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Her Death, Written One Year Later

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Photo: She was young and life was still ahead.

For years I was steeled for her death. I never knew, when the phone rang, if it would be news that she had died, alone in some city, or if hers would be the voice I’d hear. Either the harsh accusations or the begging born of anguished paranoia. The urgent instructions to call this corporate giant or that estranged relative in order to vindicate her once and for all. Sometimes it was the kind of call that ran the gamut from invective, to sobbing desperation, to sinuous manipulation. I was to drive 400 miles, tonight, and take her home to live with me, in her rightful place, because surely, I owed her that. Didn’t I owe her my life? She never hesitated to remind me. And the gift of life meant I owed her everything she could demand of me, any sacrifice, my family, my job, my very self.

The manipulation-through-guilt was always hardest to take. I had spent most of my life, even as a tiny child, believing that her fate was somehow in my hands, and that any unhappiness, or dissatisfaction or mere discomfort was somehow about me: my fault. If only I could do just the right thing I could fix it. I alone could keep her from falling into the subway’s path. I alone could keep her from loneliness late at night when her work was done. So, as an adult, I had to live day to day knowing that she was miserable beyond my own conception of misery, and that there was nothing I could do about it. The darkness in her mind made a reality that was almost too much for me to think about. Years of therapy eased me to the brink of understanding that I could not protect her, and harder yet to believe, that I never could. I certainly could not keep her alive when half the time I had no idea where she was. And besides, she was consumed by madness, totally lost in her own irrational maze cluttered, it seemed, with doors she could slam, but absolutely no exits. As a grown daughter, uncertainty and helplessness defined my role. However, I believed I was prepared, at least, for news of her death.

The five years that she was back in my world, living peacefully and safely, medicated and fairly stable, were so much better. She was back where I could see and touch her. At least a version of her had returned. But she was not really identifiable as the mother of my childhood. The spark and the laughter were gone. The need was huge. Her fears had abated to simmer just below the surface. We could “chat,” and stroll through Wal-Mart shopping for blouses and selecting underwear with an invisible panty-line. Each time I picked her up to go have coffee, or stop at CVS for moisturizer, she always made a point of asking about Dan and the children. Because she had missed 20 years of news, I spent some time filling her in about the state of the world. She had missed the presidencies of Bush Sr. and Clinton. She did not recall ever hearing the term “gay rights,” nor did she realize the rainforest was at risk. She asked innocent, childlike questions. She thought Republicans still stood for small government. The state of things confused her. Our roles had fully reversed. I worried about her living situation and worked to develop a rapport with the staff at the two assisted living facilities where she lived during that time.

Meanwhile, I ached to actually look forward to our visits. I wanted desperately to love our time together, but the time was painful, a chore, a fact which in turn haunted me with guilt. She demanded much and gave little in return. Unlike a child, whose delight in life fills your heart even as you do and do and do for them, my mother’s primary emotion was dissatisfaction, seconded only by deep sorrow. She mourned things she knew she’d lost and even things she could not remember ever having. All she knew was that her life was empty. I felt the terrible burden of being the only thing to fill it.

At this point, my preparedness for her death waned. I became sure that she’d outlive people decades older than she. Her mind was unstable, but her body, as always, was strong. And now that she was housed, fed, saw the doctor, what would stand in the way of the tremendous longevity I imagined? The weeks and months and years passed. My life was full and busy and rich; my children grew, my job fulfilled me, my husband loved me and completed the circle of our family. On the edges, never quite knowing how to be included, was my mother, who really wanted only me. The sight of me pricked her longing for the way things used to be. She saw in me her only hope of recapturing the past, her glorious past when she was beautiful, strong, lucid, admired, and had a trophy daughter worthy of her. The life I now lived, as mommy, wife and schoolteacher, did not fit her dream vision. She tried to care about it but couldn’t really. She dutifully asked about me, my job, my family. She enjoyed hearing tales of my children’s brilliance and accomplishments, because she could be reminded of when I was a brilliant and accomplished child. But always it was me, and only me, that she wanted. For my part, I was willing, glad really, to tether her to life, be her tie to any shred of happiness or pleasure. I imagined this role carrying me into my sixties, long after my children left home and into a time when I could give her more of myself, as she aged.

But all that changed. Despite a move from a brief but unpleasant assisted living situation to a warm and supportive nursing home in Great Barrington, she sank deeper into depression. At that point, even I was hard pressed to provide her with so much as a glimmer of pleasure. Enjoyment of any kind was out of her reach. She was withdrawing further and further into a death in life, as she spent every minute of every day lying in a dark room on her bed, her cardigan pulled up over her shoulders. Her dignity, you see, never faded. She would not allow herself to languish in her nightgown, under the covers all day. She got up, dressed, combed her hair, dabbed some mascara onto her pale lashes, and lay back down on top of the made bed to doze her life away in the cradle of deep depression. And then she got sick.

Her hospitalization and emergency surgery just after Christmas brought her quickly to the brink of death. Post-surgical pneumonia prompted the doctors to call me at work to ask for a suspension of her DNR order. They believed that she could come through this infection with treatment. What do you want to do? If we don’t intubate, she will die. Soon.

I wasn’t ready. I was pretty sure she wasn’t ready. She and I had spoken several years before, when she prepared her living will. She said then that she did not want a life on machines, but she was also living in the artificial world of her own mind, and I don’t think she believed in the inevitability of her own death.

And anyway, this was different. She could come through this. And I still did not know the results of the lab tests on the mass removed from her colon. We had no real diagnosis. I stood in the hallway outside my classroom, the phone cord stretched taut, and cried to the doctors: “Am I condemning her or saving her? Can she live?” I suspended the DNR and rushed to Pittsfield to see her.

There she lay in the ICU, a frail, pale woman breathing on a machine, an innocent Vader, with air pumped in and out on a timer. She was, essentially, not there. She could barely register my existence. If this was going to be goodbye, it sucked. There it was again. The guilt. It was at this point that the surgeon finally told me the lab results: cancer. The massive tumor he had removed from her colon was as malignant as they come. If she lived through this pneumonia, what would she face? Another kind of death, this one slow and painful? But would we both be ready then?

Three days in the ICU on penicillin and her pneumonia was cured. She was healing amazingly well from the abdominal surgery. She got out of the ICU and within 3 hours was making me laugh. Who was this woman? She was drugged and in pain, exhausted and confused, so her witty comeback to a comment I made to the nurse stunned me. Not to mention the fact that she had neither laughed at my amusing comments nor made any of her own for over 20 years.

Back at the nursing home, she was a woman reborn. Though fragile and thin, with no appetite for food, suddenly my mother found her appetite for life and experience. She sat up in bed and eagerly visited when I came. She began to tell stories of her childhood and share memories of mine. My children came to see her and it was as if they were meeting their grandmother for the first time. My youngest, Maggie, listened to stories of the horses on the Bauman farm, and tales of the retired polo pony, Johnny-Boy. Maggie was delighted with this new grandmother with horsey stories to tell. As we left the room at the end of that first post-near-death visit, Maggie took my hand and said, “Mommy, she’s nice.”

