We All Want Impossible Things

by Catherine Newman

my mom is a gruesome skank

If there’s a metaphor for our friendship, it might be this. The blind faith. The absolute dependability. The love like a compass, its north always true.

“Look at Thumper’s little face scrimple up when he chews,”

Every year, ever since the girls were born, I have blown out the candles on my birthday cake and wished for just this. Everything I have already. No loss. I can’t spare anybody is what I always think. But, then, people must be spared. That is the whole premise of this life, of this time we have with each other. The door opens, and it’s Jonah.

We listen to Edi breathe. I rub her lips with a sponge swab for no particular reason, wipe her face with a warm washcloth.

We take turns telling Edi how much we love her. We tell her we know she has a long journey ahead of her, that she can go whenever she needs to, that we’ll take good care of Dash. This is love, distilled to its essence—like a kind of communal ecstasy, but grief.

I put a hand on her chest and feel the stillness where her heart should be beating. And then I put a hand to mine. And here’s my own unruly heart, thumping away. On and on, heartlessly.

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. It’s been so arduous, Edi’s dying. It’s like we’ve all been digging and digging, shoveling out a hole, and we can finally stop. Only now there’s this hole here.