rites of passage

    About three weeks ago I hurt my back sweeping snow. Yes, I was pushing the snow off my front porch steps with a broom when it happened. It was too much snow for a broom, perhaps, but it shouldn’t have been too much snow for my back. Then, yesterday, I moved a heavy box that daughter V had left on the front porch and, twang, I felt something.

     One painful incident means hmmmm.... But two? There is no escaping the division of my life into pre- and post-twang.

     Picture a very cool old dresser sitting on the side of the road about a block from my house, SIX drawers and old enough to have some character (rounded front, carved) and some weight. The pre-twang me, picked that dresser up and put it in the back of her station wagon (somehow – without closing the hatch, of course. That foolish person got the dresser out of the car, up the five front porch steps, up the narrow steps to our attic room... Later, the idiot (yes, me) would get this dresser back down the stairs and even farther - down the rickety stairs into our basement. All of this, with absolutely no help.

     That’s the sort of thing I was doing at forty and even after.

     Okay, I know it was stupid, an accident waiting to happen. (Can you say, heavy furniture through the wall?) But I could lift and move and push and roughhouse pretty much without thinking about it. Now, that me is gone.

     This got me thinking about “rites of passage” and remembering how I felt when my mother died. Even though I wasn’t incredibly close to her, her death was a turning point in my life: all the difficult trips to see her; the unfamiliar need to worry about her; watching her labored breathing; sitting in doctors' offices and hospitals, managing medications; after she died, the tension when my step-father got a bit paranoid as we helped him clean out the condominium, worried, it seems, that my sisters and I would take his things.

    

     After those long months, I began to see the world as divided into two groups, those who had lost a parent and those who hadn’t. I know it isn’t really a “rite of passage,” but it so felt that way to me. A lot of the people I spoke to would share some of their stories and something seemed to unite us as a group. It’s not about how much we loved and miss the parent who died (because, face it, that isn’t universal).  Anyway, this isn't the post to talk about grief. 

     As I think about it, the conversations I had really focused not on love or grief per se, but upon how physically and emotionally taxing the whole experience had been for us and for our families.   It is hard to escape the only thing that really ties this diverse group of people together; this hole in the family tree somehow pulls us up into a new generation. Nature abhors a vacuum.     It is that kind of uncontrollable shift in the universe. Not so much a rite as a tectonic shift that takes us, ready or not.

                                                                                        twang