Last night I fell asleep before C., curled up against her back while she stayed awake for a while, reading. I have the faintest memory of her body stretching briefly away from mine as she reached to turn out the light, and then it was morning. We had reversed positions; I was facing the wall and she was wrapped around me, her hand holding mine. One of our cats, the impossibly affectionate one, had crawled into our intertwined arms and made himself a home there, purring away contentedly beside me. Some years ago, in the course of doing research for an article I was writing, I learned that organisms that actively seek out physical contact are described by scientists as thigmotactic. Our cat is exceedingly thigmotactic. So, with respect to each other, are we. “Close close all night the lovers keep. They turn together / in their sleep,” Elizabeth Bishop once wrote, in the opening lines of a silly, smitten, charming little poem that she never published, and that nicely characterizes C. and me at night. Who is to say where love ends and biology begins, or how they shape each other, or how much our cat’s feelings and motivations do and do not differ from our own? I only know that it is very rare that C. and I ever wake up apart from each other in the morning.
This particular morning, we woke up in our own bed, here in Maryland. We no longer travel as much as we used to, and so our schedule has become far more predictable; entire months go by where we scarcely stray from home. Today, we worked for a while in the office we share, and then C. migrated to the dining room table, and then we both went upstairs, to a room with a couch big enough for both of us and a little schoolhouse desk set in an alcove. The cats followed us from room to room, the thigmotactic one from lap to lap. In the afternoon we took a break and went out to inspect the waning late-September status of our vegetable garden and stroll along an old split-rail fence that C.’s father helped us rebuild when we first moved in. Every spring since then, we have sown a swath of wildflowers alongside it, a lavish, ever-changing, summer-long bouquet. By this time of the year, they are almost as tall as we are and starting to go to seed, but we still like to walk the length of them to see what we can see—a late, bright riot of cosmos; the last of the dusky blue cornflowers; fat, pollen-packed fingers of goldenrod; a smattering of bright pink zinnias, each one as round and closely petaled as an old-fashioned lady’s swim cap. In August so many butterflies find their way to the flowers that we sometimes see two and three on a single stalk; now those are gone, but grasshoppers catapult out of our way by the dozen as we walk, and when we return along the little pond out back, we hear at every step the startled yelp and plop of bullfrogs leaping in.
“I have often thought,” C.’s father, Bill, once told me, “that for a completely average person, I have lived a remarkable life.” He had grown up without indoor plumbing and lived to carry a cellphone around in his pocket, its ringtone set to emergency-alert volume to be heard over his tractor; he had married the love of his life and raised three wonderful children; he had worked as a farmer, a grocery-store clerk, a custodian, and a caretaker all his days, yet he had met four presidents—one who gave a speech on the Eastern Shore, two who employed his oldest daughter, one who spoke at C.’s college graduation; he had found, against staggering odds, a falling star. I knew what he meant, and I knew that he would have felt the same even if he had never met so much as a mayor and never even seen a meteorite. Because I, too, feel that way: that my days are exceptional even when they are ordinary, that existence does not need to show us any of its more famous or spectacular wonders to fill us with amazement. We live remarkable lives because life itself is remarkable, a fact that is impossible not to notice if only suffering leaves us alone for long enough.
Lately I have found this everyday remarkableness almost overwhelming. As I said, I’ve never been much for stoicism, but these last few years, I have been even more susceptible than usual to emotion—or, rather, to one emotion in particular. As far as I know, it has no name in our language, although it is close to what the Portuguese call saudade and the Japanese call mono no aware. It is the feeling of registering, on the basis of some slight exposure, our existential condition: how lovely life is, and how fragile, and how fleeting. Although this feeling is partly a response to our place in the universe, it is not quite the same as awe, because it has too much of the everyday in it, and too much sorrow, too. For the same reason, it is also not the feeling the Romantics identified as the sublime—a mingling of admiration and dread, evoked by the vast impersonal grandeur of the physical world. This feeling I am talking about has none of that splendor or terror in it. It is made up, instead, of gratitude, longing, and a note I can only call anticipatory grief. Among English words, its nearest kin might be “bittersweet,” a translation of the Greek term Sappho coined to describe the experience of falling in love; it was she who first and forever soldered love’s joy to love’s suffering. But while “bittersweet” accurately captures the mingling of happiness and sadness in this feeling, its intimate origin means that it lacks the necessary world-facing aspect, the sense of the scale of the problem: all that we have, we will someday lose. Of every kind of “and” that we experience, I find this one the most acute—the awareness that our love, in all its many forms, is bound inseparably to our grief.
It is a measure of how porous I am at present that this feeling can be provoked in me by almost anything: basic human decency, extraordinary acts of courage, works of art that remind me of the inexplicable brilliance of our species. I have felt it on a summer night after accidentally killing a firefly, which left a luminous, upsetting stain on our bedroom wall; and on a November evening after finding a six-week-old kitten outside in the pouring rain, full of need and life, howling for help like something fifty times its size; and rising up in me out of nowhere amid the past-midnight laughter of good friends, with whom C. and I had lingered for hours after dinner, the candles long since reduced to wax glaciers, the wine to stained-glass crescents on the bottom of each glass. It has come over me indoors and out, in broad daylight and in darkness, alone and in company, so that I have to stay quiet for a moment or briefly turn my face away.
I don’t think this feeling I am describing is the same as sentimentality, the emotion produced by tearjerker movies and corny commercials and sappy, circle-of-life country songs. That word implies an excess of emotion, typically provoked through manipulative means, but neither accusation applies in this case. Nothing could be less manipulative than the things that fill me with this tender, mournful feeling; they are best summed up as the world just being the world. And as for excess—well, how are we supposed to feel about the fact that we will eventually lose everything we love, including our own lives? In the face of a fact like that, what emotion could possibly count as disproportionate?
If anything, I am amazed that we aren’t all overcome more often by this mingled sense of gratitude and grief. And it makes sense to me that I have grown so susceptible to it after meeting C. and losing my father. In quick succession, I found one foundational love and lost another, and ever since, both the wonder and the fragility of life have been exceptionally present to me. I have put off mentioning it so far, but this is one of the most significant and difficult aspects of love, romantic and otherwise: it is terribly vulnerable to forces outside our control, and therefore terribly frightening. The corollary to “Now has your bliss appeared” is “Now, at any moment, it may vanish.”