In the Ether: A Memoir of Holding Space

Author’s Note

This is a story I am honored to tell for many reasons. Though I have combined multiple events into single occasions for economy, changed a detail or two for anonymity, and have likely fallen victim to the subjectivity of memory, I have presented the years from late 2015 to 2021 as we lived them. Additionally, I have changed the names of all characters other than Abby, Ryan, Scott, Jenna, Peter Blair, Ashlyn, and Dion.

In truth, this memoir has a very specific audience: my daughter, Abby, and her former boyfriend, Ryan. I wrote it for them as each searched for meaning in events that began to unfold in November of 2016. I thought I could help them make sense of it all, help them find themselves and—if I am being honest—help them find each other again. That was my hope.

I began writing In the Ether in May 2017. By then, I knew I was witnessing something uncommon and meaningful. Without realizing it, I was already several thousand words into a draft because of the emails and letters Ryan and I exchanged up to that point. When I finally chose the title in 2019, after a phone conversation he and I had about all these crazy coincidences, which neither of us believed were coincidental, I certainly didn’t anticipate its current relevance, which still confounds me. The body of text from the first to final chapter exists as it did when I completed the manuscript on July 5, 2020, the night of a full Buck moon on which I spoke to both Abby and Ryan, each calling me concerned about the other. This note and the afterword are newer, written little more than a month after an accident proved the first sentence of chapter one unfathomably true. For just a moment, I believed I knew how this story would end. I think we all did. The events of July 2021, however, kept my writing honest.

This book tells Ryan’s story, but only as it became known to me through my relationship with him–and that began when he met my daughter, Abby. Their connection, perhaps star-crossed and eternal, invited me to write these pages. This book, most accurately, is our story.

Chapter 1      Listen

Listen, I’d like to tell you a story, but you should know before it begins, I don’t know how it ends. You could argue that it isn’t really mine to tell. It’s Abby and Ryan’s—or Abby’s and Ryan’s. That detail makes a difference. I guess it’s the version I experienced. But, I think theirs would be pretty close. The situation is messy. It isn’t one I would have imagined involving me or anyone I know, but Abby always had a knack for the unexpected. When she was three years old, my father died, and with her being so little, we didn’t bring her to the burial. As my husband and I were leaving, I bent down to kiss her goodbye and was met with crossed arms and a scowl. What’s wrong? I asked. Too quickly she shot back, I never get to bury Pawpaw! That comment, rather than the sadness and beauty of the service, is what I remember best about the day of my dad’s funeral.

He passed away unexpectedly—to us anyway—of a massive heart attack. I say to us because he knew he was going to die. Easter Sunday had been the week before, and our whole family was together for dinner. When my mom invited us to dinner again the following week, I found it unusual, but Daddy wanted everyone to come over for barbeque. So, we put the girls in their car seats and made the hour-long drive to my parents’ house, had a nice time, and said our I-love-you’s and goodbyes, just like the week before. The next day, Daddy died.

I got the call while I was at work, during first period. My principal stood at my classroom door and quietly called me outside, saying to bring my things. A quiet panic rose in me. When I was close enough to hear him just above a whisper, he said, There’s been an accident. My eyes filled. I thought Scott or Jenna or Abby, but before I could speak, Mr. Brauner said, Your dad has had a heart-attack. Scott is waiting on the phone in the office for you. I knew immediately he was gone.

Scott said the EMT had taken him to the hospital with my mom, and that my sister, Ella, was on her way. But I knew. When I got off the phone, Mr. Brauner asked if I’d like someone to drive me home, but I told him I'd be fine. The forty-minute drive gave me time. I could think, remember, talk to him in that strange way that the living try to engage the dead. And I did. During that drive I had the sensation that he was with me, lingering as some say souls do. I spoke to him, aloud, as crazy as that sounds. I guess that’s just human, really. But what’s actually crazy is that I heard him speak back—not audibly, but through an inner voice. He told me what you’d expect, I guess, that he loved me and that he had to go. He had tied the loose ends here and now had to fix things with Zeke, my brother. Zeke had died more than a decade before—drowned on his twenty-fourth birthday. He and my dad had fought just before. It was the last time they saw each other.

