A Chance in Orange
Originally published September 4, 2018
A Chance in Orange
Visiting The Gates in Central Park
A COMPOSITION OF SKY
In February 2005, my mom flew the two of us from Salt Lake to New York to walk through rivers of wind-whipped, saffron gates in Central Park. Looking back now, I can see it was our last opportunity to connect: the foundation of our strained relationship was in mental illness and a shared interest in art.
Environmental installation artists Christo and Jean Claude draped the park in dozens of nylon banners mounted to free-standing, heavy steel bases, made to fit just below the bare branches of the deciduous trees. Some days, the park was full of blizzarding snow; others were muddied brown, punched bright by the orange structures when the sun popped out.
We wanted to experience the installation in-person because it was only slated to be up for 16 days. I remember the slushy roll of baby strollers on snow-covered paths, the dark clusters of people skating like old, moving paintings, and the blue sky on the day we visited, how it was geometrically framed by bright steel, close to vermillion Buddhist robes, or the gold pistons of the world’s most valued crocus, soaked in a bowl of water.
In that space between winter and spring, when plants begin to bud but the snow is neither beautiful nor fresh, is melting brown into underground sewers, the Gates marked the transition between winter’s long nights and spring’s impending color. The fluidity of the gates in wind gave form to the flow of air, the way a river gives form to the flow of water edging through a landscape. We walked under the moving banners, taking the occasional awkward picture, the shadows of our bodies trailed together beneath the moving orange path.
My mom’s presence in New York was overburdened by our fraught history, and our combined uncomfortable silence was too quiet to drown out my obviously bitter feelings. The trip felt like it was too little, too late: too late to apologize, too late to save us, too late to recover.
At the time, I was an undiagnosed middle daughter of an undiagnosed mother. I was depressed and exacerbated a hearty case of generalized anxiety disorder with poor lifestyle choices. I was often checked out of reality, I spent long hours online, drowning my teen sorrows in emo music, writing poems and blog posts in my online livejournal for people I’d never met. I was desperate for connections that I never made.
THE FRUIT OF AN ORANGE LASTS UNTIL IT ROTS
Driving on bridges from Manhattan back to Long Island, where my mom’s then-boyfriend lived, orange light faded on the water beneath us. The sun, a bright tower rippling, stretched thin as it fell, flagging the shift between night and day. I played Bright Eyes’ latest album at the time, “I’m Wide Awake it’s Morning,” where Conor Oberst wails: “Death will give us back to god / Just like the setting sun / Its return to the lonesome ocean."
Orange, the color of the Gates, is the color of dusk, death, change and transitions. It’s a secondary color, a color made or mixed, sometimes a fleeting thing. The blossom of an orange starts out light and bright white, then blooms into a ripe, round citrus fruit, a gift in winter. Wait too long and it falls to rot, becomes compost to feed other things.
The sky stained from pale blue, to orange, to indigo: dusk guided us from day to night. Light carries consciousness from the side of the living to the side of the dead; so death and dusk, too, are paths marked by bright gateways.
LYING IN A COMA
In February 2007, I was driving with my college boyfriend, the boy with black eyes, west on I-80 over the foothills, when my older sister called. “Mom’s in a coma.” I didn’t drive to the hospital then, I didn’t visit her. I didn’t think about it too much; I was in a state of shock. I didn’t realize how bad it was.
Two days later, another call from my sister, “We need to go to the hospital. Now.”
Apparently my mom had been on a first date with a man we don’t know from somewhere not here, who took her snowmobiling in the high mountains. She’d suffered an asthma attack that she was unable to calm down from, and lost enough oxygen to her brain for enough time that her brain swelled up and down through her brain stem, putting her in a non-responsive coma.
She’d had asthma attacks that put her in the hospital before, and I suspect her anxiety exacerbated her inability to breathe. Sadly, ironically, my mom had on her person, a freshly filled inhaler prescription just days before it happened. We don’t know if she was unable to use her inhaler or if it wasn’t enough. Paramedics had to life flight her body down to the hospital.
Visiting my mom then was my first time seeing or talking to her in 6 months. All I could say was, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, mom.” Only the machines beeped back. I remember how small she looked, a checked-out sack of bones under white sheets.
