The Rules Do Not Apply

by Ariel Levy

Huckabee questioned only the rules that struck him as questionable.

Some of my female friends of this variety felt compelled to do something only until they had children. (“That is doing something!” Yes, of course it is. But it’s something that a person can only do exclusively for a short period of time unless someone else is paying all the bills.)

How did people do this? People who’d lost children who had existed—not for minutes but for days, decades? Children who had voices, who had opened their eyes. Children with names. Did these people wake up every morning until the day they died and beg Mother Nature to return what she had given and then taken away?

My competent self—so strong, since childhood, so perspicacious, always looking for opportunities, adventures, glory, always trying to protect me from defeat—had been crushed. The wide-open blue forever had spoken: You control nothing. —

I thought of the chilling words a friend of mine had once used to explain why his older sister had married a man she did not love when she was reaching the end of her childbearing years: She had run out of runway. At

When I had no idea that all over the city, all over the world, there were people walking around sealed in their own universes of loss, independent solar systems of suffering closed off from the regular world, where things make sense and language is all you need to tell the truth.

GRIEF IS A WORLD you walk through skinned, unshelled. A person would speak to me unkindly—or even ungently—on the street or in an elevator, and I would feel myself ripping apart, the membrane of normalcy I’d pulled on to leave the house coming undone.

in a strange way, I am comforted by the truth. Death comes for us. You may get ten minutes on this earth or you may get eighty years but nobody gets out alive. Accepting this rule gives me a funny flicker of peace.

I asked if she’d ever wanted children. She told me, “Everybody doesn’t get everything.” It sounded depressing to me at the time, a statement of defeat. Now admitting it seems like the obvious and essential work of growing up. Everybody doesn’t get everything: as natural and unavoidable as mortality.