Finding Grace

by Loretta Rothschild

When Tom arrived home, the whole house was silent, yet everything spoke. It was as if the house had been burgled but it wasn’t the contents that’d been stolen, it was the context.

Night after night, when I was alive, I had looked at my deepening crow’s-feet with such disdain before I went to bed. I hadn’t realized just how lucky I was to have them. Aging had been marketed all wrong. The world seemed to prioritize a regimented skincare routine over the wonder of getting old.

Nobody on earth has the constitution to metabolize the sudden and terrific loss of unconditional love.

It reminded Tom of a quote I’d often say when Chloe was teething and I was moody—“The days are long, but the years are short”—which used to annoy him. But now he’d learned the hard way just how true that was. Everything was just a click away from the past tense.

Grief’s iron grip never weakens. You just become accustomed to its hand around your throat, moving forward but never moving on.

You can’t boycott grief, unless you want to boycott happiness with it. You don’t get the meat without the bones.”

To be a good liar, you need a brilliant memory, and Tom’s had always been questionable. It demanded perfect conditions, which life never afforded.

Both acutely aware that after a certain age, no one ever gets into bed alone. There’s always someone else in the room in some form or another. Whether it’s holiday memories or drunken mistakes or ghosts, the past cannot be rewritten.

All I want is to preserve that wonderful something which so purely exists between us.

“When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions.”

It isn’t your life that flashes before your eyes when you’re about to die. It’s the life you thought you were going to have, just before it’s snatched away from you forever.

But love wasn’t measured by its ending. It was every cup of coffee, broken boiler, empty crisp packet, and train ride.