I had a mother. I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten her, but there she was. She had complete amnesia about all the years of hardship, vitriol, anger, anguish, sorrow, and emptiness. Her forgetfulness sparked in me an ability to live only in the present, with this woman who was my mother, and memories of a mother I once had, and to forget the madwoman who haunted so much of my adult life. This mother did not make impossible demands. My desire to do whatever I could for her increased with every passing day.

Somehow, I recognized this woman. Once luscious and full breasted, she had become skeletally frail. On the once beautiful face, her gaunt smile had become a rictus. Her touch on my skin was cold. And yet, she was familiar. I felt like a daughter again. And I remembered something. I loved her. Even though I’d been saying the words to her for years, they had always made me sad.

Last year, as I watched my mother’s rebirth and death, my love for her tapped me on the shoulder and said, I’m still here, you know. That love, it must have been standing in my blind spot for a time.

I had about a month before she began the active process of dying. Although she could not fathom it, her days were numbered. She barely ate, and finally, with permission and the advent of hospice, stopped altogether. It was only a matter of time. I thought: I am not ready, but I can be. I believed that I only needed some time. Time with her. Time to part. To help her leave. To forgive her. To forgive myself. To love us both enough to say goodbye.

Take it from me. We’re never ready. But the parting is still important. I crammed 20 years of togetherness into a 12-day bedside vigil. I never tired. Never chafed. I could not bring myself to leave her side. Every tender massage of her feet or hands was an opportunity for me. Every offer of a sip of juice was a way of loving her. The music I played for her, well, it made me feel better anyway.

My world shrank to a 15 square foot space. Once again, as we had for the first 12 years of my life, we shared a room. Two twin beds, mother and daughter.

My few childhood memories of my mother as a nurturer are from when I was sick, my skin hot, my throat sore. Even though she had to go to work during the day, when she came home, she sat beside me and laid her hand, cool from the winter air outside, on my face. This time, in her last days, it was my hand on her brow. My soothing talk, her restless sleep. My bustling, her gratitude.

I lived every day of those last weeks in a state of awe. Every sense was tuned. When we bathed her body, childlike in its state of starvation, its beauty made me cry. Her skin, like silk flowers, encased her once strong bones. Her face, smooth-skinned even at 75, could occupy my eyes for hours. Much of the time I sat and read or read student essays or recited memories. Many hours passed without my being aware of what had transpired.

I watched her watching the guest who spent those final days in the room with us, invisible to all but my mother. She stared fixedly at a spot beyond me, murmured, “I need more time,” and yet reached out her arms. She kept a vigil just as I did. She seemed never to sleep. At other times, she watched me intently. We exchanged gazes.

Though she did not have enough fluid with which to make tears, I soaked the pillow by her head as I lay my face beside hers and grieved. In those last days, my mother gave me the gift of her mothering. Although she was busy strong-arming death to gain another hour or day of life, she found the wherewithal to wrap her bony arm around me as I cried on the pillow, to stroke my hair, to gentle me towards her eventual, regrettable leaving.

I yearned to crawl into the bed with her and wrap her up with my body, hold her and ease her way, but I couldn’t. She was so aching and sore in the last days that she could not tolerate any touch but the brush of my lips on her brow, or my open palm cushioning her hand.

She lived seven days past the day the nurses said she could not possibly make it another 24 hours. During those timeless days, I forgave her and asked for her forgiveness. I told her I would write about her. I told her I loved her. I said, “Give my love to Aunt Thelma and Uncle Mike.” I told her she could go. I told her she had to let herself go. I said, “Don’t worry about me. I’ll see you again.”

She waited till Dan could be with me before she took her last breath. She had teased me, though, into believing that though she was dying, she would never really die. I was in the bathroom, washing up, when Dan called out, “Vanessa, I think this is it.” I rushed to her bed. She was staring, wide eyed, right at me. The quiet in the room was deafening. The strained sound of her breathing, the accompaniment to my days and nights, was agonizingly, horribly silenced. After weeks of watching her inch her way out the door of life, when the door finally closed behind her, I was left absolutely stunned and bereft. “Is this really the way it is? Is she gone?” I wailed. Her leaving was so permanent; a trapdoor opened in my chest. But: she was still there with me. I could feel her beside me, around me, waiting for my last goodbye.

At last, I could crawl under the covers with her, wrap her in my arms and hold that body one last time. The one that gave me life. I owed that to myself.

The preceding was written in 2005, on the first anniversary of my mother’s death.

The Entrance of the Irrational

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These photos of my mother at the peak of her career are also from the years during which she began to experience signs of schizophrenia, unbeknownst to me or anyone else. Hindsight is an archaeological dig, sifting spotty memories and scraps of paper with her increasingly unreadable scribbles from inside a bottomless well of compassion and love.

The word “rational” was spoken often by my mother. And, by my father too, in another home at the far end of Pennsylvania. Starting very young, I learned what the word meant through the context clues of a lifetime. I inferred that emotion was not rational, but love could be, under certain circumstances. That compassion was illogical, but existed. That religion was not and never would be rational, and thus (at best) not worth our time and (at worst) a societal cancer. It was not until I was six or seven that one of my parents finally acquiesced and took me inside a church.

It was my father. I had asked many times before and been told no, or simply been pulled past any and all houses of worship by a firm tug on linked hands.

I knew nothing about what these buildings were. But as I was pulled by the hand around my narrow world, I recognized (from the outside only) that they shared certain qualities, shapes, and imagery.

Just inside the entrance of this first-ever church, neck bent back, I whispered, “The top of the ceiling is very far away.”

I pulled my father by the hand to sit. I knew what a chair was. And a stool. I ate my breakfast sitting on a stool. I also knew what a bench was. When I took walks with my mother in Central Park, benches were where I’d rest my short legs. But those benches were nothin like these.

Even the windows were outsized, and so high in the walls I could never hope to look out of them. I loved the way the sun carried the colors of the windows into the space and spread it in long shapes on the floor and opposite wall.

After several minutes, I asked, “When will the giants come out?”

I was being rational. What else could be explained by such tall ceilings, high windows, and huge benches? Clearly, giants lived here.

Logic. Reason. Cause and effect. These principles ruled the thinking of my parents. Formerly allied with the Objectivist Movement and members of Ayn Rand’s inner-circle-once-removed, they rejected psychology, emotional sensitivity, and unconditional love.

Each of them told the story with great delight, narrating my first experience inside a church, thinking there would be giants. I had passed some kind of test. Cute, logical Vanessa using data to draw a conclusion that made sense in her six-year-old mind. But they never really explained to me in any satisfactory way what the beautiful building was actually for. Their contempt for religion did not permit them to express what such a space means to some—many—people.

The superiority of logic and reason ruled the world I lived in. My empathic little heart, my inborn intuitiveness, and the fact that beautiful music and paintings made me cry were downplayed—basically unacknowledged—while my intellect and capacity for drawing crisp inferences were raised up as my greatest qualities.

