We All Want Impossible Things

“I love the people at the table so much, and the food is so good, and Edi is so sick, and I miss Jules, even though she’s only an hour and a half away. Plus, the lovely, changing light! My poor marriage! The red wine, the candle glow, ‘Galileo’ seeping out of the speaker. I could just cry.”

Passages like this one can be found throughout the novel, giving insight into Ash’s character and thought processes. At one and the same moment, Ash can be thinking about the most important things in her life, and the most mundane and contingent things in her life.

“‘I’m always here,’ he says. And he could mean here in his old house, which is true—he’s here all the time. Or he could mean here, available to me still, in all of the marriage ways, which is also true.”

Ash’s relationship with Honey is strained, and she is often unsure how to interpret his comments. While she loves Honey and knows he loves her in return, they are at a distance for most of the story. It will take losing her best friend for Ash to become vulnerable enough to give her marriage another chance.

“If I were going to summarize it, I’d tell you that I can’t be with a person who, in the middle of the worst fight ever, leaves me weeping in the bed to take a shower, where I hear him joyfully singing ‘No Woman, No Cry.’”

The source of the tension between Ash and Honey, as she relates, is that they are emotionally incompatible on certain levels. Ash is a passionate, sensitive person who deals with conflict by hashing it out. Honey, who is more even keeled, deals with conflict in a way that strikes Ash as cold and unfeeling, leading her to feel dissatisfied and misunderstood in their relationship.

“As adults, Edi and I have had a very city-mouse/country-mouse kind of friendship. She can’t understand how I can bear to live anywhere but New York, but then she loves to visit us here and twirl through the farmers’ market.”

As close as Ash and Edi are, they grew apart in certain ways as they entered adulthood. One of the ways they differ is in their choice of where to live: Ash opts for the more open spaces of New England, while Edi prefers the hustle and bustle of a major metropolitan area. As with many city dwellers, however, Edi finds trips to the country restorative.

“Over the years she has tried lots of recipes for similar-sounding cakes, but nothing has ever really come close. Did it have rosemary? Olive oil? Were they Meyer lemons or regular? She has never been sure, and has only gotten less sure as the decades pass. ‘Did you maybe just imagine the cake?’ I asked her once, and she shook her head. ‘I ate it in real life,’ she said dreamily. ‘The best cake.’”

The fabled lemon pound cake appears here and there throughout the novel, taking on an almost mythical status as Edi tries in vain to recreate it. When Edi gets sick, Ash manages to track down the original creator, who ships Edi a cake in the mail. However, when the cake arrives, it isn’t quite as good as Edi remembered, revealing the gap between memory and reality.

“‘Should I worry about Belle skipping so much school?’ I say to Edi, and she shrugs. ‘She seems okay to me,’ she says. She blows on a spoonful of soup. ‘But I know teenagers are not always as they seem.’”

In the midst of dealing with Edi’s illness, Ash worries that somehow she is letting Belle slip through the cracks. Noticing that Belle is skipping school relatively frequently, she finds it difficult to discern whether Belle’s behavior is normal teenage rebellion or a response to Ash’s unstable behavior, her parents’ separation, or some other stressor.

“Honey loved me, I knew, but I wanted to be kept up all night, to doze in desire and wake to an astonished somebody tracing their finger down the side of my face. Honey was too rational for that in some ways, and too damaged for it in others.”

One of the reasons Ash finds it difficult to stay true to Honey is that she has a particular image of what a romantic partner should be, and Honey doesn’t live up to those expectations. By the end of the novel, however, Ash comes to realize that there is something beautiful in imperfection, and that it should be embraced rather than rejected.

“‘Can you please not try to make everyone at my funeral fall in love with you?’ she says, not laughing. ‘Harsh,’ I say, instead of Who even are you? ‘But can you?’ she says. ‘I mean, could you make my eulogy be actually about me?’”

Edi and Ash are so close in part because Edi is brutally honest with Ash. Aware of Ash’s narcissistic tendencies, Edi asks Ash—only half tongue-in-cheek—to make sure her eulogy isn’t just an extended commentary on herself.

“I just want you to be with Dad, I guess.”

Though Belle shows herself to be capable of handling the massive stressors in her life—her parents’ separation, her mother’s erratic behavior, Edi’s death—she is ultimately just a teenager. In a rare moment of vulnerability, she admits to her mother that she wants things back the way they used to be, when she could count on her mother and father both being together.

“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. I have the feeling you’d have if there were a vault with all your jewels in it, everything precious, only the person with the combination to the lock was hanging on to a penthouse ledge by a fingertip.”

Edi and Ash’s closeness proves to be a double-edged sword when Edi becomes terminally ill. While they are still able to bounce ideas off one another and understand what the other means in many instances, their host of shared experiences means that once Edi isn’t around anymore, many of Ash’s memories will only be half of the story.

“‘Mostly,’ she says, ‘I’m just really, really thirsty.’ 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. So I fill her night—this one, beautiful night, the only here and now we’ve ever got—with Sprite.”

During Edi’s illness, emotional and physical turmoil go hand in hand. As Ash acknowledges here, the fragility of the human body is more readily apparent in sickness and in death than at any other time in life, but the opportunity for Ash to serve Edi in these moments of weakness are moments of beautiful companionship when viewed through the lens of friendship.

“Later, our new friend made us up a bed in the room next to the living room, where her father was dead. Edi and I stayed awake all night, terrified, laughing and laughing as quietly as we could. We may or may not have competed in a ‘most convincing corpse’ contest—who can say? Death was sad and scary, but we were twenty-two years old. We were going to live forever.”

