Wreck

by Catherine Newman

The enormity of my love for these tender, fleshly beings was twinned with a potential for loss so unimaginably deep and powerful that it was like a black hole lurking just outside our window.

But every individual question was really a version of the same existential one: People are different from me. How do I survive it?

I’ve always been as appalled by the book The Giving Tree as the next person. The myth that mothers exist just to get all our apples tugged off before being sawn apart limb by limb? It’s grotesque, of course. But what wouldn’t we give our children, if we could? What wouldn’t we sacrifice?

Only this—loving each other like there’s plenty of room on the life raft. Like there’s no tomorrow—or like there is one, and you don’t want to wake up hungover with regret. You just want to wake up while you still can. While the world is turning and the owls are calling and gratitude is the very air you are still breathing, because, whatever happens next, that’s how lucky you are. You are still breathing.