Two days later, brain-dead beyond recognition, beyond signs of improvement, we discussed as a family that we wouldn’t want to prolong suffering, so we took her off life support, then left. We didn’t even stay to hear her heart stop beating.
The last time I saw my mom, she was looking for me while I was hiding in the back kitchen at my part-time job. The manager shooed her away for me, and as proxy, accepted a birthday gift on my behalf: a teal mermaid t-shirt that wasn’t my style, but still wearable.
The last time I spoke to my mom, she told me she loved me in my dad’s driveway, with half of a hug, and half of a goodbye. It was early summer 2006, around high school graduation, if my memory serves me correctly. She might’ve been picking up or dropping off my siblings for a weekly visitation. She wore light-colored Levis, clogs, and a Patagonia vest.
LIKE MOTHER LIKE DAUGHTER
I understand my mom’s quirks more now than I did 13 years ago and regret that it took me so long, but trust that things happen at their own pace for a reason. I recognize my mom didn’t have the resources she needed to care for me, a mentally ill baby, then child, then teenager.
As a person diagnosed with mental illness now, it’s hard to imagine being a mother, being my mother, and being a single parent to three children. My mom hoarded, was thoroughly unable to process strong emotions or to let go from her own traumas. She spiraled out quickly (a fun quality I have myself). She was unable to consistently care for us.
She regularly left me alone while spending time with my siblings in other places. She would be hours late to pick me up from school or extracurricular activities. Once, during another yearly move, she left me alone in a new rental in Salt Lake while she and my siblings spent the weekend hours away in Midway. I had donut holes, a radio boombox, and an oversize circle chair, for food, comfort and sleep, respectively. My least favorite incident was when she left me alone, over my 13th birthday for nearly two weeks, while she, my sister and brother vacationed to Hawaii. She said I wasn’t behaving well enough to be allowed to join, but when pressed for details surrounding my “poor behaviors,” could provide none.
Was I too forthright, too needy, too stubborn? Was I possessed by the devil, as she professed at times? Did she see too much of my dad in me, thereby projecting resentment from her relationship with him onto the tiny baby version of me?
I don’t share these stories to demonize her or invoke pity, but to share how my mom, as a single parent, was less-than-functioning, less-than-able, and did less-than-asked. Her desire for a particular lifestyle often superseded her responsibilities, like to buy groceries, or pick us up from school on time, or take us to the dentist. I felt like I was a resent-a-baby; ignore her crying, pretend she isn’t there, maybe she’ll disappear. The repeat neglect broke what my teenage self called my artichoke heart, every time, and hardened it into a ball of rotten leftovers, hoarded at the back of a refrigerator chest.
NO MATTER HOW DIRTY YOUR PAST, THE FUTURE IS STILL SPOTLESS
While my dead mother remains undiagnosed, my diagnoses remain like bed ghosts, shadows from a past life. We deal(t) with the consequences of our illnesses differently. She craved freedom while I function best with consistency and stability. Self awareness has been the metronome for my wellness.
Guilt feels like it compacts my genetic predisposition to neurosis. I feel guilty about her passing because we ended things on bad terms. I hadn’t talked to her in nearly 6 months. Our prior history together dampened our relationship, and I think we started out on bad terms. I was too young to know better, and social stigma didn’t help, but I know I exacerbated her illness.
The truth is it’s too late now to repair our living relationship because one of us is dead. It wasn’t too late then, in the gates of Central Park, though it felt like it. It’s only with time I’ve been able to get over the guilt I felt cutting her out of my life before she died; but the extent of her illness and cruelty directed at me turned me away from her and toward myself.
Cutting her out was a matter of self-preservation. She was cruel to me but she was ill. Compassion for her illness doesn’t change how she treated me, but it affords me a new perspective. I know now I didn’t deserve cruelty, and I don’t hold her illness against her either.
AT THE TABLE WITH GRIEF
Due to the shame from growing up neglected and not having basic needs met, compounded by the guilt from setting hard boundaries with my mom 6 months before she passed away, I’ve spent more money on therapy over the past 10 years than I care to count. I’ve completed countless magic rituals, written sad poems, spilled my heart to close friends, done all kinds of messy processing.
