Parallel Lives

A different kind of love story on Valentine's Day.

“Hey, Black Pants” my neighbor greeted me at the polling place, as we stood in line to vote. 

“Hey Pink Pants, how are you?” I asked. 

We were veterans of an exercise class where the instructor identified us by our clothes. 

After a few minutes, we got out of the voting line to talk about our depressed daughters, and the pain of watching them suffer.  We had every possible resource to offer – our Mama Bear energy, therapy, insurance, medication and careful hope. We had flexible time for rides to therapy, the experience to interview doctors and get recommendations, and still, still, still we were exhausted.  It was like trying to make a sand castle in the ocean.    

Our parallel lives made me admire her even more. 

When people are on a similar path, their lives intrigue me.  I wonder how our lives are similar, and how they diverge.  When I think about the choices I didn’t make, I muse on how my life would have been different.  Not with regret, usually, with deep curiosity. 

Are my old boyfriends mean and fat?  What happened to my former co-workers, who stayed in marketing when I went to seminary?  (Hint: they have beach houses.)   When I walk around town, I glance up at the apartments I didn’t rent, checking to see if the residents look happy. 

At my church, the unhoused woman who sleeps on the porch is about my age.  I find her charming on her good days, and frustrating when her mental illness obscures everything else.  When I slip her some money so she can buy the privilege of sitting inside somewhere, I know how little that helps.  I tell her that she can’t yell at the members and staff, and yet I know I would be full of rage in her situation.  If I had her life, I would be mean to everyone I met.  I would yell all day.  She has survival skills that I don’t have. 

The Pink Pants mom lost her daughter to death by suicide a few years later.  When I recalled this conversation to her, she told me that suicide had claimed the daughter she didn’t worry about, another layer of the tragedy.  She and her circle of friends created a Day of Kindness to honor her daughter.  On her daughter’s birthday, friends all over the country offered acts of kindness.  In Maryland, I kept crying and crying in the car in between my stops.  Weirdly, some people declined my offer of free ice cream – maybe because I looked so deranged from all the tears.  Her loss felt so close, in our parallel lives. 

Francis Weller says, “I have come to have a deep faith in grief…It is in fact, a voice of soul, asking us to face life’s most difficult but essential teaching: everything is a gift, and nothing lasts.” 

There’s no pattern to tragedy, and each of us gets some dose of horrible sorrow.  Some parallel lives inspire gratitude.  Others reveal wounds that can’t be healed, only lived.  Tragedy is always hovering on a parallel line. 

Everything is a gift, and nothing lasts. 

Image above via Pexels.