Daddy was a wild man of sorts for some of his life. Of course, he had settled by the time I was born. I only saw his past through stories and occasional flashes of anger that scared me so deeply into myself, letting even my voice escape seemed a risk. Despite his explosive temper and alternate reticence, I know he loved me, though he didn’t say it until tragedy drew the words from him. I heard my Dad’s first I love you when I was nineteen, standing on our front lawn hoping that my brother’s body would be found alive. It wasn’t.

Driving home the day Daddy died was strange. The conversation I had with him felt so real that I am not sure whether I experienced the power of the mind to create its own reality in response to stress or the peace of other-worldly contact. It wasn’t the first time I faced that wonder. After Zeke died, I had a visitation dream. It was about two weeks after his funeral, and I had fallen asleep on the sofa. I dreamed I saw myself sleeping there, but then, in the dream, I woke when Zeke shook my shoulder. Colleen, wake up. Are you up? he said. I remember my confusion, knowing he was gone, but there in the grey and blue flannel shirt he wore too often, he bent over me beside the floral sofa in my parents’ den. I sat up. Tell Mom and Dad, I’m okay. Everything’s good. That was all. I remember wanting to speak to him, beginning to say something, but then I awoke, sitting up just as I was in the dream.

I guess it was a dream.

Part of me wants to believe, maybe does believe, that it was real. Another part just marvels at the power of our brains. Either way, I felt better about Zeke, about his soul, about the fight.

The day of that fight, over thirty years ago, should be a blur of memory, but it is as clear as the air before me and equally laden with motes of the other lives, other influences, which led to it. I suppose there is no such thing as an isolated incident. It was a Thursday. I had come home from college knowing the rear passenger-side tire on my car was going flat. Maybe if I had stopped to fix it, tempers and blame and confusion wouldn’t have combined into tragedy. The tire initiated the whole episode: Why couldn’t any of us take care of the things we had? Why were we so irresponsible? Did we know money didn’t grow on trees? When Zeke, who had just come in from work, spoke up saying the tire wasn’t a big deal and that he would fix it, Daddy, who was just getting ready to leave for work, a night shift, told him to mind his own fucking business. Ella, my sister, was there and said something in Zeke’s defense. Daddy told her to shut up and get out, that she didn’t live there anymore. I had heard my dad speak crassly before, but never to us. The argument evolved into something else: a battle of wills—not between a father and son, but between two men who never shared a perspective.

The result was ugly, violent.

When my dad reached for Zeke’s shotgun on the rack in the corner of the den, Zeke grabbed him. My father looked at him with an expression I had never seen before, a combination of rage, frustration, and sadness. Zeke didn’t wrestle the gun away from Daddy, though. He didn’t have to. Inexplicably, my dad just stopped. He put the gun down on the kitchen counter and walked out of the room. I didn’t see him again until too early that Saturday morning, when Scott brought me home from what would become our first full weekend spent together. Funny, I just realized my father and my then-future husband said, I love you, to me for the first time on the same day.

Sometimes emotion, good or bad, has to boil within us before we allow it to bubble over and escape from our lips. In the weeks following my dad’s death, my family—my mom, sister, and uncles—talked more about Zeke’s. It was as if we were searching for a connection that would allow us to make sense of separate tragedies, of how we got from there to here in what seemed less than the thirteen years it had been. Sometimes, I think nothing is separate at all. Zeke’s death, Daddy’s death—everything bleeds into everything else. I look for the connections. Sometimes, I find them. Occasionally, they burst in demanding attention. But usually, to most, the universe is quiet.

So are we.

Too often we only talk, truly express ourselves, in crisis, with past and present moments spilling down our cheeks. I wish I knew a better way into the future, one that leaves the pain of the past uninvited. How can we keep the wisdom gained from tragedies and wrongs and walk forward uninjured? How can we make sense of life? Sometimes, survival seems to be denial, selective and focused, a purging. But I find that difficult to accept. Reflection, introspection, and searching benefit us far more. We have to choose it, though. My dad taught me that. After Zeke’s death, he changed. He sank into himself and found meaning in loss, in letting go, which must have been unimaginably hard to do given the circumstances. He began healing by reading. He started with the Bible, the book of Ezekiel.

