We All Want Impossible Things

by Catherine Newman

The inevitability of Edi’s death was like a crumpled dollar bill my brain kept spitting back out.

We called the recommended hospices from the hospital lobby, but they all had a wait list. “A wait list?” Jude had said. “Do they understand the premise of hospice?”

“I believe I may be mildly demented,” Ruth whispered once, apologetically, and I was like, “Oh, please. Same.”

Ruth is also the person who watches Fiddler on the Roof every afternoon and also some nights. The volume is turned way up and, for hours every day, it’s the soundtrack of everybody’s dying.

“You drive with your hazards on for no reason. You are not an optimist.”

It’s monstrous. It is too much to take. 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.

“We simply don’t know,” he says, and I say, “I know. Not knowing seems to be all I know anymore.”

“It’s so frustrating that I’m stuck in this stupid, sick body,” she says. “It seems so inessential, somehow, but then, there’s really nowhere else for me to go.” I picture unzipping my own body and wrapping her inside of it, like a shared coat. “I would give anything to keep you,” I say through the sob that’s gathering in my throat, and she says, “I know you would. I would give anything to stay.”

The body and its petty demands! Grief is crashing over our heads like a tsunami, this miraculous soul is about to be homeless, but thirst is thirst.

When the girls were little and driving each other nuts with some or other noise, like sucking air through a flappy lollipop-filled vacuum in their cheeks, we used to say, “Some sounds are only fun to make.” I still think that in my head sometimes, like when somebody is talking too much in a meeting. I always worry I’m going to say it out loud.

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, which, Jules has explained to me, is the fear of eternity, which I am definitely having. Where will Edi be? And for how long? Nowhere and forever. No.

Every year, ever since the girls were born, I have blown out the candles on my birthday cake and wished for just this. Everything I have already. No loss. I 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.

Sleep, which has been playing a dully exhausting game of hide-and-seek with me for months, shows up out of nowhere and drags me to the bottom of the ocean floor, where I dream the deep-sea dreams of the drowned. Of the oblivious.

“I think I’m just worried that I, like, don’t have this particular skill set,” I say. “The only skill you need now is love,” Laura says, “and you definitely have it.”

After Jonah leaves, Edi looks into my face, studies it. I’m smiling and smiling. She shifts a little, winces, raises her eyebrows and shoulders in alarm. “You’re good,” I say. “You’re perfect.” Her shoulders drop, and she smiles. 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? By the time the plane exploded, the fact that they couldn’t trust me anymore would have become quite immediately moot. You are safe! I beam at Edi now, and she grins like a jollied baby. “You are doing everything exactly right,” I say out loud, and she nods.

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.

It’s been so arduous, Edi’s dying. It’s like we’ve all been digging and digging, shoveling out a hole, and we can finally stop. Only now there’s this hole here.

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.”

And then I was alone in my underpants in Edi’s closet, putting on her clothes. Costuming myself as the kind of person who could live on the planet without her.

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.

dreamed last night that Edi was visiting everybody in their dreams: Jude, Dash, Jonah, Alice. Did she come to you? Yes! Me too! Everybody but me. In the dream I talked to Laura from Shapely about it. “Maybe you’re not trying hard enough,” she said, and I said, “I don’t know how to try harder.” Laura shrugged. “Hey, she’s doing her best,” somebody said from behind her. Edi! She was palely opalescent, smiling. “You’re good, Ash, you’re perfect,” she said, before kissing my cheek and leaving me again. “You are doing everything right.” And it wouldn’t be true forever, but, in that moment at least, it was. It was true enough.