I’m thinking this morning about two women. Both of them experienced trauma a year ago today. One of them survived; the other didn’t.
A year ago this morning, my mother awoke to find her bedroom filled with an acrid haze. She woke her husband, who leaped out of bed to (foolishly) find the source of the smoke. Mom is highly mobility impaired, and spent several panic-stricken moments wondering if her husband was going to come back. She opened a window and told herself over and over that she wasn’t going to die today. She didn’t; her husband returned and they both got out of the house safely. The fire was extinguished and the damage to the house was repaired.
A lot has happened for my mom in this past year, and it’s been largely a good news / bad news proposition. She’s back in her home, but she’s there alone; her husband came back to the hotel room they were sharing while the fire damage was being repaired in the spring and announced that he didn’t want to be married anymore. It was a profoundly difficult thing for her to do, but I really think that she’s handled this past year with an amazing amount of poise and resignation. She’s turned a painful, frightening and difficult process into a learning experience and, paradoxically, she’s a more whole person today than she was a year ago. I am so proud of her.
The other woman wasn’t so lucky. While I was comforting my mother a year ago this morning, Mr. Chili called me in tears to tell me that my girlfriend April had died in a single car crash after dropping her younger son off at high school. The twisty mountain road was wet, possibly icy, and she lost control of the car and crashed, driver’s-door first, into a guard rail. The responding officer said that he believed she died instantly, and it is my sincere hope that she did. She was a nurse, and I can’t imagine how horrible it would have been if she’d had an opportunity to assess her own condition and realize that she was going to die alone in a car.
I still haven’t deleted April’s contact information from my cell phone. My calendar reminds me of her birthday. Every once in a while, I’ll see or hear something that makes me want to call her and laugh, and then I remember that she’s not here anymore. She’s not gone, mind you - I can still feel her every so often - but she’s not where I have ready access to her. I miss her.
So, for me, today is a day for celebrating. I’m celebrating my mother - strong and smart and vibrant and determined to make lemonade - and I’m celebrating my friend - funny, energetic, irreverent and complex who left too soon for my liking.
I am glad you are celebrating these beautiful women in your life. What a horrible day you had a year ago. It’s so important to remember these things, as painful as it can be. But you are celebrating the blessings you received from these women…
I’ve been thinking about A lately, too. She was on my Christmas card address list and it was so weird to move her name before I printed. It seems like it was years and years ago while seeming like it can’t possibly have been a whole year.
that was a really, really beautiful post. i hope that my daughter grows up to be as proud of me as you are of your mom. for your friend, her friends and her family, i wish you peace in the midst of something that seems so beastly unfair. xoxo
I must have something in my eye. I’m a bit teary.
Wow, have I been reading you for a year or do we run in the same circles because I have read that article before?
Sending you great thoughts for your mom and for April. A bittersweet day.
The dark part of the year seems to somehow promote thinking about loss. And love.
This time of year seems to bring these thoughts out of us all I think. You have a date in time to think about it, but I think these thoughts are natural at the dying of a year.