Last month, a woman died. She was a neighbor at one point, though not a friend, more of an acquaintance. She became pregnant the year after my twins were born. I knew she wasn't happy at home. She tried to talk to me about it once but I was overwhelmed by newborn babies and first-time motherhood jitters. My pregnancy and delivery had been nightmarish. Her pregnancy was a cake-walk -- until her son was born several months early. He ended up in the NICU for two months after that. Her mother flew in from out of town frequently. Among the stress of a sick newborn infant, new motherhood, perhaps conflicts between mother-in-law and son-in-law, and underlying marital unhappiness, her marriage fell apart and she and her husband (still my neighbor) got divorced.
I pretty much stopped seeing her almost completely by then. She was no longer in our neighborhood and soon not even in our state. I had heard that she had moved, leaving her son behind with his father. While it seemed a strange arrangement to me, being the helicopter parent that I am, I did not want to sit in my glass house lobbing stones at her parenting decisions so I didn't judge her then and I still don't judge her now. Later I heard through the grapevine that she had moved back to our town again. I saw her very infrequently. My children's schedules started getting more and more complicated and she very rarely stopped by our neighborhood, only for the occasional transfer of her son from one parent to another. Such is the life and rhythm of a two-household family. My husband has a son from a prior marriage. I know this life very well.
I was not a close friend of the father either though I knew him longer by several years. He was already in the house next door when we first moved in. We had that superficial kind of relationship, a wave and a salutation. He seemed to have his own support network. I had mine.
And then she killed herself. That's when it all changed for me. We were not by any means close. But her son is a year younger than my own children. On the rare encounters that lasted longer than a few minutes, our children shared that universal unfettered innocence of socialization without boundaries. My children and her son instantly shared toys and games with that enviable free abandon that has been long lost amongst us adults.
I can't help but think of her often. Not to wonder or to gossip, but to feel the ache of a life lost. For this woman was not quite nameless, not quite faceless to me. She was a mother, like me, with a wonderfully innocent young child, like me. Our children connected us in someway, as all mothers understand, like a piece of twine between two tin cans. And now she is gone forever, leaving the other end of this string mournfully flapping in the wind.