My mother’s mind-over-matter strength of will was a constant in my life. Her fierce commitment to career. Her—for that era especially—meteoric rise in the world of fashion marketing. Her ascent from copywriting lackey to big boss and decider. Her cubby at L’Oreal of Paris became a huge corner office at Peck and Peck in just a few years.

The move from NYC to Buffalo just a few years before the end of high school never seemed rational to me. It felt like a disaster. It was a wound that festered until I went to college and was happy and free. But, as ever, my mother’s version of irreproachable logic prevailed and, as always, I was able to see things from her point of view. A steppingstone—more responsibility in charge of marketing for a whole department store chain—this job will lead her back to NYC and bigger and better things. I would see.

One day, when I was a senior in high school, the book my mother was reading, left splayed on a table, spine broken, registered on my awareness. Not the typical escapist mystery novel she usually favored to unwind, this book looked more like a paperback textbook. It was called Seth Speaks by Jane Roberts. Reading the back, I was confused but did not try too hard to figure out what it was about. As large as Lee Park loomed in my awareness, I had my own problems to deal with. Namely Latin and chemistry, not to mention loneliness and homesickness, and a keen awareness that as nice as the girls in my class were, they were insubstantial stand-ins for the people I left behind in the school I’d called home for most of my life.

But after that, when I saw my mother reading the book, I noted that, rather than relaxing into the couch with her book held loosely in one hand, she sat hunched over Seth Speaks, shoulders curled inward, pen tightly gripped. She annotated and underlined wildly. A stack of Seth sequels beside her bed revealed a long-term plan.

Occasionally she’d read aloud to me, something that was clearly profoundly meaningful to her but that I could barely follow, so limited was my frame of reference at the time.

One day, something she read penetrated more deeply, and I said, “Wait. Say that again?”

This woman, Jane Roberts, was not writing about her ideas or research or philosophy. She was speaking for someone else. But not someone real. A being. An entity. It was called channeling. She was channeling the self-named Seth. His words, her pen. His words, inside her head.

As bereft of spiritual instruction as I had been my entire life, I was lost. This sounded, most definitely, irrational. 

What has hindsight revealed to my brain that combines both the rational and the intuitive, a fact I’ve come to embrace?

My mother was searching for answers to explain the voices she heard inside her own head. The brilliant brain of Lee Park could not reconcile her conviction that reason, rationality, and objective truth were the only reality with the fact that she could hear things no one else could.

Jane Roberts gave her hope—for an answer she might be able to live with.

As it turned out, there was no answer outside of madness, and not really much hope, either.

Mother on the Bed*

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Third photo taken pre-cancer diagnosis but only 6 months before her passing.

Mother lies like an Etruscan noblewoman
on the bed, arms crossed over her bosom.
A little pot of pansies on the sill
was a gift I brought months ago. 

Somebody waters the plant, I suppose,
now and then, but it is withering slowly
like her breasts, once like sovereign orbs,
now androgynous swells beneath her hands.

Her eyes open. I strain to remember
what color they were, once.
I watch as they stare into middle distance,
the cogs clicking awkwardly as she registers:

the ceiling, her daughter, and,
I imagine last of all, “I am still alive.”
Their color, now a black translucency
behind which all is hidden,

was once golden, a darker shade to
match her youthful, cotton candy hair,
now slicked in gray strands
to her head. Somebody loves us all.

*Inspired by a poetry prompt from my son, Maggie Haas, during one or another poetry month in recent times. The prompt was to use a line from “Filling Station” by Elizabeth Bishop. I chose her last line, which is also mine: “Somebody loves us all.”

The Passport Office part 2

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To say there has been “clamoring” for the second part of the Passport Office would be an overstatement. However, I am very gratified that several folks said they would prefer to see part 2 sooner rather than later. I’m not completely sure, but the day described in this chapter may be the most surreal of my life. Also, it was the first time I was faced directly, full-frontal, with Lee’s not-to-be-denied state of delusional mental illness. This day unfolded just a few months before her first arrest and hospitalization. Thank you for reading.

The scene: Boar’s Head Inn, Charlottesville, VA. (This picture is the right era, circa early 1980s.)

The Passport Office Part 2

Scene VI

In car heading south on Rt. 29.

LEE has her eyes closed and is leaning back against the headrest. Vanessa reaches for the stereo to turn the music back on.

STEREO (loud)

Love from the bottom to the top
Turn like a—

Vanessa quickly reduces volume

STEREO (faint)

 …wheel—(he’s alright)
See for yourself (the Lord won’t mind)
We’re gonna move (right now)
Turn like a wheel inside a wheel

Scene VII

The car is pulled over on the side of the highway along with seven or eight other vehicles. Several State Troopers are issuing tickets. VANESSA has shut off the music again.

VANESSA

(Looking around.)

I don’t get it. Why did they stop us?

LEE

(Looks horrorstruck—her eyes are huge, mouth opening and closing around words she cannot muster. It looks as if she’s gasping for air. Suddenly, she pulls herself together. Making a decision, she opens her car door.)

VANESSA

(Reaching for her mother’s arm to pull her back)

No! Mother, you absolutely cannot get out of the car at a traffic stop!

LEE

(Looks at VANESSA over her shoulder and hisses)

We’ve done nothing wrong!

VANESSA

Don’t get out of this car! It’s totally not okay!

LEE

(Gets out of car) 

Excuse me! (Imperiously, gesturing at nearby trooper)

Cars speed by on the highway just feet from the pulled-over cars and troopers. The neckline of LEE’s beige silk blouse flaps in the wind. She holds it closed with one hand and slants the other hand over her eyes to shield them from the lowering sun. The trooper sees her and walks briskly to her.

TROOPER

Ma’am, please, get back in your vehicle.

LEE

(Talking over him)

You need to let us go. We can’t be late.

TROOPER

Ma’am, get back in the car.

LEE

Why have you stopped us? And all these people?

TROOPER

We will get to you as soon as possible.


LEE

But we did nothing wrong!

TROOPER

(clearly exasperated)

You were driving in an HOV lane.

LEE

What is that?

TROOPER

Ma’am, please get back in your vehicle.

LEE

How can you pull us over for driving in a lane we don’t know about?

TROOPER

The HOV lanes are well marked, Ma’am. High occupancy lanes are for carpoolers during rush hour. A driver and at least two passengers to utilize this lane.

LEE

(Flicking her hand in the general direction of the highway)

That’s ridiculous.

TROOPER

Ma’am…

LEE

(Talking over him, voice pitched a bit high. VANESSA, in the car, hears the panic in her mother’s voice.)

If you don’t let us leave, it could well create an international incident. That is all I am permitted to say due to extremely intricate matters of state.

VANESSA

(In the car, slouches lower in her seat, exuding pure devastation.

TROOPER

Ma’am (he reaches for her arm to guide her back to the car)

LEE

(Flinches away from him and takes a step backwards)

No! Don’t touch me. (Pauses. The trooper looks briefly paralyzed.) You do not understand what is at stake. We cannot be late. My future husband—that’s all I can tell you at this moment—will be most displeased with you. He wants everything to go smoothly. Time is of the essence.

VANESSA

(Murmuring under her breath)

“Time is of the essence?” Oh God.