Ash recalls the memory of traveling in Europe and being invited to the home of stranger whom they had just met. When they arrive at the woman’s house after a long delay, they discover that the woman’s father has just died and their stay coincides with the family funeral and wake. Looking back on that event, Ash realizes that her flippant attitude toward death wasn’t an instance of malice but naivety: Young and old people view death differently.

“‘That’s all I want, Ash. Just to love and be loved.’ She’s crying now. I’m crying too. ‘My imperfect marriage. My family. My life—to keep it. I’m sorry. I know this is guilt trippy. But what I’m losing? You’re choosing to give it up.’”

Edi grieves the loss of her life, and her family, and all the things that she wants to hold on to. Part of her grief, however, lies in the fact that she thinks Ash is voluntarily giving up the exact things that she herself is losing involuntarily. Ash’s behavior is thus a cause of both anger and sorrow.

“‘Isn’t it, though?’ Edi says. ‘I mean, couldn’t you decide that it really was that simple?’ Could I? I wondered as I drove home.”

Edi’s assessment of Ash’s love life is that it doesn’t have to be as difficult as she’s making it out to be. Edi believes Ash brings a lot of the chaos on herself, so she asks why Ash can’t just embrace the messiness of life and be with Honey. Ash will eventually take Edie’s advice and reconcile with her husband, but not until Edi’s death teaches her the importance of vulnerability and acceptance.

“For long stretches we lay silent, waiting, fighting, fighting sleep. Reach out your hand, I would tell myself. But it would have taken some kind of winch to move me closer. It would have taken an earthquake. Going to bed mad—we knew it was a death knell, and we did it anyway. By the time Honey left, we were never not fighting.”

Ash continues to grow in self-knowledge as the novel progresses, and in reflecting on the many fights that she had with Honey she realizes that part of the problem was her own stubbornness. She realizes that if she had humbled herself and dared to be vulnerable, things could have been different.

“Mom. Stop. I’m not thrilled about it either, obviously. But you’re just hurting your own feelings. You want Dad to, like, pine away for you for the rest of his life. I’m sorry, but you do. It’s not right. His girlfriend’s kids’ names bug you, okay, whatever. I think you’re going to have to get over yourself a little bit.”

Belle offers her mother some serious life advice without sugarcoating. Belle doesn’t particularly like that her father is seeing someone else, but she also realizes that her mother is handling the situation poorly, and tells her so. Ash doesn’t want to be with Honey, but she wants him to keep longing for her. This exchange illustrates Ash’s close relationship with her teenage daughter, who, like Edi, tells it like it is and urges Ash to look within herself.

“I delete soonish and write soon. I delete soon and write now. I tell everyone they’re welcome to stay at my house—that we’ve got plenty of air mattresses and sleeping bags.”

Realizing that Edi is now in the final stage of her illness, Ash sits down to write the hardest message she’s ever written. As she tries to write out the message telling everyone to come see Edi one last time, she struggles to get the truth out in words, changing “soon” to “now” in a revision that signals her acceptance that Edi’s time has finally come.

“‘I think I’m having vertigo. Or, like, an existential crisis.’ Or 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.”

Speaking with the chaplain sharpens Ash’s view of mortality. Death is tragic, and yet it is as natural as anything else; everyone dies, it is a fact of life. The question for Ash becomes what comes afterward. The prospect of annihilation results in Ash’s fear of eternity and nothingness.

“I’ve been so focused on keeping the girls alive all these years that this is the first moment that I truly understand the inevitability of their deaths, however timely they turn out to be, however—knock wood—blessedly long after my own.”

The idea that her children could die is so horrific to Ash that her mind recoils from the thought. It’s only when she pauses to concentrate on her own breathing that the inevitability of death bears down on her, and she realizes that everyone she loves, even her children, will one day die.

“You don’t need to search for meaning on her behalf, for finality. Whatever Edith needs to do now is what she’s doing—it’s not really about you.”

Ash’s desire for control is tempered here by the chaplain’s reassurance that in the end, there’s really nothing she can do for Edi. Ash’s search for meaning and need to try and find a reason or a cause or an ultimate purpose to life is a noble and worthwhile thing, but it needs to be for own sake. Edi is capable of seeking out her own answer.

“‘The only skill you need now is love,’ Laura says, ‘and you definitely have it.’”

Ash has been so concerned with doing everything “right” as she takes care of Edi—being constantly available and present, offering the right kinds of gifts and food and services—that she has lost sight of what Edi really needs from her. As the chaplain reminds her, no particular skillset or expertise is necessary to be there for a loved one in their final moments; Ash’s love is all that is required. Ash’s anxieties and insecurities blinded her to that fact.

“She’s leaving behind the shell of her human flesh, molting like an invisible butterfly, disappearing. She’s going, she’s gone. You could almost grab onto her wings and go too. I put a hand on her chest and feel the stillness where her heart should be beating. And then I put a hand to mine. And here’s my own unruly heart, thumping away. On and on, heartlessly.”

In the moment that Edi dies, Ash experiences it as a slipping away—not as something violent or radical, but as something gentle, smooth, and practically effortless. This passage illustrates The Tension of Life and Death, as Ash feels for Edi’s stilled heart while simultaneously feeling the rapid, steady beat of her own.

“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.”

In the runup to Edi’s death, Ash was so focused on the pain of her imminent loss that she failed to realize the time after Edi passed would be equally hard. The pain and sorrow of grieving alongside Edi, mourning her death before the fact, is followed by the experience of actually living without her and having to navigate the grief by herself.