“Some Things Are Meant to Be” - Why This Song Breaks Your Heart

Sutton Foster and Megan McGinnis in Little Women

by Chris Peterson

When people talk about Little Women: The Musical, the conversation almost always lands on Jo’s “Astonishing.” And sure, I get it. It is the big one. The belt-your-face-off anthem. The song that makes every teen Jo in America go, this is my moment.

But the song that actually wrecks me is not “Astonishing.” It is the duet that shows up later, quiet enough that it can almost slip past you if you are not paying attention.

“Some Things Are Meant to Be.” It is devastating because it does not try to be.

Beth does not fight the truth with poetic metaphors or big theatrical language. She does not dress it up. She just says it, calmly and plainly, like she has already made peace with what Jo is still refusing to touch. We expect tragedy to come in loud, with crashing chords and sobbing crescendos. This one does not roar. It whispers.

And that whisper is what makes it unbearable.

A lot of musical theatre songs about death lean on abstraction. The afterlife as a metaphor. Grief as some pretty image you can sing around without naming it. “Some Things Are Meant to Be” does not do that. The title alone tells you where you are headed. There is no flourish. No denial. No bargaining. Just the bluntest truth.

Some things are meant to be. And in that plainness, there is nowhere to hide.

Because grief is not always operatic. Sometimes it is small. Sometimes it is sitting on a couch at two in the morning saying the thing you have been trying not to say. Sometimes it is watching someone fold a shirt you know will never be worn again. Sometimes it is realizing, with this awful clarity, that you cannot stop the tide from coming in.

That is why the song lingers. It is not only about Beth and Jo. It is about all of us.

It is the friend who left too soon. The grandparent who did not make it to your next milestone. The pet you still expect to see in the corner of the room for a split second before you remember. It is every long goodbye you did not ask for, the ones that shape you even as they hollow you out.

Everyone has had a Beth. Or will.

Someone whose leaving teaches you more about love than their staying ever could.

And that is the gut punch. This is not a theatrical tragedy. It is a mirror. Whether you hear it onstage, on a cast recording, or sung by someone in a college recital who is about to break halfway through the last phrase, it hits because you are not just watching the March sisters. You are hearing your own life echo back at you.

By the time it ends, you do not feel gutted because it got huge. You feel gutted because it did not.

It leaves you in the quiet, the way real loss does, when there is nothing left to do, nothing left to fix, just the shape of love with nowhere to go. Jo is standing there holding the weight of her sister, and the audience is holding their own version of that weight, too.

That is why “Some Things Are Meant to Be” devastates. Not because it is loud, but because it is honest. It tells you the one thing you do not want to hear and already know is true.

Some goodbyes cannot be avoided. Only endured.