We All Want Impossible Things

by Catherine Newman

“We think of it as a place where people come to live!” “To live dyingly,” Edi had whispered to me,

Forty-five-year-old me, fresh off the school bus with my under-eye bags and plantar fasciitis and boobs hanging down my torso like beige knee socks with no legs in

“I believe I may be mildly demented,” Ruth whispered once,

only you’re cry-laughing because there’s a turd on the floor and you don’t know if it’s human or from one of the resident dogs.

“Everything you’ve ever fed him,” I say. “His whole self is made completely out of your love.”

My eggs are like a miserable old bunch of crone grapes.”

should know that carnations and mums last forever. Lilacs and irises are basically dead by the time they arrive. Roses can go either way. Hydrangeas go quickly, but on the sly—they still look pretty, even after they’re dry as paper.

“I love you, but you want impossible things, Ash,” he said, finally, and it was true. It still is. I want impossible things.

It’s the anticipation I can’t handle. Loss lurks around every corner, and how do we prepare?

“You’re a cheese whore,” Edi says to the dog, and then to me, “And so are you.”

The sky is a gray Slurpee—so cold and wet that I get a brain freeze when the wind blows.

Edi’s memory is like the backup hard drive for mine, and I have that same crashing, crushing feeling you have when the beach ball on your computer starts spinning.

this one, beautiful night, the only here and now we’ve ever got—with Sprite.

“Like, clinically tired. Maybe I have a deficiency.” “I think we might call that deficiency grief,”

women’s health piece I’m working on, tentatively titled “No Cuntry for Old Vaginas.” “So you don’t want to hear about how Sun-Maid invited me to be a raisin ambassador?”

“Write a book about this,” Edi says. “About us?” I say “Friendship?” “Yeah,” she says. “About all of this. Death too.

“Oh dear, oh dear.” If Winnie-the-Pooh had ever fallen to the floor trying to escape hospice and accidentally yanked out his peripheral catheter, this surely is what he would have said.

Everyone dies, and yet it’s unendurable. There is so much love inside of us.

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.

I’m holding her hands in my hands. “Stay gold, Ponyboy,”

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.

Is it better to have loved and lost? Ask anyone in pain and they’ll tell you no.

I think Abe wants to stop at that bakery anyway. The place with the Portuguese rolls. You know he doesn’t mind a bit of a journey if there’s food involved.”

“Life is messy. I certainly don’t expect tidiness from yours or anybody else’s.”