The Unsinkable Greta James

Maybe the point isn't always to make things last. Maybe it's just to make them count.

The truth is, being a parent is mostly just reacting. Sometimes you get it right and sometimes you don't. You give what you can. And at the end of the day, most of it is just being there.

It’s a particularly strange kind of loss, when something you don’t think you even want gets taken away from you.

It seems like an impossible job, being a parent, and a sad one too, watching them pinwheel further and further away and out into the world, so much more interesting and complicated than you imagined they might be, like a song that starts out as one thing and ends up something else—not necessarily better or worse, but different. And entirely out of your control.

Everyone has baggage,” he says. “Even you. Just because yours is a different shape and size doesn’t mean it’s not heavy too.

The proper function of a man is to live, not to exist.

It’s like that feeling of getting off a long flight and taking your first breath of fresh air. You were okay on the plane. You could breathe just fine. And you could survive like that for a pretty long time if you had to. But once you’re off, you realize you wouldn’t want to live that way forever. Not if you had a choice. I think being away did that for me. It helped me realize I hadn’t breathed—really breathed—in a very long time.

Greta finds it almost painful sometimes to think about all the different lives she could be leading, to know that every choice she’s made has meant the loss of so many other possibilities. Every day, more doors close. Without even trying, simply by moving forward, you end up doubling down on the life you’ve chosen. And the only way to survive is to commit to it fully, to tell yourself it’s the right one. But what if that’s not true?

And,,,she left me. She left all of us, but it feels like she left me most of all, and I know that's completely self-centered, but it's how I feel

The love part,” she says, so quietly that only Greta can hear, “is more important.

the way they looked at each other, like each thought they were the luckier one.

Maybe the point isn’t always to make things last,” he says. “Maybe it’s just to make them count.

The crowd wasn’t huge that night, maybe a couple hundred people. But as soon as she stepped onto the stage, Greta saw that her mom was right. There she was, right up front, with her thin glasses and short gray hair and sensible shoes, beaming amid a sea of college kids and hipsters dressed mostly in black. When their eyes met, Helen smiled and lifted a small white sign. Greta was in the middle of a complicated riff, but when the song came to an end, she took a few steps forward and squinted at it, trying to make out the words. GRETA’S MOM, it said in simple block lettering.

Luke might have lit the match, but Greta was the one who burned everything to the ground a week later.

fear of all that—of getting stuck, of standing still, of being ordinary.

If that were my life, I think I’d off myself.

You had to find another way to make him listen.

And...she left me. She left all of us, but it feels like she left me most of all, and I know that's completely self-centered, but it's how I feel.

The proper function of a man is to live, not to exist.’

That's the thing about New York - it's always bringing people together at unexpected moments. That's part of its magic.

What she’s lost, really, is her closest ally: someone just as fiercely independent, just as passionate about his work, someone who – not so long ago – would’ve shuddered at the thought of wedding registries filled with fancy china and fondue sets. It’s a smaller loss. But it’s still a loss

We set out to be wrecked. —J. M. BARRIE, The Boy Castaways of Black Lake Island