We All Want Impossible Things

by Catherine Newman

Under my fingers, his hair feels like cobwebs, like fog. It is barely even a physical substance.

But sometimes I worried that marriage was just a series of these small deflations, our dreams floating around invisibly near the ceiling like escaped gas.

But now you’re thinking Honey’s perfect and why aren’t we together and probably it’s my fault, and you’re right about all of it, more or less. If I were going to summarize it, I’d tell you that I can’t be with a person who, in the middle of the worst fight ever, leaves me weeping in the bed to take a shower, where I hear him joyfully singing “No Woman, No Cry.”

“Do you have any actual human feelings?” I’d asked, and he hadn’t answered,

Hospice is just so existentially weird. It’s like you walk in under a giant banner that says, everyone here is dying! but then most of the time you’re just making small talk and quesadillas, trying to find something to watch on Netflix, or wondering if there’s any pie left.

“Mom,” Belle says. “You have to sleep with my eighth-grade gym teacher like you’re in a play about someone’s bisexual mom?” “I really only ever subbed in the middle school,” Miss Norman says, somewhat irrelevantly.

pointless meta-arguing (“If you would have just said you were sorry instead of blah blah then I wouldn’t have had to blah blah blah”)

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

We were picturing the Milky Way of mother love filling the sky of Dash’s future—galaxies of it, vast and bright and everywhere. So much of it, yes. But so much of it unmappable, unmapped. Unknown. Not here.

The sky is a gray Slurpee—so cold and wet that I get a brain freeze when the wind blows.

At her high school’s recent college fair, another mom had sighed and said to me, “Don’t you just wish you could do it all over again?” “College?” I’d said. “God. I don’t know. I don’t think I really have the energy anymore to be date-raped every second.” Honey had laughed at least, bless him, while the other mom backed away, presumably into a more normal type of small talk.

Even the word wife. I just picture all of us stirring oatmeal at the stove, knee-deep in everybody’s diapers and feelings.

wore green corduroy knickers and a Gunne Sax blouse to her bat mitzvah.

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.

have the feeling you’d have if there were a vault with all your jewels in it, everything precious, only the person with the combination to the lock was hanging on to a penthouse ledge by a fingertip.

Not knowing seems to be all I know anymore.”

“Just toss me in the dumpster when I go!” my dad likes to announce, and when I’m like, “Um, Dad, I think funerals are actually more about—” he interrupts me. “In the dumpster!” “Okay!” I say. “The dumpster it

Roxy Music’s “Avalon” comes on first to ruin me. Life is just seesawing between the gorgeous and the menacing—like when you go for a run and one minute the whole neighborhood is lilacs in purple bloom, and then the next it’s stained boxer shorts and an inside-out latex glove.

Pretty much the only thing Honey doesn’t like is a to see a semi cab driving on the highway with no truck attached, which simply, as he puts it, gives him a weird feeling.

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.

I can hardly express to the girls how different the man I grew up with is from the one who listens attentively, nodding and scooping up hummus with pita chips, while they explain to him the concept of ableism and why he should stop saying, “A blind man could see it.”

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.

“Life is messy. I certainly don’t expect tidiness from yours or anybody else’s.”