We All Want Impossible Things

by Catherine Newman

I wanted to be kept up all night, to doze in desire and wake to an astonished somebody tracing their finger down the side of my face.

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

Everywhere, behind closed doors, people are dying, and people are grieving them.

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.

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,

Is it better to have loved and lost?

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 ...