Liminal spaces

Gail shares about life in a holding pattern

Photo by Scarbor Siu on Unsplash

In mid-December of last year, I hopped on a plane to my hometown in the Southwest and was hit by a striking realization. For the first time in my 64 years, I had no living parent to welcome me.

I’m old to consider myself an orphan, I know, but still it was a shock.

My mother, twice widowed, died the previous month after nine decades of living an impressively authentic and adventurous life. But far from a quick end, she languished for more than a year, so I lost her in chapters.

First, the diminishment of her robust physicality. My mother, who effortlessly zipped from a business breakfast to a Rotary luncheon to an evening symphony, needed an hour to move from her bed to her car to the hairdresser (I drove). Then even that ended. Bed-ridden, with her memory fading, her innate edges softened. My visits became less challenging but also less familiar. And then there were no words at all. I could get a smile out of her, but the quiet stretches grew longer and longer until, really, all I could offer by way of comfort was holding her hand.

All of it, the seemingly endless months of it, forced upon me a growing uneasiness I couldn’t pinpoint.

“You’re in a liminal space,” my cousin told me during a text exchange as I shared my angst. I’d never heard the word, but grasping for something to explain my malaise, I dug in.

Ah, liminality. From the Latin, limen. Occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold. Also: Relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process.

In other words, one monster of a holding pattern.

I laughed when I came across one quote by a therapist opining that humans don’t like liminality; we don’t like existing in a space of unpredictability. Ya think?

But at least there was an end to it, right? We traverse that epic thoroughfare and are rewarded for our herculean efforts with closure on the other side.

Hmmm.

It was on that trip in December to my childhood home when I realized the fatal flaw in the concept.

Leaving the Twin Cities, I sat down in the aisle seat next to a chatty fellow on his way to a guys’ ski weekend out West. We talked for more than 20 minutes – about jobs and kids – before he told me, cautiously, that he almost didn’t get on the plane, but his wife – in surgery for cancer at the very moment we were chatting and eating our granola bars – insisted that he go.

On my flight back to Minneapolis, my delightful 80-year-old seat mate, returning from celebrating his milestone birthday with family, broke down telling me his 40-something son died several months earlier from an accidental drug overdose.

I would never flatter myself by suggesting I’m a magnet for stories of human challenges and tragedies such as these. But 40-plus years in journalism has made it easy for me to read a room (or an airplane cabin) and ask questions borne of genuine curiosity.

And that’s when it occurred to me. Every one of us propelled forward at 500 mph inside that plane, or riding moving walkways in antiseptic airports, or zipping home on freeways in Ubers, or unpacking from bedroom to bathroom, is fooling ourselves in the belief that we know where the boundaries begin and end. Or that they end at all.

Yes, my mother is gone. But the unpredictability of life isn’t going anywhere. There will be the next and the next. Living means embracing continuous liminality.

So, what do we do? We don’t like this unpredictability, remember?

Honestly, I don’t know. But here’s what I’m going to try to do now, with no parent left to guide me. I’m going to try to be more realistic and more courageous and more flexible.

Mostly, I’m going to try to be more empathetic to strangers in limen, in the rare moments when it isn’t my turn.


Gail Rosenblum is a journalist, teacher and author of A Hundred Lives Since Then: Essays on Motherhood, Marriage, Mortality & More. She recently wrote an essay for Minnesota Good Age about the difficulty of saying good-bye to her 35-year-old washing machine. She can be reached at [email protected].

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