More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The inevitability of Edi’s death was like a crumpled dollar bill my brain kept spitting back out.
My heart fills with, and releases, grief in time to my breathing.
Hospice is a complicated place to pass the time because you are kind of officially dying.
There’s nothing like hospice to remind you that decrepitude is totally relative.
I picture her mind like a bar, her thoughts and memories nursing their last round. It’s closing time, and you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.
“Smile and the world smiles with you,”
I assume it’s not a coincidence that the closer people get to death, the more you see the extent to which we’re all just skeletons in elaborate, fleshy waiting rooms.
“All of that caretaking,”
“All of it’s in his bones. It’s the actual stuff of his body and brain. The placenta you made from scratch. Your milk from nursing him. All those pancakes and school-lunch sandwiches, all of that food and care.”
“Everything you’ve ever fed him,” I say. “His whole self is made completely out of your love.”
sometimes I worried that marriage was just a series of these small deflations, our dreams floating around invisibly near the ceiling like escaped gas.
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?
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.
“Soon I’ll be a stranger in a strange new place,”
Not knowing seems to be all I know anymore.”
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.
apeirophobia,
the dying and the loss are actually two different burdens, and each must be borne individually, one after the other.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.
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.
