Everything Under the Sun

Sorry for all of the things

Standing in the produce aisle of a grocery co-op in England last summer, the brevity of everything landed on me, how quickly this family trip—and, in fact, our lives—were going by. I clenched at this alarming thought, and the gargantuan flat of blueberries I was holding slipped from my hands, striking the floor, and exploding everywhere with a terrific plastic crash. It was like a blueberry supernova, dozens of them rolling every which way.

I tiptoed out of the epicenter, squashing one or two despite all efforts, finally arriving at the manager’s desk up front. She was busy with something on a tablet. I delivered my news with heartfelt apologies.

“Ah, don’t worry about it, love,” she said, as she came out from behind her desk. “These things happen, don’t they.” Then we rounded the corner together and she saw what I’d done.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she said softly.

“I know,” I said. “Sorry again.”

She sent a teenaged assistant to get a mop, so I merged with a small cluster of onlookers, all of us wondering what idiot had done this. I no longer felt the brevity of everything, but instead like time had, perhaps, ground to a halt.

As the teen returned with a mop and bucket, I slinked along the outskirts of the scene and retrieved a second flat of blueberries, cradling it like I would a newborn child.

After the self checkout, I turned back as I reached the exit, just as the teen with the mop looked up at me. “I’m sorry,” I mouthed, and grimaced. He shrugged.

“How was the co-op?” Emma asked, as I unpacked the groceries back in her parents’ kitchen.

“Surprisingly challenging,” I said. “But I got blueberries.”

The following day, I took a train from my in-laws’ station in Oxford an hour or so into London. Simply moving around the train, getting to my seat, maneuvering past people in the most normal ways, I was apologized to at least a dozen times. It’s a very English thing.

A researcher named Kate Fox studied this for her book Watching the English, intentionally bumping into people (which in itself is astonishing), and found that about 80% of English people will apologize even when another person bumps into them.

“Oh! Sorry, sorry!” a man says to me as I walk near him on this London-bound train. We haven’t even come close to bumping into each other. I want to tell him there’s no need to apologize, but I worry he might then apologize for apologizing, so I let it be. So many apologies!

I’m struck by all these little moments of apologetic recognition, people just wanting things to continue smoothly in our mutual space. The train ride made me wonder if I’ve apologized enough, for all the things I’ve done, inadvertently and otherwise. Just by being alive.

I once had an ex call me up to apologize for how things had gone during our breakup, which had really been just a long, steady drifting apart with her finally leaving. She mentioned that her therapist had talked her into making this call. What was the point, I wondered? We’d been broken up for over a year, each of us in new relationships.

My first reaction was wanting to bow out of this whole thing, as it felt performative and perfunctory, but I went through with it. She offered her apology, which sounded lifeless to me. “Thank you,” I said, not feeling very thankful. I then returned an equally half-hearted apology to her, both of us now like two little kids who have been forced to apologize by a parent standing nearby with crossed arms.

I hung up feeling: Well, that was weird and pointless.

I didn’t think about this ex much, but I would think of her dad every so often. He was such a strange and wonderful man. He always called me Dear, which felt oddly intimate and formal, both. He’d been a doctor and a classical pianist, so brilliant at these two things. I googled him one day, wondering about him, and found his obituary. I said a little no out loud to myself at my desk.

It had been two years since he’d died, but I texted my ex, telling her how sorry I was to hear about her dad, how wonderful he was. She asked about my family, and I told her my parents were gone now, too, and she said how sorry she was. Obviously these sorries were not apologies, but instead an acknowledgment and sharing of each other’s sorrow. All of this felt so uncomplicated and overdue. We only wanted, now, good things for each other, wherever we were.

Since grief, and everything over the past few years, I sometimes feel small and clenched, bracing against all this loss. Other times I feel utterly cracked open, expansive with the combination of impermanence and timelessness.

There’s a bench outside our firehouse where I often sit on spring mornings, in this brief stretch we get here in the Hudson Valley when it’s no longer too cold, not yet too hot. I’m here with my laptop in the sun, while people stride by with their dogs, others driving along our small town’s main street. Sometimes they honk at each other, annoyed; other times they give a friendly wave to let someone in.

It’s in these flashes, all of us under these last, fading spring blossoms, everyone in motion, that I feel it: a deep and sudden recognition that none of this will last, that all of this and all of us will be gone—but just now this feels miraculous. How can I feel anything but tenderness for all of these people? Sure, one of them might cut me off later today, when I’ll have slipped back into being a separate person, driving to school pickup, muttering at the three cars in front of me, which I will think of as “traffic.” But right now, look how everyone is doing their best, trying so hard, so imperfectly, so vulnerable and fleeting. See how beautiful everything is. Look at all of these dear, dear people moving amongst one another, ever so briefly, in this shared morning light.