Swinging Doors

I woke up last night at 2:48am to the telephone ringing. Hard as it was, I dragged myself downstairs to check the caller ID. It was my good friend, D, who I'm supposed to meet tonight in Southern Vermont to catch up with some of our other hometown friends. She had just gotten home and received a message from the State Police in Pennsylvania. Her mother had been found dead in her home, sitting at her computer. The dog had been barking for days.

D's mother isn't your average mom. Is any mother? D has spent the better part of her life trying to make some sense of her childhood and has learned, as the adult she's become, to welcome her mother back into her life, to share her own daughter with her mother, scary as that might have been. Her mother's childhood was so loosely and painfully strung together that she had little to no resources when it came time for her to parent D and her younger brothers. I met D when she 14 years old. I was 20 and had no idea she was so young. She had just moved into an apartment with a friend of mine and it never occurred to me, coming from my own sheltered youth, that a 14 year old could be living among our ranks.... all the LSD, crazy nights, music, travel. She held her own impressively. And we've grown up gracefully.

I may be getting in my car to drive to Pennsylvania now, instead of Southern Vermont. I don't know if there will be a funeral, a wake, a memorial of any kind. All I know is the phone call I received a few hours ago, in the quiet of night, and the hammering of thoughts since. D has a journey before her that so few of my friends have had to walk yet. We aren't quite at the age where our parents are starting to acquire the debilitating health issues of old age. I can't imagine the things she will discover about her mother, her own childhood and the deepest parts of herself, now that her mom has died.

Between the inhale and the exhale is a swinging door where we are constantly existing. Each swinging door has it's own story, history, herstory. D's mom's swinging door has both been closed and left wide open. We leave all kinds of ghosts behind when we die, in our letters, our sock drawers, old photographs. My heart is so not at this keyboard, not sitting in this morning office looking at the cows I need to go feed and milk. It's pressed up close to D, hoping I can provide enough support. Say the right thing. Pull her through nice and slow and steady.