Everyone Else Is Spring-Bound

Monday, a mother in our community committed suicide, leaving behind what appeared to nearly everyone a contented life.  And all I've got is lyrics from Dar Williams' "After all." It turns out December doesn't own the claim to life-taking. That dubious honor goes to early May. 

And it felt like a winter machine
That you go through and then
You catch your breath and winter starts again
And everyone else is spring bound

The ball hockey community has rallied. The men on our street left their houses without sticks last night for the visitation.  M looks uncharacteristically dapper, and I tell him. He is a father of two young children, and he is a school principal. But he is confused like a child, standing guileless at the edge of our lawn wondering how a person could decide to leave a husband who loves her so much and a 14 year old son. I start to tell him about demons, about how they drown out the other voices and make it very hard to see beauty and even reality.  This is not numbingly obvious to him. He doesn't know demons, and I think he is standing beside her on the platform in his mind. He is thinking how easy it is to jump in front of a subway train. How brutally, unfairly spontaneous that decision might have been.

That those who have lived with demons know different doesn't matter. M is off to complete a circle around a living man and a living son who was very close to his mother and didn't know her.

And when I chose to live
There was no joy
It's just a line I crossed
It wasn't worth the pain my death would cost
So I was not lost or found

I'm not sure the demons ever go away. They retreat, sometimes, if we are lucky enough to store up sunlight enough to blind them - (or is it better words for our spinning minds?)

Mothers are helping their sons rally around the poised funny popular motherless boy.  As Mothers' Day approaches, they are fielding questions about mental health and promising not to die.  They are giving their sons phrases to text and words to say at the visitation. They are wondering how much to divulge - about genetics and disease and the possibility that what happened at the subway station just after morning rush hour was inevitable. It's just that nobody knew.

And they practice motherhood. Which looks like this:

Go ahead, push your luck
Find out how much love the world can hold...

 *all quotes from Dar Williams' After All.