I didn’t have a visitation dream about my father. I guess the conversation I had in the car the day he died took its place. When I got home from school that morning, Scott met me at the door, saying we had to hurry. I told him, no, Daddy was already gone. When? Did your mom or Ella call school? he asked. I said no. I just knew. Scott said we couldn’t be sure yet, and we left with the girls, whom he had picked up from school, strapped into their car seats just like the day before, except this time, we dropped them off at our babysitter’s home. We made the hour-long drive again, and when we arrived at the hospital, my brother-in-law met us at the door saying, They couldn’t resuscitate him.

Like Zeke, Daddy had a two-day wake and funeral, and like Zeke’s, it was packed. The morning of the funeral started with a church service, and when a St. Michael the Archangel school bus pulled into the parking lot and unloaded my entire senior class, I struggled to contain my tears. During the homily, Father John spoke of life being a book, and I hoped my students thought of Donne’s Meditation 17, the literature we were studying when Mr. Brauner came to my classroom with the news that day. Donne says, at death, a life is not torn from the volume, but translated into a better language. How appropriate, I thought, Thank you, Daddy. The church service, which Jenna and Abby attended, ended, and then we brought them to my sister’s in-laws’ home while everyone else continued to the cemetery. That’s when Abby said she never gets to bury Pawpaw.

Jenna was absolutely no help in preparing me to raise her little sister. Four years older, Jenna is completely different. She never slept as a baby. Midnight car rides and late-night vacuuming were regular parts of our routine in the first several months. Those were the only things that kept her from crying sometimes. Jenna was a difficult baby. Since then, my girls have changed roles. Abby was a difficult teenager. Where Jenna has never given me a reason, in twenty-six years, to doubt or mistrust her, Abby rained a deluge of reasons over the past twenty-two to make up for all the tears she didn’t cry as an infant. High school was a trial, not so much academically—she’s very smart—but socially. She’s my wild child, my unprovoked rebel.

Often I’d ask Abby if there were some memory or resentment lodged in her mind causing her to act in ways one might expect of a girl raised in different circumstances—less fortunate ones, dysfunctional ones. She always said no, that Scott and I were never the cause, that she wasn’t rebellious. She was curious, adventurous.

To me, she was inscrutable.

Her thirst for adventure terrified me—her, too, at least on one occasion. In high school, she wrote a prize-winning essay about it. I was exceedingly proud of her accomplishment, but a bit embarrassed by her unabashed disclosure. I’ve saved it, the essay, and reread it from time to time.

Of Kittens and Curiosity

I am three years old; I am in the chicken coop at Camp. I have a ragged towel as my armor, and I intend to use it for one purpose: kitten-wrangling. Although the summer sun steadily approaches the horizon and the mosquitoes become more vicious, I refuse to go inside for dinner until I am accompanied by a furry little feline, which will probably not be too happy about being swaddled in the towel. Finally, I hear a very faint mew coming from the corner of the coop. I slowly creep towards the nearly imperceptible sound and peek behind the last chicken box; I spy a terrified, tiny, black kitten with blurry blue eyes. Immediately, I scoop her up into the towel and try to console her while protecting my hands from her frantic scratches. She looks at me with mistrust in her eyes, and I am wondering, why is she doing this? How doesn’t she see that I am trying to keep her safe? Why won’t she just let me protect her? For the next twelve years, I would ask myself these questions every time a kitten strayed from me and allowed its curiosity to lead it into danger, which was always present in the form of blood-thirsty raccoons or speed limitless country roads.

