Quotes from Catherine Newman

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 used to picture time as a rope you followed along, hand over hand, into the distance, but it's nothing like that. It moves outward but holds everything that's come before. Cut me open and I'm a tree trunk, rings of nostalgia radiating inward. All the years are nested inside me like I'm my own personal one-woman matryoshka doll. I guess that's true for everybody, but then I drive everybody crazy with my nostalgia and happiness. I am bittersweet personified.

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

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.

One thing I've started to suspect about myself is that I'm some kind of confusingly extroverted introvert. I just want to sit here on the couch with a tumblerful of the good booze Alice brought, soak in the music and the conversation, and not talk to anyone. I want to be invisible and lie down on the couch and fall asleep to the muffled sounds of conversation, like a child in the back seat of the car being driven safely through the night by grown-ups who love her.

What I'm starting to understand, finally, is that the point isn't to help the people who know how best to ask for help. It's to be helpful.

We don't think of this as a place where people come to die," the gravely cheerful intake counselor had said to us. "We think of it as a place where people come to live!" "To live dyingly,

One of the hardest things about parenting is that you just never know what the outcome will be. It's a total leap of faith. Even with decisions you feel fairly confident about (say, what to make for lunch), you just can't be sure of the consequences they'll have for this person you're raising. Will you like the adult this kid—your kid—becomes?

Marriage confused me. Some days it seemed to be just an endless sequence of body functions: the fan turned on in the smelly bathroom; the sound of someone clipping their toenails into the trash can; a waxy Q-tip on the counter; a scrim of shaved-off hairs around the sink. Another person's waste sloughing off incessantly! It can really drain a person of the will to live.

We were trying to understand, then, what her life was about to become. I think we're still trying to understand.

Everything you've ever fed him," I say. "His whole self is made completely out of your love.

What it is like to be any parent. The way you ache when they ache, the way you experience their stomachaches or heartaches or fear in your very self. It's as if, having once been placentally connected to your beating heart, having once inhabited your actual body, your children continue to live there with you. For better and worse, you are never alone again. Parental love defies your apartness from another person.

Boredom is that agitated space between relaxation and action; dialed down, it can become a pleasant kind of inertia or a meditative stillness, where it feels good to sit quietly with your own thoughts; cranked up a notch, it can produce creative release. But that middle place is the boredom itself – restlessness with no movement. A dull and desperate longing for something else. From Catastrophic Happiness.

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

I want you to be crazy about me," I'd said, and he said, "You want that. I know. But you also want space to think and work. Freedom. You want to rest sometimes. You'd hate me if I tried to contain you." He'd sighed, pressed his lips into a thin line. "I love you, but you want impossible things, Ash," he said, finally, and it was true. It still is. I want impossible things.

Sometimes I suspect that everybody sleeps with their kids, and the only difference is the level of denial you're in.

I am so glad and grateful, I am. But sometimes the orchestra plays something in swelling chords of luck and joy, and all I can hear is that one violin sawing out a thin melody of grief

I love you, but you want impossible things, Ash," he said, finally, and it was true. It still is. I want impossible things.

It's monstrous. It is too much to take. Why do we even do this—love anybody? Our dumb animal hearts.

I guess I really just wanted to pick out the rocks. Because now that I have them? I don't actually want them that much." I felt the exact same way. Sometimes I think that's kind of what stuff is like. You want it until you have it, and then it's like the light inside it goes out.

Inside the hospice, Belle glows like a shiny ambassador from the land of youth. It feels almost indecent to bring her.

Dr. Soprano has explained to me that some of this pain—which Edi experiences as pain in her joints—is actually being sent over by her organs as they falter. He described the liver as a kind of ventriloquist that speaks its suffering from nearby limbs and bones.

I'm not there," she says. "I'm not there to scramble his egg or kiss his forehead. My baby. I'm not going to be there. The whole rest of his life he's going to be sick without me. How can that be?

Would it be wrong to have the cats' arms and legs removed?" Belle says. "I just want them to be more"—she pauses to put the plate down and pull Jelly up into her neck—"beanbaggy. They're so annoyingly opinionated about coming and going." I imagine this would be a tough sell to the vet.