LEE

I don’t mean to be rude, but my daughter and I are leaving. You can’t stop us.

TROOPER

Ma’am, please do not do that. Of course we can stop you. A traffic ticket is not worth becoming a fugitive and having one of these officers go after you. (He bends to look into the car at VANESSA behind the wheel and addresses her) Young lady, do not drive away. Do you understand?

VANESSA

(Nods vigorously)

LEE glares at VANESSA and then at the TROOPER. She returns to the car, walking stiffly, her body reflecting equal parts rage and fear. VANESSA turns the music back on.

STEREO

God help us, help us to surmise

These slippery people help us understand

VANESSA and LEE sit in silence.

Scene VIII

VANESSA pulls the car gingerly into traffic. LEE holds the paper given to her by the trooper.

VANESSA

You know, I saw those signs saying HOV but I didn’t really pay attention. They must be new. At least we just got a warning.

LEE

(Looking anxiously out her window. Bites at a cuticle.)

Mm-hmm.

STEREO

No one here can recognize you
Here is everything that you like

Feelings without explanations

Some things are hard to describe

The sound of a cigarette burning

A place where everything spins

And the sound inside your mind is playing all the time

You’re playing with a heart of steel…

LEE

(Softly)

Let’s turn the music off, shall we, Darling?

VANESSA snaps the off button and ejects the tape. She lifts one butt cheek and stuffs the tape into her back pocket.

Scene IX

VANESSA is pulling off Rt. X onto X. LEE has pulled her lipstick out of her purse. She applies a fresh coat of some tawny beige-pink color. Drops the tube into her bag and removes her new passport. In the light of the dash, VANESSA sees her mother run her fingers over it, riffle the pages, lift it to her nose.

VANESSA

Does it have a smell? The brand-new smell of government issue vinyl?

LEE

(Still muted)

Yes, it does, in fact. (After a pause, she goes on, in a much stronger voice, giving instructions.) I’ve been receiving last-minute information. (Turns to look at her daughter.) This is what we are to do. When we pull in at the Boar’s Head, drive directly to the pond. On that road there will be three sedans waiting. You are not to get out of the car. I’m to tell you quite specifically that only I am to get out, and only after the security guards have reached my door. You and I are to say our goodbyes in the car. Once I’m out, you must drive away. I asked when I can contact you and was told that within 48 hours you will receive a message. A phone call, I believe.

VANESSA is silent, staring ahead into the yellow path of the headlights.

LEE

Do you understand, Vanessa?

VANESSA

Yes.

LEE

Darling, don’t worry. It will be perfectly fine. You must trust me.

VANESSA glances at her mother. Golden halo of soft hair around a strong face, lit by orange dash lights. LEE does not turn her head to her daughter until VANESSA has returned her eyes to the road.

LEE

You have always trusted me, haven’t you. (This was not a question but a statement.) I am your momma after all.

VANESSA cannot speak.

Scene X

VANESSA drives, according to instructions, through the darkened campus of the Boar’s Head Inn towards the pond. As they get close, it is evident in the light from the headlamps that there are no cars waiting. VANESSA drives along the pond road and turns right at the next intersection, heading in the direction of the exit. She pulls over and stops. VANESSA gets out of the car and walks a few feet onto the grass. She bends in half, her head dangling lower than her knees, her hands touching the grass. After a minute she rights herself. She opens the car door and sits on the seat, feet still on the ground. She feels her mother’s touch, briefly, in the middle of her back. A few fingertips, there and gone in an instant. VANESSA turns, closes the door, puts the car in gear and starts to drive.

VANESSA

Sorry about that.

VANESSA glances at her mother who is looking out her window, hands folded in her lap. Nothing makes sense. There is nothing LEE could possibly do now that would seem like a logical response to everything that has happened. As she pulls out onto 250, VANESSA sees LEE put her fingers into her purse and lay them atop the new passport lying innocently on top of her wallet.

In a few minutes, VANESSA turns left, toward home. Neither woman speaks. VANESSA pulls into the semi-circular front driveway. She had remembered to turn the front light on this morning, so very long ago, before they left on their errand. When LEE gets out, she has just enough light to see clearly as she unlocks the front door. VANESSA reaches into the backseat for her sweater and follows her mother, who has already begun turning on the lights.

The Passport Office part 1

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Welcome to the second post in SpiralWoman’s newly purposed blog. This installment is chronologically in approximately 1983, about 11 years before the Pick Up and Drop Off I last posted. It is the first part of a longer chapter that is written in script form. It came to me to write the scene this way, and I tried it. Thus far, reviews are mixed. Two people have read it. One was not sure and the other gave a thumbs up. Wait until the second installment next week before deciding what you think. For now, part 1, The Passport Office.

CAPTION: After a certain age, Lee was always conscious of how she was seen. Photos were hard for her because she could not help posing. It mattered so much to her to control perception of her. This became increasingly challenging as her mental illness worsened through from the late 1970s on. Descriptions of all photos can be found at bottom of this post.

THE PASSPORT OFFICE part 1

Scene I

The living room, early morning.

Vanessa enters, rubbing her eyes, and passes through to the kitchen. When she comes back in, her mother is emerging from the room she calls “The Study.”

LEE

There is something important we have to do today. Get dressed. I need you to go with me to DC. If you drive, I can run into the Passport Office and not have to worry about parking.

VANESSA

Why are you going to the Passport Office? (Gulps hot coffee. Spits it back into cup.)

LEE

I need an expedited passport. I had not realized that mine expired. Okay, time is short. Let’s go! (Stalks elegantly out of the room, towards the hallway leading to bedrooms.)

VANESSA stands still in her red and white striped PJs gazing after her mother.

LEE

(calling from offstage)

TIME IS SHORT.

VANESSA follows the sound of LEE’s voice.

Scene II

Northbound on 29 towards Washington DC.

VANESSA is driving her mother’s Honda.

LEE

(half turned toward her daughter)

I believe you know a little bit about the communication channel that has opened up in my brain. The last few weeks I’ve been receiving truly life altering, loving, and inspiring messages from the King of Burma. It seems he is a compassionate forward-thinking ruler who needs a strong, loving woman by his side to rule. He has chosen me.

VANESSA

(trying to quell rising panic)

Is this real?

LEE

(face animated with shock)

Darling, of course it’s real! I would never lie to you! What do you mean is it real?

VANESSA

You realize most people do not have direct brain-to-brain channels of communication. Why doesn’t he call you? Or write a letter?

LEE

(looking patient as she tries to explain)

Of course, most people don’t. But these last years I’ve been evolving to a higher plane, as I thought you knew and understood. We have not spoken directly about it much because I sense it upsets you. And you are busy with work, and DAN, and still getting healthy… (Takes a skinny brown cigarette out of her bag and lights up.)

VANESSA

Window please, Mother.

LEE

(opens window, blows out a plume of smoke)

And he can’t call or write. Security reasons. There’s danger if the wrong people get wind of the plan. That’s why we have to be so careful. Why we can’t tell a soul. He’s sending emissaries to pick me up this evening at the Boar’s Head Inn. When you get back to the house after, you may find press there. He warned me that might happen, though we hope not.