I am eight years old and holding one of three new kittens which recently appeared at Camp. My determination to keep them safe is strong. Over the years, too many sweet babies have disappeared into the country night. Every morning, I wake up and head to the barn to check on them. I open the tack room door, praying that all three are still in the crate. I see only two. How could one have escaped? The box is so tall. Why would one escape? Although I make sure they have food, water, and what I think is a safe environment every evening, it isn’t enough. They are growing stronger and more agile, causing me to grow more frustrated with my inability to keep up with their energy and curiosity. Each time I carry them back to their safe haven in the crate, they become rambunctious, wanting to roam more widely. I am eight years old, and my only concerns are the kittens’ safety and happiness, yet I am failing them; I need help.

Confused, I ask my mom, Momma, why don’t they want to stay in the tack room when I’m not there? Why do they still want to be out where bad things can hurt them? They just don’t know how dangerous it is!

Well sweetie, my mom responds, you’re right; they don’t understand. God made them curious, and they want to explore and discover things on their own. No matter how much you love them, you can’t stop them from being kittens.

I know she is right; they need more independence, more room to grow, so I give them access to the whole barn again. They seem thrilled as they jump from saddle to saddle in the tack room, stalking each other. Unfortunately, those happy few days end in greater tragedy than we have experienced before. Upon going to feed them one morning, I discover another kitten has vanished.

Crying and frustrated, I trekked back to the kitchen to tell my mom the awful news. Although she did not seem surprised, she listened patiently as I pleaded to take the remaining kitten home, to let it live in the house where I could care for it and know it would be safe. To my surprise, she agreed.

Years later, my mom shared the truth of the two kittens’ disappearances with me, a revelation that also explained her soft-heartedness toward the little survivor. Unknown to me, she would go down to the barn early to feed the horses and check on the kittens before I woke. On one morning, she walked into the feed room to discover a raccoon scurrying out through a small opening where the concrete floor met the corrugated metal wall. Also, that morning, she swept up the four tiny paws and vertebrae, for raccoons will devour anything, except another animal’s feet and spine. Despite my efforts, I could not protect them from the laws of nature, for I could hardly protect myself.

I am seventeen years old; it is a Saturday morning, and I just stepped out of the shower. Something isn’t right; I feel distant from the world around me, and my heart begins to race. My vision seems blurry; sound is muffled. I fall onto my bed, faintly calling for my mom. She rushes to me, and one of the last images I see is the fear in her eyes when she looks into mine. She asks me what happened, and I attempt to answer, then all goes black. She wraps me in a towel and holds me. I hear her, as if through water, ask if we need to call 911, but I say no. I just need to eat—I haven’t eaten since noon yesterday. Hesitant to let me go, she rushes to the kitchen. As I lie on my bed, weak and alone, I understand. I understand what is really happening to me. My curious and defiant nature has led me to this moment; my body is having a reaction induced by substances that have no business being in my system, yet they are there. I have chosen to use them. In that moment, I understand. I understand her seventeen years of worry and warning. I understand her powerlessness to control what happens to me. In that moment, I understand her. She is me, and in that moment, I realize, I am a kitten.

Seems like an epiphany, doesn’t it? I hoped it would be, but from ages seventeen to twenty, there were times when I thought she might be lost to the night.

Learning, like letting go, comes slowly. I suppose her risk-taking spirit was critical to bringing us here, but still, as much as Abby can make the most ordinary thing interesting, sometimes ordinary would be nice. With Jenna’s being so untroubled, I could have easily forgotten how wrong life can go, even vainly forgotten my own failures in light of successful parenting. I consider Abby the child who has kept me human, who’s kept me humble. She has been struggling against me as often as she’s been nestled in my arms, crying over some self-inflicted disappointment, mother and child cleaving together. Now, though, she is twenty-two years old and has moved on, attempting to save lives far greater than those of kittens. And I’m still trying to save everyone, though I know too well that people can only save themselves. I know I have to let go.

I’m not sure whether I should consider myself fortunate to have learned early that life is an exercise in release, but I am certain of that truth. Loss through death, disappointment, error, neglect, or choice is inevitable, but understanding that does not make accepting it any easier. There is a lifetime of difference between knowing something and feeling its truth. Learning to continue through great pain—to find a reason to smile through it, a noble cause to encourage you forward—is a lesson I thought I understood absolutely. Yet, I continue to listen and learn. I marvel at what others have encountered and have survived—are surviving. I suppose my quiet life always had an inner intensity that readied me for the tasks to come, and I wanted to help him. I wanted to help Abby help him.

