We All Want Impossible Things

by Catherine Newman

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.

Grief is crashing over our heads like a tsunami, this miraculous soul is about to be homeless, but thirst is thirst. So I fill her night—this one, beautiful night, the only here and now we’ve ever got—with Sprite.

Hospice care in a sentence

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.

This

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. I need to find my kids. I need to sit here with Myron while grief tries to swallow him whole.

yup

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

It’s the deep well of nothing where Edi should be, like if you poked a painful tooth with your tongue, only the tooth was gone, and then you got sucked, tongue-first, into a black hole.

Matriarch death