We All Want Impossible Things

by Catherine Newman

“Smile and the world smiles with you,”

the way to have a friend is to be one,

Everyone dies, and yet it’s unendurable. There is so much love inside of us.

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, 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.