Chapter 2      Magical Motherfucker

Can he stay with us? she asked after calling me up to her room. The question seemed outrageous, but coming from Abby—a fledgling nestled into the white down comforter of her bed—it shouldn’t have surprised me.

She had known him less than six months, had only seen him in person over a brief week in December, and now, in March, she really expected me to say yes. I had never met him, this Marine who had become her most recent future plan. His story—his need—was compelling.

He had a home near the river, the banks of which had recently flooded with the unprecedented spring rains. The house—already in disrepair—had taken in water. His father had just passed away—the day after Abby’s birthday—and he was coming home from Camp Pendleton to handle the funeral arrangements.

I’m sure he has friends he can stay with, love, I told her, eying her phone lying screen-lit-up on the comforter. Ryan Freeman, shirtless with his dog, smirked at me.

Abby responded, But, we live closer than most of them, and the actual close ones flooded, too, and besides, I want him to be somewhere comfortable, where he can feel taken care of instead of having to take care of everybody else.

I leaned against her dresser to brace myself for what I knew would be a persuasive argument, but still trying to deflect, I said, Abby, don’t be so dramatic. He must have family or someone.

Her voice rose an octave as she scooted to the edge of her bed and sat cross-legged. Mama, you don’t understand. The people he has don’t have anything. His brother is living out of his car right now because of the house. His sister just had a baby and lives with her boyfriend’s family. His grandparents’ house still has a foot of sludge in it—that I’m sure he’s gonna be the one to clean up—and that doesn’t even count the stacks of magazines his grandma’s collected for thirty years. Which are now soaked, she rambled.

Sweetie, I get it. He has it rough. But you have to understand most sane people don’t invite twenty-two-year-old strangers who have romantic interests in their freshly-eighteen-year-old daughters into their homes. You don’t even really know this boy—man! I corrected. My common sense was trying hard to outweigh my compassion.

At still a notch higher, she said, Mom, dragging the word out into two syllables, I’ve talked to him every day since Christmas! Aren’t you the one who says good relationships aren’t based on physical contact? Well, he’s in California. All we can do is talk! She punctuated her justification by throwing herself backward onto the mattress.

Sitting down next to her, my hand patting her knee, I said, Abby, this is just a lot. I have so many hesitations. All I can promise is that I’ll think about it and talk to Dad, but what you’ve told me about the situation doesn’t make me feel great. I mean, we’d have to be crazy.

What Abby had told me about Ryan Freeman’s situation was horrific, truly a mother’s nightmare. He came from hardship: a broken, struggling home complete with various types of dysfunctions. She said his mom died when he was fifteen, a possible suicide or the result of domestic violence. The details were fuzzy. Though officially ruled a suicide, no one in the family accepted it, with good reason. There was a boyfriend, a turbulent relationship, an intense argument. Ryan and his younger brother found her in the kitchen, shotgun on the ground.

Now, his father was gone, too.

Ryan had called Abby on Friday morning. She was in her first-period class, calculus, and he knew that, so she found his timing odd. Abby asked permission to step outside to answer and, later told me, all he said was, I’m going home. Misunderstanding, she told him that was good; he could catch up on sleep after working all night. Then he said, No, I mean coming home. I’m coming home. Daddy’s dead. Then, she said his voice cracked and he sobbed.

That day was only the second time in my career as a teacher that my life outside of the classroom flowed uncontrollably in. Abby came immediately to my room, seeking the comfort she could not offer Ryan, calling me into the breezeway to tell me what happened. Abby had friends, or people she thought were friends, in my class. As I tried to console her just outside the door, I imagined what they might have been saying inside. Some had already expressed harsh opinions of Ryan, asking her if she were insane—talking to a guy like that. That may have meant promiscuous or older or poor or any number of other things that would seem foreign to a gaggle of suburban girls. The real problem, as I saw it, was that Abby had ventured from the crowd. She wanted nothing to do with high school boys and it became a problem.

