And so that morning when I woke up out of sorts and unsure of what to do, I delegated the problem to C., who took me for a walk in our local arboretum. We followed a looping trail through woodlands and meadows, past native sassafras and mountain laurel and shining sumac and a pasture full of goats, until we returned to the place where we had started, a little Monet-like pond with a wooden bridge across its middle. It was a beautiful September day, breezy and warm, and we stood there together for over an hour, leaning side by side against the railing, just watching: as two turtles sunned themselves on a half-submerged log, as a hummingbird swooped in to hover beside the long trumpet of a flowering vine, as a coot went for a splashy little swim, as a heron eased itself with impossible patience perhaps six inches eastward in sixty minutes, as a tapestry of sage-green algae shifted slow as light around the water.
I had had a lousy week leading up to that anniversary, a week of feeling, as I did shortly after my father died, low-level sick and stupidly clumsy and more emotional and irritable than usual—the bereft heart being as attuned to seasons as a migratory bird, and capable of registering, in ways both remarkable and annoying, the calendrical return of grief. But there in the arboretum with C., I felt at peace, and even content, in the adult way that contentment can coexist with whole histories of sorrow and distress—and indeed almost presupposes them, since it suggests an acceptance of life as it is. I didn’t miss my father more that day than any other, and, as usual, I didn’t feel his presence, either. But I was happy to slow time down for a spell there by the side of the pond, to do nothing at all for part of an afternoon but look at that dapple-green view. Since I could no longer sit with my father, it was good, on that day, to sit for a while with the world.
So much had happened in it since he had died. To begin with, a sobering number of other people had died, too, even before the devastation of the coronavirus, and even in the small compass of our own lives—friends of friends, gone in a month from lung cancer; parents of friends, gone overnight. So many babies had been born that each winter the mantel where we set our holiday cards looked like the cheerful bulletin board in the office of a busy obstetrician. We had celebrated with other couples as they got married; we had driven up to New York to help with the packing and unpacking and the buying of dishes and trash cans and bath mats after a close friend—the one whose wedding C. had attended the day before our first date—got divorced. When my mother needed a heart valve replaced, we had returned to the Cleveland Clinic, where a saturating bleakness immediately settled into me; I felt ten thousand years old, and felt like I had spent nine thousand and ninety-nine of them there in the hospital. Everything about the experience was dispiritingly familiar, except that two days later, my mother, looking healthy and happy and in no particular need of assistance, did what my father had not done and came back home.
It is true what people so often tell you in the face of hardship or heartache: life goes on. I have always liked that expression, hackneyed though it may be, for its refusal of easy consolation, for everything that it declines to say. It does not promise an end to pain, like “time heals all wounds” and “this too shall pass.” It does not have the clean-slate undertones of “tomorrow is another day.” It says only that things—good things, bad things, thing-things; it does not specify—will not stop happening. That is not so much a reassurance as a reminder: you will not just get to sit there for as long as you want, drinking your sorrow neat. Not only will your own emotions begin to distract you; sooner or later, the rest of the world will likewise resume asserting its many needs. Well before you feel you are ready, you will have to go to work and clean the kitchen and pay the phone bill; you will have to listen to other people talking about the Nats game or the Congressional Black Caucus or daylight saving time; you will get mad about something unrelated, and laugh about something unrelated, and look at your partner and think about nothing at all except taking off her clothes. And the same goes for happiness. Nobody ever says “life goes on” after someone falls in love, but it does. As wonderful as those early besotted days are, you will not get to spend forever gazing into your beloved’s eyes and making middle-of-the-night pancakes and staying in bed together until two in the afternoon. Eventually, some new development will command your attention, and then some new development again after that.
This is the other idea implicit in “and”: that something else is about to happen. When the word first appeared in the English language, it meant “next,” and it still retains that tacit orientation toward the future. “X, Y, Z, and”: appended to the end of anything, it is an anti–stop sign, an indication that we are not yet done. (“And?” we say to someone when they have fallen silent without finishing their story or making their point; by which we mean “keep going.”) As a result, the feeling of “and” is not just a feeling of conjunction; it is also a feeling of continuation. The abundance toward which it gestures—the sense that there is always something more—is not only spatial but also temporal.
This abundance is one of the most wonderful things about life, and also one of the most difficult, because it throws into relief the constraints of our own existence. The world overflows with possibilities—with places to visit and things to learn and books to read and skills to master and people to meet and causes to champion and trajectories to pursue—but only a tiny fraction of them are available to each of us. As a result, although we all like to feel that we make choices about our life, much of what we do amounts to choosing against things, to making our peace with everything that we will never get to do. From the age of six or seven until my early twenties, for instance, I entertained the idea of pursuing many different careers: a wizard, a squire, a gymnast, a jockey, a novelist, a historian, an astronaut, a mathematician, a mountaineer.
I love my life and wouldn’t exchange it for any other, but I am not sure the faint contrails of longing left behind by all these other imagined futures ever fully disappear. That’s not because some part of me still wonders who else I could have been; it is just a general mourning for the foreclosure of possibility. So many opportunities are out of reach from the moment we are born, ruled out by circumstance, and so many more are eliminated as we age. “It is impossible to have every experience,” Virginia Woolf wrote, regretfully; at best we get a glimpse of a sliver of what we are missing—“like those glances I cast into basements when I walk in London streets.” Decades later, the poet Louise Glück described this problem as “metaphysical claustrophobia: the bleak fate of being always one person.” Every other possible existence, in Idaho or Honduras or Lahore, as a carpenter or baseball player or musical genius, as a sibling if we are an only child or an only child if we are the youngest of seven—all of these variations on the human experience are unavailable to us. We have, unavoidably, only our one lifetime, and no matter how energetic or interested or fortunate or long-lived we may be, we can only do so much with it. And so much, against the backdrop of the universe, can seem so very little.