Wreck

by Catherine Newman

Marinating in someone else’s grief like it could season me to the bone.

I was an antenna attuned to my daughter’s unhappiness: I could hear tissues pulled from the box, the tap turned on and off, the sound of vomiting, crying.

“Maybe what you’re feeling is your life. It’s the full, expansive possibility of being alive.”

One day, will we look back and think: Wow, that was a hard year? Will we be damaged and scarred, but okay? Or will we think: That was when things first started to get bad?