All Things Must Pass

Three and a half years ago, I got a phone call that my mother was dying, two thousand miles away in Michigan. She was 87, and had been ill for a few days, but still, the news came as a complete shock. I shut the door to my office at Stanford and cried for a while. Then I told the people who had to know, and called an airline to book an overnight ticket, hoping I would get there in time to see her before she lapsed into unconsciousness. (I did, the following day.)

Next I stumbled out into the sunshine and found my car. As I was driving across a bridge over Interstate 280, I suddenly saw something I never had noticed before. As I looked at the highway wending south through the hills into the October glare, I could see every flaw in the pavement standing out in sharp relief. Dark lines of fill criss crossed the roadway like irregular black ribbons draping it as far as my eye could see.

***

The other day, mourning another type of loss, this time of love, I found myself driving south to work along Highway 101 when I suddenly realized I must have been frozen in place for miles and miles. My hands gripped the steering wheel, my eyes stared straight ahead. I hadn't checked a mirror or glanced right or left for probably twenty minutes or more. I blinked: Where was I?

My mind clearly was somewhere else. Following another driver in another car thousands of miles to the south and east, as she sped away from me, from us, and from what we had built together. As I struggled to reorient myself to my daily commute, I wondered who would care if I just kept going beyond my normal exit, following the lay of the land south and east in the direction where my love had disappeared.

Most of all, would she care?

I didn't keep going, at least not that day. I exited at the normal place, and went into work as I always do. But the visions of the highway glare both on that afternoon I learned my mother was dying, and on the morning that it hit me my love was really gone won't leave me. Maybe the world always looks different when we are in shock.

Time, I'm told, heals the pain that follows our losses. Time cannot, however, remove the images seared into our brains at those times we suddenly feel so utterly alone.