Way Back in Another Lifetime
I traveled the world with a backpack full of innocence and abandon. From the top of Throng-La pass at 18,000 feet in Nepal to the orchid draped hillsides I floated by on the Rio Dulce in Guatemala, I drank the nectar of the world-- the sweet connections of children wanting to touch my hair in Haiti, the contrast of poverty woven with joy and wealth braided with despair. Throughout these journeys, there were direct and indirect experiences that stuck to my heart like Velcro, like a warning light, like a beacon of humanity.
In 1993, while living in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, in the month following the sudden death of my father, our ex-pat community learned that a 21-year-old college student from the States had gone hiking outside of town, took a misstep, and fell to his death. I was obsessed with this story, imagining his mother's loss (her only child), imagining her having to travel to Mexico to recover his body. I've never forgotten this as if I was already being prepared for what was to come.
When the massive tsunami hit the beaches of Thailand in 2004, I felt myself get pulled into the stories pouring in from bystanders and survivors. I had walked those beaches a decade before and when I saw images of towns I'd visited being obliterated by the waves I was stunned and obsessed. This is a very dangerous place for me to visit-- once pictures get in my head they seem to be permanently etched and I have a tendency to languish, imagining all the parents, spouses, children, and friends that lost a loved one. I stopped reading or watching anything after learning about a mother who was trying to make it up a stairway in a hotel as the wave surged behind her. She had her little boy in her arms and her eyes were wild with desperation. Someone above her tried to help and the mother, using that superhuman strength that only shows up at times like this, projected her son into this stranger's arms before being swept away by the ocean. I could not sleep for days after learning this. I could not sleep for days.
During Hunter’s first year in college, several fraternities and sororities banded together to rent a houseboat on Lake Shasta. Hunter had considered going but decided it didn’t feel safe to him being stuck on a boat with people he didn’t know well. One of the students didn’t return home because he got drunk and fell off the boat. For weeks I felt a mixture of deep empathy and horror for the mother of this boy.
Then, in the early months of 2020, I found myself reading books that just landed in my hands—Caravan of No Despair, a memoir about a mother that lost her only child at the age of 14 and Addict’s Mom, a book I thought was going to have a happy ending, only to discover that her son died of an overdose—I stopped reading as soon as I read this, shaking with anger and disappointment.
In a weird way, I had my ear tuned to the polarities of life, no longer naïve about the stunning ways life gets turned on its end yet I refused to entertain the idea that tragedy could strike inside my own home.
Back in another lifetime, my motherhood was intact, my child was becoming a man on the hairpin turns of anxiety and expectation and love. I believed he would bury me, not the other way around.