We All Want Impossible Things

by Catherine Newman

I’m an elderly mastodon, trying to understand the ways of the young humans, but Belle has explained that my need for clarity is part of the capitalist patriarchy’s master plan, which I do not doubt for a second.

Why do we even do this—love anybody? Our dumb animal hearts.

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

“You know bats?” she says. “Yeah.” “How a bat is like a tiny little mouse—like, the smallest, sweetest thing ever? Only then it spreads its wings and it’s suddenly huge and horror-movie scary?” “Yeah,” I say. “I feel like human dicks are like that.”

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.

My kids did this too, when they were little—they looked into my eyes to make sure they were okay. On a turbulent airplane, their two small faces swiveled over to me to ask, wordlessly, “Are we safe?” We are safe! I beamed back at them judderingly, because what did it really matter if I was wrong?

If cancer had seen as many romantic comedies as I have, it would understand that what’s next on the schedule is delightful plot twist. But cancer has mostly just watched gritty documentaries about war and famine. Also melodramas. Cancer has seen Beaches and Terms of Endearment, and it has no imagination for joy. There will be no turn of events.

This is love, distilled to its essence—like a kind of communal ecstasy, but grief. We sing “Let It Be” and, when we finish, we listen into the silence for Edi to inhale. But she doesn’t. She’s leaving behind the shell of her human flesh, molting like an invisible butterfly, disappearing. She’s going, she’s gone. You could almost grab onto her wings and go too.

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.

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.