don’t know. I just know you can’t create loss to preempt loss because it doesn’t work that way. So you might as well love as much as you can. And as recklessly. Like it’s your last resort, because it is.

How alive your heart to feel such sorrow!