Adolescence was a tough time for Abby, and in hindsight, I have some regrets about my choices for her then. She had always been curious about life, which was wonderful when it led her to research the life cycle of the periodic cicada, but it wasn’t so great when, at the age of eleven, she told me she was having sexual urges. I can assure you, sexual urges are two words that no mother wants to hear from her child. But there they were. At least she was secure enough in our relationship to be honest with me although, for a time, that would change, too. The span from eleven to sixteen hijacked Abby, replacing my preciously feisty child with her wily doppelganger, an exchange of ginger tea for vinegar. I’ve never been mistaken for being older than I am, at least not until recently, as I can no longer outrun the consequences of the sun, but Abby looked thirteen at eleven, fifteen at thirteen, and, well, you get the idea. Her face was just as young and sweet as you can imagine, all doe-brown eyes above a splash of the lightest freckles. But from the neck down, she had suddenly become Jessica Rabbit. She was drawn that way, but she wasn’t bad—yet.

I suppose Scott and I were a bit blind to her no longer looking like a little girl, but others weren’t, and she enjoyed the attention more than we realized, something social media certainly facilitated. Her Facebook friends became too numerous for me to keep up with, though I tried to monitor things. In fact, although I had no clue at the time, my eighth-grade Abby had friended an older high school student named Ryan Freeman (though five more years would pass before she ever saw him in person). I suppose Abby did no more than most typical kids—experimenting with different combinations of friends, alcohol, and drugs throughout her teens.

The problem was that I had hoped my daughters would not be typical.

Parenting requires such a delicate balance—no wonder some parents go far off course. Imperfect people are bound to raise imperfect kids, but I think all parents hope their children are somehow improved versions of themselves. Maybe some don’t. It’s possible, I suppose, that some parents aren’t really up for the commitment or the challenge, and the resentment or confusion or guilt over it, over their own lack, overwhelms them, exploding outward like shots from a pneumatic rifle—not with enough force to kill, but enough for the target to feel the impact. Parents—people—don’t have to be maladjusted to aim and fire words, though. We have all wished to recapture some bullet once it has left the barrel.

I know I have.

Often, I feel I have never gotten parenting right, not that I wasn’t ready for the commitment. Both Jenna and Abby were well-planned babies, yet I’ve suffered the work-motherhood dilemma as much as those with more prestigious careers. I was the one who couldn’t chaperone the class field trips because I had my own class to attend, the one who sent crappy Valentines for the first-grade exchange, thinking a card was enough when other moms found time to make thirty gift bags filled with treasures. And socially, I’ve always been a bit off-center, a little too in my mind, too soft and hopeful. That idealism spilled into my parenting, making me especially bad at discipline, thinking that thinking about what was wrong and discussing it was better than punishment.

Abby and I talked about consequences quite seriously when she was about sixteen, after failed attempts to reform her habits through typical discipline. I acknowledged that imposed consequences—taking her phone away, suspending privileges, requiring extra chores—would only encourage her sneakiness and resentfulness. She agreed. So, we talked about natural consequences, about what would be worth the risk, and about how sometimes the realization of what is worth it happens too late, and how tragic that can be. After all, Zeke had not planned to drown himself, only his sadness. I wish, still, I could convey to her how much his death hurt everyone, the devastation it brought to friends, to my dad, to all of us. Some risks are not worth the likely results.

The belief in the invincibility of youth is quite a spectacle to see. Rarely, if ever, can neophyte risk-takers discern adaptive from maladaptive risks; and rarely are they aware of the long-term consequences of the latter—of the lasting impressions they leave deeply embedded in the primal soil of the amygdala. Some experiences would be better if forgotten, but the body cannot forget, though the conscious mind may appear to free itself from the burden from time to time.

Sometimes I think Abby has pushed certain memories down so deep she can no longer connect cause to effect. When she was nearly fifteen, she had her first boyfriend, a nice enough kid, who was a year older than she. He was a student in my sophomore class, and I did my best not to mingle being his teacher with being his girlfriend’s