We All Want Impossible Things

by Catherine Newman

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

I don’t know if pain and grief and dying are turning Edi into a person who feels this way about me—or if she’s always felt this way, and hospice is turning her into a person who doesn’t bother not sharing that fact.

Every person is a person, I think redundantly, because my brain is on the fried setting.

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.