Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives

As far as I can tell, the uncertain part is every second we’re alive, until the last.

We take care of who we can and what we can, near and far, because that’s the job. That is life. It’s true: There will always be threats lurking under the water where we play, danger hiding in the attic and rolling down the street on heavy wheels, unexpected explosions in our brains and our hearts and the sky. There will always be bombs, and we will never be able to save everyone we care about. To know that and to try anyway is to be fully alive. The closest thing to shelter we can offer one another is love, as deep and wide and in as many forms as we can give it.

Sometimes I don’t know how any of us go on. Sometimes I fear there’s no way our species will survive our own self-destructive choices. Sometimes I feel so gut punched by the backward deal of the universe—that if you’re really lucky, you get people in your life to love, and then, over time, they will all either leave you or die—that I am angry at life. Actually, not sometimes. Always. I always feel that way. I don’t always actively think about it, but it’s in there. At the same time, I am always looking for some gratitude, warmth, or hope. I often have to really search for it, but when I see something that makes me feel joy—even just a tiny odd hardly anything—you’re damn right I applaud it. Way to go, adorable cat on a leash! Thank you, server who brought my hot pizza! Kudos, writers of a TV show that made me laugh! Hallelujah, sunshine after a week of storms! Yay for a good hair day, yippee for hot coffee, huzzah for an outfit that puts bounce in my step. If I can scrape up some evidence of a thing made beautifully or a gesture made kindly, then I can believe, for a few seconds, that this world is careful and kind. And if I can believe that, I can believe it is safe to let the people I love walk around out there. It’s my own attempt at foresparkling, seeking out hints of good, even planting them myself, so I can believe there’s more good to come. It might all be superstition, just mental magic, but why not try?

Better to believe the world is at least half-full of decent intentions than to focus on how it’s also half-full of assholes.

Loving teenagers is not so much like taking drugs as it is a constant need to be sure that they are not taking drugs, and they don’t like it when you sniff them, but listen: Loving a teenager is just as emotionally intoxicating as loving a baby. Maybe even more.

Life can’t be all beginnings, but I am still a little stuck on the fact that I don’t want my people to go. I’m a little stuck on the idea that what I want has anything to do with anything.

I don’t think, This is my life right now. I think, This is my life forever. I panic. I forget, although I’ve learned it countless times, that every stage of life changes, then ends.

When we begin things, we can’t possibly know how they will end. Everything we plan is built on guesses and hopes,

How hard would it be to repurpose the old smoking lounges and designate a space where people can go to break down for whatever reason? A crying lounge could be stocked with cold beverages, soft chairs, windows to stare out of, large sunglasses in a range of sizes, fresh waterproof mascara, and friendly, quiet dogs of varying fluffiness. It could be centrally located but closed off, separate from the rest of the airport, just like time and space in the air are separate from time and space on the ground. Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a place where we could privately fall to pieces and then get ourselves together? Instead, we have to do it out in the open.

am a person who trusts data and loves information and feels soothed by sorting things. I’m a person who sees cause for delight everywhere but can’t stop noticing danger everywhere, too, and who often struggles to reconcile the two. I’m a person who takes every personality test despite knowing her own personality very well, and then retakes them until she gets the label she wants.

Sometimes time moves quickly and sometimes it moves slowly, but it always moves forward. This is not your life forever.

I used to think babyhood was the neediest stage of life, but teenagers need their parents just as much—maybe even more. A baby needs a snuggle, some eye contact, a song. A teenager needs a trusted adult to talk things out with when they or a friend gets into a scary situation.

Loving a teenager is just as emotionally intoxicating as loving a baby. Maybe even more.

When you’re an adult who thinks your own churning mind is what keeps everything safe, it’s called anxious.)

Her family and friends loved her with all they had. Still, she died. It’s not that the love didn’t work. It’s not that the love was wasted. It is never pointless to love someone.

I try to explain that I am obsessed with death because I am in love with life. I grieve in advance of loss—losses that will definitely happen, along with some that may not—because I recognize that what I have is so good. I don’t mean to muck up the beauty of now with my tears about later, but I can’t help it. I’m sad because I’m so happy.

My birthday, to me, is a chance to say, “Thank you for having me,” to the earth and everyone on it.

To be a person is to be a mortal. It is to be a death waiting to happen to a body. But it is also, until that moment comes, to be alive. I love the word alive, how it springs to action. It has real spark, like afire, alight, afoot. It’s jaunty. It quickens and pops from stillness to breath. Listen: Living. Alive. The two words mean the same, but I like the second one better.

The problem with worry is that the scope is infinite.

want to believe that if humans really leaned into this impulse to mother one another, it would be stronger than the impulse to tear one another apart.

I don’t understand how parenting will become past if I always love my children in the present.

Your consciousness lives on in the memories housed by your loved ones’ consciousnesses, they suggest. Your atoms return to Earth’s atoms. There is a holiness or, for the less devout, a wondrousness in the way the cells of the body transform in the process of death. It is amazing, scientifically speaking. It can be, for some, a peaceful end to suffering. It can be something for loved ones to be present for, to look directly at and even participate in, versus something to turn away from. We must live with the reality of death, goes this thinking, not fight in vain to deny it.

The only way to get through this life without losing your mind is to make peace with the fact that you’ll lose everything else at some point—maybe your mind, too—and there’s nothing you can do about

You have to figure out how to care just enough but not too much, and then you have to ignore the people who call you a scaredy-cat. Let them be as brave as they wish with their own beloveds.

Kid stuff, then big-kid stuff. My life had expanded like a balloon to hold the responsibilities, the love, the people themselves, and now I had to figure out how to let them go. My children’s leaving—a gradual process that had barely even started—was exactly what any parent would wish for. It’s what I had raised them for. And it already felt like my limbs were being pulled off, one by one.

If I can scrape up some evidence of a thing made beautifully or a gesture made kindly, then I can believe, for a few seconds, that this world is careful and kind. And if I can believe that, I can believe it is safe to let the people I love walk around out there.

obviously you want your birds to learn to fly? What if you want them to go, because you want them to have full lives, but you also, simultaneously and secretly and impossibly, want them to stay by your side forever?