My mother’s hair was the tallest I’d ever seen it. Coiffed high with expectation and shiny with joy. I loved that I got to have my mother at my wedding. I got dressed, she got dressed, and when she came to my hotel room to see me that Saturday afternoon, it surprised me how much I enjoyed having that moment. It wasn’t the one I thought would get me, but when she walked in and smiled, I cocked my head to the side and struck a pose. I thought, Look at me, Mama! I was happy that she was happy that I was happy that she was happy that I was happy. My breath caught in my throat and my chest swelled. We wrapped our arms around each other’s breathless bodies. The beading pressed little dimples into our skin. We made it, we got here. We won.

My mother “won” a lot of things she wasn’t supposed to have. The doctors handed her a prognosis of only a few years, but she stretched it out. She got the short straw and jabbed it in the eye of the world. Her lungs and heart lasted eight years—not two.

It was the big stuff I anticipated would hurt most. In the early days, I cried for the wedding she wouldn’t attend, the children she’d never meet, for my parents’ milestone anniversaries never reached. My chest heaved with never, never, never.

Grief and loss were sneakier than that. They wandered all over my house ready to deal their blows. They were hiding in my recipes and jewelry, stuff I got from my mother. They swirled up from the steam in my mug, filled with hazelnut coffee, her favorite. Those little bastards could get their licks in any day of the week. Turns out it was never just the big stuff.

To badly paraphrase Elisa Gabbert, anything you do every day is the stuff of real life. Life may feel wide open, but as each day passes, the range of movement constricts. The time I have “left,” I gobble up more of it in each and every moment. People come and go, whether I like it or not. I lose parts of myself and parts of others all the time. But I have to eat. The flowers bloom, whether I’m involved or not. In German, Gabbert writes, there’s a word for this sensation of aging: torschlusspanik, or “gate-closing panic.” The ways forward narrow, and our bodies bend back toward the earth.

A friend lost her mother in a memory ward. She told me the real heartbreaker was the placemats in the dining hall: the staff made collages with photographs of the residents’ favorite things and put the collections under plastic. The photographs made up simple compositions. A tulip, a slice of chocolate cake or apple pie. A brightly painted bench. A monarch landed on a leaf.

“It kills me,” my friend said. “Like, that’s it? This is all that’s left?”

Maybe it’s all we ever have. I think I’m supposed to take the biggest bites of life that I might, try to hang onto a snapshot here and there. Some bread and its breadcrumbs: that’s all life is. What broke my friend’s heart brought me a great sighing sense of relief. It’s the idea that even my old, sick self might have some little untouchable self inside her, a part that will still cry out, “There! That thing there! I like that!” It’s what remains. This moment, then the next, my job is to recognize what I can of life being lived and let go of the rest. I can’t carry it all around forever. I wasn’t built to. I don’t want to.

My mother got more life than she was supposed to, hard-won and heavy, so she saw me marry, she met my daughter, she visited my first home. But I wonder if we were any happier for what she got. And I wonder if I’m not supposed to say that the grass might’ve been greener on the other side, so let me put it another way: is the bucket list half-full or half-empty? The lesson is only that what doesn’t kill you hasn’t killed you. You know they only put her on the transplant list once her lungs were ready to kill her? It’s a Hail Mary at knifepoint.

I wonder if they know things on the memory ward, the way they know things in the preschool classroom. I wonder if we’re closer in touch with different things at each age, more or less sensitive to different parts of life, that’s all.

“You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit,” one of my daughter’s daycare teachers likes to intone at them.

One of the not-quite-kindergartens likes to reply, “You get what you get and you don’t throw a baby.”

It’s the baby and the bathwater, a tulip and maybe a slice of something sweet. Was it wedding cake? Who’s recipe for pie is this?

At first I was so sad for the never-evers, but we still had to pay our fare for each wasn’t-that-nice. It can’t be that the interesting part, the weight, is found in what we lost alone. Loss is the story of every life. We lose and lose and lose and it would take a thick stack of oversized placements, a stack to the sky, to begin to hint at the entirety of what we had and then we lost. What remains, it might just fit on a placemat, it has to, and what a beautiful arrangement it could make.

What do you do with the short straw? If I knew that’s what I had, I wonder if I’d do the same things I’d do with the long straw. Maybe it doesn’t change the game, just the duration. The rules are the same. I can see the edges of the playing field. The goal hasn’t moved, even if its shadow in the grass is a little longer, the time left on the clock a little shorter. I hear the tick of the clock and the space between, diastole, systole, expand and contract. Time to wash out the hairspray, let our hair dry in our sleep.

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