VANESSA

You didn’t pack anything.

LEE

I’m not to worry about any of that. Everything I need will be waiting for me when we land.

LEE gazes at the scenery, mostly more lanes of highway and the occasional massive building behind soundproofed walls. VANESSA drives, her mind gradually shutting down. She thinks about her boyfriend, DAN, and how she had to cancel their plans for the day. She thinks what an absurd way to spend her day off. She’d rather be sitting by a lake with DAN and a cooler.

Scene III

Honda Accord, VANESSA behind the wheel, LEE gone

VANESSA is driving in circles around the Washington DC neighborhood of the Passport Agency. It’s a chilly day in late March, too early for the cherry blossoms.  

STEREO

(blasting song from Talking Heads “Speaking in Tongues” cassette)

Hold tight, wait till the party’s over
Hold tight, we’re in for nasty weather…

VANESSA tries to turn onto 19th St. NW and three cars converge at the intersection, blocking her. Horns blare. She circles the block again and tries again, making it this time. Leans toward the windshield to check if her mother is standing out on the steps as arranged.

VANESSA

(singing along)

Burning down the house! (drums fingers on steering wheel in time to the music as she pulls away to circle again)

Scene IV

VANESSA pulls up in front of the Passport Agency and double parks.

STEREO

Ha! Takes over slowly
But doesn’t last very long
Ha ha ha ha no need to worry
Everything’s under control

LEE descends the steps of the Passport Agency, already a queen, moving only her legs, upper body motionless. She could carry a book on her head and it would not budge. A car honks somewhere behind VANESSA, and another passing to her left.

VANESSA

(to herself)

Mother, is hurrying not an option now that you are the queen on deck?

LEE

(opens passenger door and flows into the seat like molten gold)

We need to be back at 1:00. (Checks her bracelet watch.)

VANESSA

What now?

LEE

Let’s find a park.

VANESSA

The Mall is nearby if we can find parking. I hope it’s not as jammed as this neighborhood.

All practicality now, LEE opens a map from her glove box and directs VANESSA. As if already a monarch with power over things not yet imagined, LEE manifests a parking place one block from the Mall.

VANESSA

(laughing as she parallel parks)

I drive around for an hour and a half and you get in the car and find a parking place in five minutes.

LEE

(grinning)

What can I say?

VANESSA

(laughing)

Take a bow.

LEE gestures broadly with her arms, accepting the imaginary applause of her audience, then laughs with genuine mirth. VANESSA spontaneously leans over and kisses her mother’s temple. They get out of the car and start walking.  

Scene V

LEE and VANESSA approach an empty bench facing the reflecting pool. Each of them holds a paper-wrapped hot dog and a bottle of water. VANESSA sits. LEE puts her water bottle on the bench and eats standing up, leaning out at a 45-degree angle.

VANESSA

(biting her hotdog)

I never came to DC till I was in college.

LEE

You know better than talk with your mouth full.

VANESSA

(Grinning, mouth still full)

Sure do.

LEE

I wish we had come down here when you were a child. We could have taken the train and spent a weekend. I don’t know why we never did things like that.

VANESSA

You were working all the time.

LEE

Yes. My career was very important to me. And it will be again—when I’ve cleared my name.

VANESSA

What about the King of Burma? I thought queen was your next career.

LEE

Oh well that’s true. (Looks down at the top of VANESSA’s head.) I’ll miss you, you know. In time I hope we can arrange for you to come for a nice long visit.

VANESSA

(silent for several beats then…)

Mother, I shouldn’t have brought it up. Let’s just sit here and enjoy the fresh air. I’ll take you back to the passport office. You can do your thing. Then we’ll go home.

LEE

(Tosses her wrapper into a bin and wets her napkin from the water bottle. Wipes her mouth delicately and then her fingers.)

Whatever you want, Darling. I know this is hard. It’s a lot to take in.

To be continued …

The photos in this blog: posing in her majorette gear (1940s), posing in her bathing suit (1940s/50s?), posing with a riding helmet (1960s) performing at work in costume and posing on the deck of her home (1970s). Grandiosity was always part of her personality, but schizophrenia simply amplified that. After reading today’s post, you’ll understand that even her delusions were grandiose.

The Pick-Up and Drop-Off

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It has been a long 4+ years since I posted on my beloved SpiralWoman blog. I will not even try to explain why, mostly because it’s a combination of such complex reasons that I don’t really understand it fully myself. I am going to start posting again. Different material entirely. Instead of personal blogs and dives into my wide-ranging areas of passion, concern, or love, I will be posting sections of a book I’m working on. A memoir written by a woman who has an extremely spotty memory of her life. I am experimenting with an approach that is episodic, multi-genre, and in some instances actual short stories or semi-fictionalized narratives based on a combination of my own memory, research into my life, research into the life of my mother, and my imagination. Most of what I post will not necessarily be sequential so even if you have not read the last entry, you will be able to understand and follow the next. These entries are distinctly first drafts so read accordingly. I am eager for feedback if you are inclined to provide it. No expectations, however.

I have selected the following “chapter” at random from my ever-growing folder of pieces that will ultimately (probably) end up in the book. Hoping to post weekly. Thanks for reading. The photo below was taken when she was probably in her 40s, maybe by me (she once took me with her to the Bahamas on a business trip).

The Pick-Up and Drop-Off

She had agreed to take her meds, so the hospital agreed to release her. I had learned to take nothing at face value and was absolutely sure that she had no intention of taking her meds.

Until the day she died, she never admitted she was ill. According to my mother, her only problem was everyone else in the known universe—and their commitment to sabotaging her until there was nothing left of her life.

It was Valentine’s weekend. My husband, toddler son, and baby daughter drove down with me from New York. As my mother’s next of kin, I was to receive her. I left my husband and children at Grandpa’s house in Northern Virginia and drove up to the Springfield Hospital Center in Maryland.

Passing through a series of locked doors, I arrived in her ward. Tooth enamel white walls gleamed under dozens of fluorescent lights. The nurse’s station was behind glass with lockable doors. Just in case.

She was waiting at the back of the room, nearly dwarfed by an enormous suitcase and dressed in immaculate cornflower blue jeans and a crisp white blouse. Later, I saw that the neck of the blouse showed signs of fraying and there was a circular brown stain on the placket the size of a pencil eraser. Around her neck was a designer silk scarf—creamy beige with navy blue swirls. She might have had it for 25 years, but it looked elegant and unmarred. When she saw me, she picked up her purse. The cheap teal colored vinyl had bald spots and the gold-tone clasp was missing most of its gold. Purses get stolen more than most things when you’re homeless.

An empress in jeans, she allowed herself a tight smile when she got close and let me pull her suitcase. She walked toward the exit doors.

The nurse behind the glass spoke into a microphone. “Mrs. Lynch? Norma?”

Haughty as ever, my mother turned and looked at her. “Yes, Evelyn?”

“Mrs. Lynch you can’t leave without your medication and you and your daughter both have to sign some papers.”

