“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 usually circles around Jo’s anthemic “Astonishing.” And fair enough. It is the showstopper, the kind of song that inspires young performers to belt until the rafters shake. But tucked away later in the score is a quieter piece, a duet so deceptively simple it sneaks up on you and leaves you shattered. I’m talking about “Some Things Are Meant to Be.”

This is Beth’s swan song. The moment when the most fragile of the March sisters, who has lived her life in the shadow of her sisters’ dreams, finally accepts her fate. The words aren’t complicated. The melody isn’t flashy. And maybe that is why it hits so hard, because grief rarely arrives with grandeur. It slips in softly, like a tide rising until suddenly you are underwater.

The power of “Some Things Are Meant to Be” lies in its restraint. Instead of dramatizing death with thunderclaps of orchestration, the song feels almost conversational, almost ordinary. Two sisters on a beach, one ready to fight for forever, the other ready to let go. Jo sings with desperate energy, as if sheer willpower could hold Beth here. Beth, in turn, floats through the lines with heartbreaking serenity.

That stillness, the calm acceptance in Beth’s voice, is what makes the song devastating. We expect tragedy to roar, but here it whispers. And in that whisper is something unshakably true. Sometimes the people we love most are the ones who teach us how to let go.

There are plenty of great musical theatre songs about death, but most of them lean toward poetry or metaphor. What makes “Some Things Are Meant to Be” stand apart is its plainness. Its very title tells you what’s coming. There’s no flourish, no denial, no attempt to rewrite reality. Some things are meant to be. Beth says it without fear, and in doing so, forces Jo, and us, to face it.

It’s that simplicity that devastates. Because grief is not always loud or operatic. Sometimes it is a conversation on the couch at two in the morning. Sometimes it is a parent folding the last shirt of someone who will never wear it again. Sometimes it is watching the tide roll in, realizing you cannot stop it.

What makes this song linger is that it is not just about Beth and Jo. It is about us. It is about the friend we lost too soon. The grandparent who quietly slipped away. The childhood pet whose absence we still feel when we glance at the corner of the room. It is about the long, slow goodbyes that mark our lives, the ones that shape us even as they undo us.

Everyone has had a Beth, or will have one. Someone whose leaving teaches us more about love than their staying ever could. That is why the song is devastating. It is not a theatrical tragedy. It is a mirror. And no matter when we encounter it, whether onstage, in a cast recording, or sung by a friend in a college recital, we hear echoes of our own goodbyes.

By the time the song ends, you feel gutted not because of the volume, but because of the silence it leaves behind. Jo is left holding the weight of her love with no place to put it, and we are left feeling the same. It is the kind of musical theatre moment that lingers in the bones, reminding us that not every story is about triumph. Some stories are about love that refuses to die even when the body does.

And that is why “Some Things Are Meant to Be” devastates. Because in its quiet, it tells us the one thing we do not want to hear but know to be true. Some goodbyes cannot be avoided. Only endured.