We All Want Impossible Things

by Catherine Newman

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 them. There’s nothing like hospice to remind you that decrepitude is totally relative.

I can hear Belle clanging around the kitchen, and I can’t tell if it’s normal clanging—the unavoidable sound of the colander hitting the sink—or if it’s pointed my mom is a gruesome skank clanging.

The thinnest thread of ambivalence does not yank a whole pregnancy into unraveling, I realize.

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

So many of my assumptions about people turn out to be wrong! I try to make a mental note of this.

Everywhere, behind closed doors, people are dying, and people are grieving them. It’s the most basic fact about human life—tied with birth, I guess—but it’s so startling too. 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.

Cedar is here too, perched on an ottoman next to Jules, who catches my eye and winks because a beloved somebody shuffling off their mortal coil is no reason not to invite the hot boy inside, as I well know.