“Very well,” enunciated Empress Mother.

We left the suitcase against the wall and approached the nurse’s station. Before she signed anything, she read every word of every document, glasses off, eyes two inches from the page. I watched as she signed. I never got used to her new name: Norma Lynch. Norma, the first name on her birth certificate—one that only her mother ever used. Lynch, the name of her second husband, Don.

The signature was no longer the big looping Lee Park I knew so well. This was much more straightlaced— Norma Lynch, as if a name could determine a signature. The unknowable Norma Lynch inhabited the body of my very own mother.

The nurse gave her a pharmacy bag. She shoved it into her purse, turned, and walked away. I paused and said, “Thank you, Evelyn, for your help and compassion toward my mother.”

Evelyn smiled. “Norma is God’s creature, and a unique one at that. We had a few long chats. I know for a fact she’s very proud of you.”

When I joined my mother at the door, someone pushed the unlock button and a buzzer vibrated the air. I leaned into the heavy door, and we walked out.

“You did not need to speak to that woman and there is certainly nothing to thank her for. She’s paid by my enemies to keep me here. She might not know it, but she is.”

“But you are leaving. And she was kind to you.”

“Darling, a kind jailer is still a jailer.”

My car was in the adjacent lot. I lifted her bag—it must have weighed 60 pounds—into the back seat of my car and opened the passenger door for her. We didn’t speak.

Within thirty minutes, we were driving through dusk-darkened streets looking for a parking spot.

With every block, my chest tightened with anticipated grief as my breasts swelled agonizingly with milk. Maggie had not nursed since wake-up.

I parked two blocks from the shelter. We walked in silence. I pulled the suitcase with one hand, and with the other I held my mother’s hand, as I’d done ten million times in my life. It was as warm and soft as ever. She gestured with her chin. “It’s up there. What time is it?”

“I don’t know. We left the hospital just before 5:00. It’s already dark so I bet it’s closing in on 6:00.”

“We aren’t allowed to line up until 6:30.”

How could I leave her? Just walk away from her as she paced the block dragging her suitcase, waiting for check-in time?

There was a Burger King on the corner. As soon as we entered, she pulled the medication bottle out of her purse and dropped it in the trash bin near the door. Two steps behind her, I pulled it back out.

She sat at a booth shaped out of a single piece of orange plastic while I bought two cups of coffee. I dumped the contents of five creamer pods into her cup and returned to the booth. My straight-backed mother stared ahead out the dark window, the monstrous suitcase taking up space in the narrow aisle.

She held the cup delicately between the outstretched fingers of both hands. It was such a subtle thing, but a signature of hers. A simple, delicate, oft-repeated gesture, more memorable in many ways than her former magnetism and the way she could fill a room with her personality and glow.

A digital clock on the wall said 5:56. Do I leave now, knowing she’s only across the street from the shelter? Do I wait till 6:30 and walk her to a spot in line? Exactly how do I navigate what will be less than one minute of my life? The single minute, one of so many impossible minutes. This one would be me, saying goodbye-I-love-you, kissing her cheek, and turning to walk away.

I finally said, “I need to get to Maggie soon. I’m really engorged.”

“Your place is with me. I know you don’t see it that way. You’ve made that clear enough.”

“Momma, I’m a momma now too.” She turned away, refusing to look at me, staring intently at the frail man slouched in the booth across from ours.

I reached out to take hold of her hand. She gripped mine fiercely, as if enduring awful pain and relying on me to ease it. Then she let go and withdrew her hand until it lay on her lap, below the table, inaccessible.

I looked at her face, unlined at 64, hair thin and darkening from blond to steel gray. Full lips set in a grim line. Bitter endurance had become her resting state. I put the bottle of pills on the table. She pretended not to see. I half stood to reach across and lift her shabby teal blue purse from the bench to the tabletop. Snapping open the chipped gold clasp, I dropped the bottle inside and put her bag back down beside her.

She pretended, again, not to see. I knew they’d be back in the trash the minute I was out of sight. I was shamefully grateful that she decided this time not to do battle, shout imprecations, or lunge across the table as if to wrestle me to the ground.

“Go if you have to. I’ll be fine.” She glanced at the clock. “I only have ten minutes to wait.” She was looking at me again. Her words were perfunctory, but her eyes were soft. Her mouth relaxed. Then she smiled. I could tell it cost her something, but she meant well. She felt love. She always did, somehow, when it came to me. She was being kind, in her way. Letting me go to my children was a gracious act. The daughter who chose to leave her at a homeless shelter rather than take her into her own home. The cruelty she attributed to me was a burden that pained her heart—and mine—every day. I was resigned to the fact that she’d never understand.

From inside her mind, the entire world had betrayed her, but the worst betrayal of all was mine.

As I walked to my car, my throat clamped down. In the driver’s seat, the sobs roared out of my chest. I sat like that for some minutes. Finally, as I tried to get out of the neighborhood and find a highway heading south, I did figure eights around the same two blocks a few times, and then found myself driving past the shelter. My mother was third in line, her enormous black suitcase blocking out half her body. Her gaze was fixed on the dusk-shrouded rooftops of high rises beyond her reach in more ways than one. She did not see me.

2020 Reflection

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Human beings don’t make it easy on themselves. That truism can come in the form of setting challenges, taking gutsy risks, insisting on growth and healing in the face of trauma, grief, or the simple fact that you don’t have the tools—yet—but forge ahead anyway. It can be taking a chance at second love after heartbreak. Not easy. But so many do it. It can be reinventing yourself in a new career to seek greater fulfillment or after a professional train wreck. It can show up as continuing to live and love after the incomprehensible loss of a child, a home, a limb… We get back up again, we humans. I love that about us. And the capacity for altruism, grace, and love is seemingly endless within our quirky, remarkable species.

But 2020 has opened my eyes and propped them open with toothpicks—opened them, beyond forgetting, to the painful truth that the dark side of humanity exists and can wreak untold havoc, misery, and harm. People will trash their lives and—even worse—endanger or destroy the lives of others for no other reason than pure selfishness. Self-interest heightened to the point of cruelty, brutality, and rage perpetrated on anyone who may be perceived to threaten it by simply existing and wanting their human rights­­­.

Over the past four years, the self-interest of politicians seeking power and the money necessary to keep it has led to ugly, inhuman acts of injustice, from the caging of children to the groveling and pandering to the wealthy, whether via pardons for heinous crimes or tax laws intended only to further line their pockets.

This year, those in the highest offices in the nation have refused to see to the basic needs of American citizens during a deadly pandemic. They’ve ignored the horror, cast blame everywhere but on themselves, and done a hell of a lot of golfing.

But, to return to my original thought—that human beings don’t make it easy on themselves…

What about all the people who refuse to wear masks because… what is it again? “My body, my choice?” And then lots of people get sick and die. Including the mask-refusers. Not making it easy on themselves… The motto “Live free or die” has real teeth again.

As the death toll climbs into the 300 thousands, people still expound, with absolute certainty, that Covid is a left-wing hoax, as they host maskless parties to prove they are willing to double-down on that wacky, baseless, and deadly theory.

