We All Want Impossible Things

by Catherine Newman

“I love you too,” I write, and I squeeze my eyes shut to picture her face, paint hearts on her cheeks, sprinkle her with glitter. “I think I might not know the difference between praying and decorating a cupcake,” I say to Honey,

Everyone dies, and yet it’s unendurable. There is so much love inside of us. How do we become worthy of it? And, then, where does it go? A worldwide crescendo of grief, sustained day after day, and only one tiny note of it is mine.

It’s occurring to me only now that the dying and the loss are actually two different burdens, and each must be borne individually, one after the other. It’s like after a grueling delivery, when they hand it to you and you’re like, Oh! The baby! because your focus had become so narrow and personal during the birth. But now here was the actual end point, which you’d always known but then forgotten in all of the incarnated drama and suffering.