We All Want Impossible Things

by Catherine Newman

We called the recommended hospices from the hospital lobby, but they all had a wait list. “A wait list?” Jude had said. “Do they understand the premise of hospice?”

Edi, like most people with ovarian cancer, will die—if she dies!—because her guts stopped working. What will kill her, ultimately, is (spoiler alert) bowel obstruction and malabsorption, catastrophic electrolyte imbalance and then kidney or liver failure.

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.

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.

Is it better to have loved and lost? Ask anyone in pain and they’ll tell you no. And yet. Here we are, hurling ourselves headlong into love like lemmings off a cliff into a churning sea of grief. We risk every last thing for our heart’s expansion, even when that expanded heart threatens to suffocate us and then burst.