The dystopian flavor of 2020 leaves us all vulnerable, many of us appalled, and too many of us dead or with permanently compromised health.

We are literally dying.

It is no coincidence that 2020 was the year the BLM movement was thrust finally into the consciousness of the nation in a way it had not managed before. The threshold for so many Americans has lowered. We are pissed, scared, in despair as never before. The last four years since our 45th president took office have been bad enough, but when people start getting sick and dying and that president lies, denies science, refuses to acknowledge what is happening, leaves his citizens exposed and unprotected, then starts a Twitter war to support police who have ended black lives at a statistically improbable, ethically heinous rate–well then. The reality of sanctioned racism and murder finally caught some much needed attention.  

People of color, as we know, are far more vulnerable to Covid. Am I paranoid to think that our leadership is secretly hoping that letting this pandemic “run its course” will help them make America white?

Who are we?

All the people I hold dear, that I fill my life with—the ones I’ve collected over the years and loved, with whom I’ve nourished relationships … they dazzle me, each in their own way, with how they pursue life. The deep love they bring to bear in their lives. The earnest, valiant, often deeply courageous efforts they make to learn and become and grow. To know better, do better, be better. Their innate compassion. Their ability to admit what they don’t know. Their ability to value science while maintaining an openness to spirit—in whatever way that works for them. Their kindness, humanity, and, not to be forgotten, their humor.

I’m spoiled, have existed in a lovely bubble. I know that. 2020 has burst my bubble.

All humans are capable of both goodness and greatness, but far too many choose self-aggrandizement, power, and levels of opulence exponentially greater than their ability to enjoy it. They choose these things over thei­r own humanity.

I see this now in a way I never let myself before. This learning is part of the legacy of 2020. A bitter pill for an innate optimist to swallow, but for which I’m deeply grateful.  

We can make change every day with our actions, thoughts, and words. We must use our actions, thoughts, and words without surcease to shift, however infinitesimally, the paradigm preferred by some, but rejected by most. We may feel helpless because we do not walk the halls of power, but we are not.

Words Matter

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Our words cast spells.

They change the world, because they change us.

If you doubt me, then you probably don’t believe in prayer. Many people don’t. In fact, a child of the 60s who was raised by atheists, I didn’t either until I realized that “prayer” is just another term for “words matter.”

Whether it is a mantra, a prayer, an affirmation, a dark-of-night wish uttered with a full heart, or just the words “I love you” spoken again and again to your beloved people—the utterance of words is powerful. Either aloud or in the silence of your mind.

Throughout history priests, imams, and rabbis have urged their followers to “pray together” to right a wrong or heal a hurt. Foolishness? I don’t think so. Maybe it didn’t work the way they expected it to—via the intercession of a supreme omnipotent being. But those hopeful, fervent prayers equate to energy, belief, and thought. Our thoughts and beliefs create our actions—we cannot think and believe “hate” and act from a place of love. We cannot think and believe “I’m worthless” and act from a place of optimism and confidence. We cannot think and believe “I’m a victim” and behave any differently than as a victim.

Chanting, meditating, journeying, manifesting, affirming, singing (I swear gospel singers can change the world), even drumming, whatever you do or whatever you call it, it is (in the terminology of the Western/Judeo-Christian paradigm, forgive me) a kind of prayer.

Fear is an inverted prayer. Fear consumes our minds. Our bodies even. It takes root. Without meaning to, we perseverate on all the thoughts and beliefs darkly birthed by fear. They become unintentional prayers to manifest the worst that can happen.

Do we want that? No! Of course not. So how do we feel fear and also act to defeat it?

Well it sure is hard and I’m no expert. I’m not going to glibly state that “all you have to do is…” and then lay some platitudes on you. But understanding how it works has helped me a lot. Internalizing that knowing has helped my body react to its own fear by overlaying images of light beings flooded with love on top of fear’s dark thunderheads. It actually works for me, I’m happy to say. Well, most of the time. A pandemic and an authoritarian commander-in- chief would challenge Buddha himself. (Okay, maybe not, but all us regular folks for sure.)

What made me want to write this blog is thinking about the 2020 election. As I write this, Biden/Harris have won the majority of electoral votes. Depending on when you read this, who knows what you will know about the outcome of it all. Still, I am optimistic for the future and flooded with relief. Oh, and ready to keep on working.

If there is one thing the Trump presidency has taught us it is that words matter. They have power to destroy and incite. They also have the ability to heal and soothe, but we’ve seen precious little of that for the last four years.

I’ve noticed people casually lying lately. Blatant, but casual, while I sit and listen and know the truth. I imagine it has become normalized for so many who realize lying of all kinds can be used to one’s advantage, as evidenced by the man in the White House.

The president’s lies and his vile, hate-steeped language have both altered reality. His platform is so prominent, and his voice so amplified by his power, it didn’t take long at all for him to get inside our heads. Think of all the actions that have resulted from his words.

The activism and resistance of millions of progressive citizens. People never before activated in this way—well they are now. A reaction in opposition to the ugliness because we all believe we can create change. We say it, believe it, act accordingly.

And on the other side—the open hostility, violence, and rage of haters and bigots. I’m not naïve enough to think Trump created those people. They were there all along. But his words empowered them. Big time.

Trump and his enablers have cast a spell on this nation. I do not know exactly how we will reverse it, but I know we can.

Love is, ultimately, the most powerful force in the universe. I try every day to let my thoughts and words be those of hope, action, tolerance, justice, optimism, courage, and love. Sometimes I get scared and then it’s hard.

A battle for the soul of our country requires that we cast our spells with every word and thought.

Speak up when we witness cruelty, injustice, or bigotry. Speak silent prayers inside our own hearts about what we intend for ourselves, our loved ones, our neighbors, and all humanity. Don’t shortchange all of humanity. I mean, words matter.

Let’s use that power for good.

Thank You, Sylvia Plath

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For a person who tends to overthink things, it’s odd that I never really examined why Sylvia Plath was such a powerful force in my teen years. Today, when Google reminded me it is her birthday, I had an intense emotional reaction to realizing that she would be only 87 now, had she lived. All the decades of her absence slammed into me as a deep loss. I feel my throat tightening again now, and the hot glitter at the edges of my eyes.

When I’ve told people in the past that Plath was an important writer for me, I’ve heard comments like, “Oh that’s so dark,” or “Were you suicidal too?”

What? Do people who love Byron have to be promiscuous bisexuals to adore his ravishingly rich poetry? Do people who love Homer need to be blind? Those comments strike me as both naïve and sexist, but that is not the point of this blog.

Today, I realized in a simple, clean epiphany that was far from surprising or unexpected—Plath showed me that we can use words to unhinge the meaning from the experience and slam the page with truth.

She showed me that nothing is off limits.

She showed me that what is real has a place in writing. And real is found in the world outside us but also the world inside us.

Of course, other poets could have taught me this, but she is the one I found at the moment when I was open and vulnerable to awakening.

