We All Want Impossible Things

by Catherine Newman

“His whole self is made completely out of your love.”

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Fly, be free! I want to say. I want to say, Stay with me forever! Come to think of it, these are the two things I want to say to everyone I love most.