The Night We Lost Him

She said if you are looking for answers you can’t find, you need to change the question.

Grief is exhausting. No one talks about that. Or, at least, no one told me. No one told me just how exhausting it feels to carry it around with you. And it uses the same muscle as love. Because with real love you have to show up and give. You have to show up and be given to. And it’s not so much that I’ve forgotten how. It’s that it’s all added up to be so heavy.

Loyalty doesn't trump love. ... But what a thing, what a rare and precious thing if you have both. ... Because when you do have both, you have everything to lose. And, eventually you will lose it. You will be separated. That is the cost of loving anyone. It doesn't mean you don't do it. You do it anyway. And you pray.

if you are looking for answers you can’t find, you need to change the question.

Witnesses to each other’s lives,” she said. “That was the deal.” “I wish I had never shown you that poem—” “… Not something we push and pull from, no promises that someone may need to break. Just the people who know each other. Who love each other. Who see each other. Best friends. Lovers. Whatever title you give it or don’t give it, just how we’ve always been. No way to lose each other.

My mother had modeled for me early on that the quickest route to unhappiness was to pay too much attention to anyone’s disapproval, particularly someone that you barely knew.

And when you are grieving, guilt lives inside your sadness, doesn’t it? The guilt lives there like an unfortunate side effect of what you haven’t done.

He doesn’t want to know what he is starting to know about himself. Because he doesn’t want to do the uncomfortable work that comes when you accept something needs to change. The uncomfortable work that comes with knowing that change means showing up for yourself in a new way.

That question centers around the idea of what it means to show up for someone. More specifically, what does it mean to be the witness to someone’s life? I love the idea that, if we are lucky, we each have a person who sees all of us—who reminds us who we most want to be. Who refuses to allow us to stray from who we most soulfully are. But what does it mean if, despite that level of openness, you have things keeping you apart? This tension is where the novel began for me.

No one wants to think about what we’re up against. And with love, with standing up and trying to love anyone, we are up against ourselves too. We are up against our heartbreak and our pasts and our ideas about how things should be. We are up against our most primal pain, like a living-breathing barricade, blocking the space between where we’ve gotten stuck and where we most want to go.

said if you are looking for answers you can’t find, you need to change the question.

You only get so many chances to fix what you get wrong.

what does it mean to be faithful if you love someone else anyway? Loyalty doesn’t trump love, not in the end.

You carried me I carried you through this world

Loyalty doesn’t trump love. That’s how Paul said it, isn’t it? But what a thing, what a rare and precious thing if you have both. Loyalty and love, swirling together. What have I been doing? Except trying to escape what you can’t escape. Because when you do have both, you have everything to lose.

Let’s hope. My sister is pretty much the smartest person I know, and she told me to get on the plane. She said if you are looking for answers you can’t find, you need to change the question.” That hits me, how true that is. “Sounds like she is operating on a different level.” “Well, she’s living with five roommates and they’re all unemployed, so…” she says. “Bit of a mixed bag.” I smile, adjusting the baby, trying to keep her comfortable. “So, what’s your new question?” “Will my being gone knock it out of him?” She shrugs. “The parts I don’t recognize.” I nod. That’s what we are often fighting against, isn’t it? The parts in someone we don’t recognize. The parts we are trying to reconcile. Aren’t my current questions, as large and impossible as they are, circling around that exact thing? What happened to my father that I wasn’t there to see? What did I miss about who he was? Where do those things intersect?

Don’t be. There aren’t weird questions when you’re grieving,” she says. That penetrates. The truth of it. And the kindness. Then while I sit there breathless, the connection cuts out, the line clicking off, and Meredith Cooper

strawberry sofrito sauce: a savory mix of garden-grown strawberries and San Marzano tomatoes, balsamic vinegar, onions, and pine nuts.

the reasons that you move away from the people you love are sometimes the very reasons you wish you could move toward them.

Since the loss of my parents, whenever an unknown call comes up on the caller ID, especially late at night, I'm sure it's going to be someone else I love in the type of trouble I can't save them from.

It had suddenly felt wrong to allow my father to occupy any emotional terrain in her absence. So I left the space empty, digging into that parental void on my own.

you are looking for answers you can’t find, you need to change the question.

the quickest route to unhappiness was to pay too much attention to anyone’s disapproval, particularly someone that you barely knew.

He closed his fingers over the ring, not saying anything. His childhood street was lantern-lit behind her. His past, his present. How easy to say she was wrapped up in all of it. How inadequate. She was all of it.

I’ll hold us there for as long as I can. For as long as the earth and the sun and the sky conspire to let me, longer than that, if I ever figure out how.

I'm fine. I'm lonely. I'm worried, every time I hear your voice, how and when I'll lose ypu