I still feel the weight of grief. It comes in heavy waves that bowl a body over. I still wonder if my mom and I could’ve fixed things, as pointless and heartfelt a wish it might be.
I’ve learned since how positively art and writing can affect one’s experience on the path of healing. Through the self-awareness that comes from experiencing pain in the body, processing it with meditation, spirituality, and expressing it through writing and art, I’ve learned to face my inherited illnesses with the self-compassion and patience required to begin my own healing journey. Self-awareness and the ability to express my experiences have allowed me to begin to heal from generational cycles of family trauma and illness.
By walking the path of self-awareness, I’ve learned how to face my demons, to share space with grief, fear and pain as trusted board members, and flow with the cycle of pain, rather than fighting, avoiding, checking out or projecting inherited traumas onto others.
THROUGH ART, WE HEAL TO RESTORE OUR PERSONAL POWER
Osho says a child can become conscious, fully aware, if, in her past life, she has meditated enough to fight with the darkness that death brings. The way art affects an environment, so too may spirituality, meditation, self-compassion, drape a refreshed coat of color on our soul.
The temporary installation of The Gates reflects the temporary opportunity I had, a last chance, to connect with my mom before she passed away. I see it now, looking back: a gateway; but back then, I was hurting too much to notice. She tried to reach out the best way she could and we didn’t connect. I cut her out of my life afterwards.
Life with my mom reflected a dark winter of my youth. Her death brought forth a new, second life within me, a spring of hope, full of the decision to live, to develop goals, to do anything other than rot and wait for death. I needed to take the path that led me here: to healing with art in the gateway between earth and the divine, in places where we can access peace, bliss and joy.
AND WE PLUNGE INTO THE CAVERNS OF TOMORROW WITH JUST OUR FLASHLIGHTS AND OUR LOVE
Trauma is like re-walking the same circular paths of travel over and over. Trauma creates a wormhole in presence where the past is always present. Recurring memories can be haunting and subtle, or overwhelming and overbearing.
In Buddhism, self-awareness is the practice by which people are able to break free of their life’s conditioning, to experience life without separation from self or others, without judgments or expectations, and to know the true power and stillness that lives within us. Without self-awareness, it’s impossible to rewrite trauma cycles or change our family stories. I want to heal and recover from my mom’s projected pain, her descent into madness. Self-awareness through meditation creates the power to change those traumatic memories.
The feeling of ‘flow’ is what gives us the ability to soul-travel in meditation. Like water in a river, or air moving through The Gates, ‘flow’ that comes from focused endeavors, including through writing, painting, meditating, or other time-traveling activities, is a way to tap into the feeling of trust and surrender, and allow yourself to be led by the path before you.
Writing aids with emotional processing. Tapping into flow provides access to deeper subconscious patterns, and by bringing these patterns to light, we can face, assess and know them. When we make space in the present for past parts of ourselves buried in darkness, we walk on the path of self-awareness, beneath orange healing gates, to self-integration, a direct road from a dark winter into a brighter spring.
The secret is that tapping into ‘flow,’ the feeling that comes from being focused or in sacred spaces, is accessible anywhere with meditation. My therapist, a previously ordained monk, says, “Humans are masters of separation, we separate ourselves from each other when in truth, we are all a connected, unified universe of consciousness.”
Things are rarely as permanent as they seem. By shifting memories, expressing the immensity of pain and feelings, and reconnecting with lost and forgotten parts of myself, I’m integrating past and present selves to make a best possible future.
Kelli Tompkins is a writer and artist from Utah who believes deeply in the healing and restorative power of art. She graduated from the University of Utah in 2009, as well as the Utah Screenwriters Workshop in 2015. Her work has been featured in So It Goes, the Kurt Vonnegut literary journal, Meow Meow Pow Pow, Lead | Protect, Decarcerate Utah, deLuge. Kelli’s first collection of poems was a longlisted finalist for the Atlas Review. In her spare time, she indulges in eating, gardening and magic.
Thank you to Roar Magazine (now closed) for publishing this piece originally in 2018.