I have owned The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel for 47 years. They are on loan to my poet daughter at the moment. I am sad about that today as I long to leaf through them. Though Colossus came out in 1960, months after I was born, and Ariel in 1965, after her death, my editions are: Colossus 1968 edition Vintage Books, and Ariel 1966 edition Harper and Row—pictured above.

But I digress.

Her posthumous book is the one that now, reading many of its poems online, I realize with some mild surprise, I must have read hundreds of times, so ingrained are the words in my mind.

Like so many very young aspiring writers, my natural talent with words was hidden under bushels of cliché and “shoulds” when I was 12, 13, 14. The stuff I wrote at 6 and 7 was far more real. Plath was the bitch slap I needed… and so much more.

In “Lady Lazarus” Plath scorchingly writes of her near deaths, one by chance and one by her own hand, adds raw layers of stunning images—her, curled up under the house, trying to die while underground critters came to rest upon her (“I meant / To last it out and not come back at all. / I rocked shut / As a seashell. / They had to call and call / And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.”)—and references to Nazi doctors (“So, so, Herr Doktor. / So, Herr Enemy. / I am your opus, / I am your valuable / The pure gold baby, / That melts to a shriek.”), carnivals (where she is the attraction: “There is a charge / For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge / For the hearing of my heart– / It really goes.”), and so much more as she rises again and again from death (“What a trash, / To annihilate each decade.”).

I read these words, at 15 and 16, knowing that she did not rise again, the next time she tried. I knew this voice was silenced forever and it grieved me. I cried real tears for her, and for me, for all we both lost.

“Daddy” was another poem that sank into my bones. I did not know, till then, that we could write such forbidden things. That we had permission to speak truth to power. That fear need not demand silence if proclaiming these truths would have meaning. If not to anyone else, at least to the writer herself. I was scandalized, thrilled by her scorn for the Nazi beekeeping father who held such sway over her life:

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

But not only that—the bold zero-fucks-given way Plath just went there. This may seem like no biggie nowadays. People write from depths that were off limits 40, 50 years ago. I believe Plath’s unrepentant, slicing honesty and the devastating perfection of her language helped pave the way for every writer since. And that is with her husband’s horrible interference, now thankfully undone in more recent editions.

The Bell Jar was an amazing book and of course I read it. But only once. I am a writer of prose, not poetry, and yet it was her poems that called to me again and again. I have never read any book as many times as I’ve read Ariel. Why? I asked myself that today for the first time.

It freed me. It blew open my mind to possibility. I did not try to act on that possibility till several years later, in my fiction, but the seed was sown, permission given.

And I adore her because she did not need permission. She was a trailblazer who, despite suffering from mental illness I cannot fathom, wrote. She wrote real. She wrote genius. She wrote pain. She wrote her own ugliness. Her strength. Her tragic flaws. Her own unmatched, shocking beauty.

Her words were an incision, clean and kind, into me. Thank you, Sylvia Plath.

Shelter in Place OR When Children Must Come to Terms with Their Imminent Demise Something is Very Broken

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“This is a lockdown. This is a lockdown. This is NOT A DRILL.”

That’s what the students at the public schools heard on Friday in the community where I live, an island off the coast of Massachusetts. They pushed tables against doors, crouched in corners, and tried not to make noise. They hoped and prayed that they would be allowed to live.

Thirty minutes went by before they learned that it was a false alarm. Someone had accidentally triggered the panic button.

Thirty minutes went by in which every adult and child in the school wondered if the shooter would find them. And when.

Texts were sent, like this one: “I don’t know what might happen. I love you, Mom.”

Some students could not bear to wait and jumped out of second floor windows.

I can’t begin to guess why they jumped… Was it fear, plain and simple? Survival instinct? A despairing belief that it might not matter but I’ll try anyway? It seems that “I want to live” looks like shelter in place to one child and it looks like jump out the window to another. What would you do?

By incredible, ironic chance, a panel discussion about Massachusetts gun legislation was scheduled for later in the day and I had planned to attend. I did attend, completely unsure what it would look like in the wake of the morning’s events. Three members of the Massachusetts legislature were there, as well as a representative from Moms Against Gun Violence, and a high school student activist extremely involved in the national gun control movement.

That boy told his story.

“A fourteen-year-old girl one foot away from me was crying so hard that tears flowed in a stream from her chin. All she could say, over and over and over was, ‘Where is he? Where is he?’”

The boy, let’s call him JJ, went on: “By he, she meant the man out there somewhere who wanted her dead.”

He explained, “I did not know how long I’d be alive.” He said that, or words to that effect, repeatedly as he processed before our eyes.

No one, he explained, thought, “Maybe it’s an earthquake.” They’ve been trained to fear something far worse than the shifting of tectonic plates, the collapse of buildings, and a tsunami aftershock.

By the time we saw JJ, he was very, very angry. But there was more. Much more. This brave teenager, who somehow managed to have the stomach and the grit to make it to his speaking commitment that afternoon, was traumatized.

I think we say that word a bit too freely sometimes: “I was traumatized,” or, “That was so traumatic.” Many people in our country experience true trauma—abuse and rape victims, children ripped from their parents and kept in cages, the victims and survivors of mass shootings, to name just a few examples. We need to be careful to use words precisely.

Children who thought they were about to die while in a place where they should always and without question feel safe? That is trauma.

However, JJ never once said, “I am traumatized.” He was too inside the moment to think about defining it. But all of us in that room heard it in his voice. Saw it in his face. He will never be the same. None of them will.

And JJ did NOT have to face a shooter. He will NOT have to go to funerals for the next month. But he believed he would die. That his friends, his teachers, might be gone in the flash of a semi-automatic weapon and lie in their own blood until some indeterminate moment when things were safe again.

Outside, surrounded by the flashing lights of every police car on the island, parents gathered, awaiting news, wondering if their babies would come back to them.

This is the country we live in. This is the United States of America. A nation of children who know how to shelter in place, push tables against doors, be very very very quiet. While wanting their mothers. While crying, while needing human connection, while being paralyzed by the most horrific of thoughts. A “civilized” society in which 5-year-olds know what a “shooter” is and must understand that they and they alone are responsible for their actions in attempting to avoid being murdered. They must also know this: if they reveal their position to the shooter, they may be to blame for the deaths of everyone else in that room. Deal with that, why don’t you.

I know I could not.

Marjory Decker, state legislator who sponsored the red flag law that passed in MA in 2018, spoke of her own young children. One of them has night terrors because of the lockdown drills at her school. I have heard similar stories from others whose children are deeply troubled just by being prepared for an active shooter in their schools. Why wouldn’t they be?

As horrible as it is that the alarm went off in our schools by “mistake”—why do we even have to have a panic button in every school? Why must we prepare our children for imminent death because some dude decides he needs to shoot things, AND he can get a gun more easily than a car or a marriage license?

I am intensely proud to be part of the agency that was called upon and that responded to this event on Friday. Our clinicians rushed to the scene and helped children and parents, teachers and administrators navigate the fearful reality of this accidental “not a drill” that they had to live through for 30 whole minutes. We will be back again on Monday, helping as best we can… But I despair. Why does this have to be a thing? How can the gun lobby matter more than the lives and souls of children?

Please explain.