“You can’t rage against the machine
while asking it
to read your emails.”

And I rolled my eyes
so hard
I nearly injured myself.

So I guess this is me
outing myself:

I use ChatGPT.

A lot.

I use it to research.

I use it to organize my thoughts.

I use it to talk through ideas
while I’m driving.

I use it when I have
seventeen thoughts
trying to get through
the same doorway at once—

and I need help
sorting them into something
another human being
might actually understand.

I use it to find information.

To interrogate my assumptions.

To brainstorm.

To edit.

To create.

And sometimes
just to figure out
what the hell
I am trying to say.

But here’s what I don’t do.

I don’t ask ChatGPT
what I believe.

I don’t hand it
my moral compass.

I don’t ask it
to manufacture experiences
I haven’t had
and pass them off as mine.

I am a writer.

And I care deeply
about the difference
between assistance
and authorship.

My ideas remain my ideas.

My lived experiences
remain mine.

My voice
remains mine.

I also use
AI-generated images.

And when I do?

I say so.

I’ve hired digital artists
who use AI
as part of their process
to enhance their own work.

And I have paid them
for that labor.

I believe in transparency.

I believe in attribution.

I believe in compensating
human beings
for their work.

And YES—

there are enormous
ethical questions
surrounding AI.

Labor.

Environmental impact.

Intellectual property.

Corporate power.

Surveillance.

Bias.

And the really important question:

Who ultimately benefits?

Those conversations matter.

But telling people
they cannot rage
against the machine
while using ChatGPT?

That is not
one of those conversations.

Because ChatGPT
is not the machine.

Technology
is not the machine.

A printing press
isn’t the machine.

A smartphone
isn’t the machine.

Facebook
isn’t the machine.

A computer
isn’t the machine.

AI
isn’t the machine.

Any of them
can become instruments
of the machine.

They can also become instruments
for challenging it.

The machine
is unrevealed truth.

The machine is the shadow
we have accumulated
over millennia—

until it has become
this sticky, garbage, toxic,
abusive, non-life-sustaining force
we are all trying
to survive inside.

It is domination.

It is exploitation.

It is the belief
that some human beings
are inherently entitled
to control—

the lives,

bodies,

labor,

land,

resources,

stories,

and futures

of other human beings.

It is colonialism.

White supremacy.

Patriarchy.

Capitalism without conscience.

It is the systems
we inherited.

The systems we perpetuate
without examining them.

And the systems
that convince us
their existence
is inevitable.

And perhaps
most insidiously—

the machine teaches us
to turn on one another
instead of looking at it.

Which is why
I find declarations like,

“You can’t rage against the machine
if you use it
to read your emails”

so incredibly unhelpful.

Really?

We’re going to purity-test
one another
over the tools we use?

While organizing
on Facebook?

From smartphones
manufactured through
global supply chains?

Ordering books
through Amazon?

Driving gasoline-powered cars
to protests
against fossil fuels?

Buying groceries
produced inside systems
most of us would dismantle
tomorrow
if we actually possessed
that power?

There is no ethical consumption
under an unethical system
that allows us
to float six inches
above the ground
untouched by it.

We are in here.

The question is:

What do we do
while we’re here?

For me?

Integrity means knowing
what my tools are—

and knowing
what they are not.

ChatGPT is a tool.

Sometimes
an astonishing one.

Sometimes
a frustrating one.

Sometimes one
that confidently misunderstands me
and gets told
exactly where it can shove
its suggestion.

It helps me access
and organize information.

It helps me think.

It helps me take something
enormous and tangled
in my head—

and begin pulling apart
the threads.

But it does not get
to decide who I am.

It does not get
to decide what I value.

It does not get
to replace human relationship.

Human creativity.

Human accountability.

Human touch.

Human community.

Or human responsibility.

And if someday
we discover
that these technologies
were developed
or deployed
in ways that exploit us?

Then we confront
that truth too.

We demand transparency.

We change our behavior.

We fight for regulation.

We refuse abuses.

We keep asking:

Who holds power?

Who profits?

Who is harmed?

And whose voice
is missing?

Because that
is raging against the machine.

Not identifying
some new electronic object
as inherently evil—

and dividing ourselves
into the morally pure people
who don’t touch it

and everybody else.

Machines aren’t the enemy.

Unexamined power is.

Hidden exploitation is.

Domination is.

Unrevealed truth is.

And every time
we allow a tool
to become another convenient way
to divide people—

people who might otherwise
be standing
shoulder to shoulder
asking those questions together—

the actual machine

gets another day

without us

looking directly at it.

I’m having one of those moments.

I’ve been up in the woods with a group of beloveds for a week, having myriad experiences that have each helped me look at, and feel into, what comes up in my memory, in my emotions, and in the messages sent from my body that point me back to my story and what got me from there to here.

In that moment, it’s a reckoning. It’s either a reckoning like, “Oh, I see I’ve uncovered something that’s going to take some time for me to feel into and to learn from.” Or, “Oh, look—it’s a reckoning, and I’m going to take a moment to process it, and then I’m going to let it go.” And then there are some reckonings that come where we say, “I’m going to put this down, but first I’m going to share it, talk about it, bring it to a friend, write about it, or give it to the trees.”

This is a little bit of all of the above.

In 2008, when the housing market crashed, so did many other things. My marriage. My career was taking a seemingly 180-degree turn—although, ten years later, I made another 180 and ended up reorienting to my earlier avocation.

Some things were exploding, and one of them was my sense of self, my sense of purpose, and my awakening to the responsibility I had to care for myself as a living, breathing organism, rather than continue to absorb whatever was being thrown my way.

The other thing that was exploding was my mortgage payment. It tripled in the course of one month.

We had a first mortgage and a second mortgage. One was sold into mortgage-backed securities, and the other was sold to a different bank. Between those two things, my monthly mortgage payment went from about $1,400 a month to well over $4,000.

I sought the help of my community at the time—my family, my coworkers—because I didn’t know what to do. I was advised by somebody to challenge this in the courts. I did that. And the court stayed the actions of the banks and we were allowed to stay in the house in the interim.

I didn’t need resources. I wasn’t trying to save the mortgage. I was going to refinance the house. I was going to move forward.

And during this fallow time, the house was effectively in limbo.

And so we stayed in the house because there was no one there to say we had to leave. And I knew I couldn’t make the payments, so I didn’t bother. I just lived.

I had a 16-year-old, a 14-year-old, a 2-year-old, and a 1-year-old.

When I sought counsel from someone I trusted—someone who might have insight about how I could handle the financial aspect of it, how I could move forward financially through a refinance—I was not looking for money, mind you.

And it’s a good thing, because not only did this person not offer advice, they admonished me. They admonished me for, quote, “squatting” in my own home with my four children, one of whom was still breastfeeding.

The admonition was that what I was doing was not without fault. There was a victim, and the victim was the bank.

When I pushed back and said, “Banks aren’t people. I’m not harming anyone,” this person doubled down and said, “Well, then you’re harming that bank’s shareholders.”

So, with a lump in my throat, I hung up the phone. I started looking for rentals and feeling sadness, loss, shame, regret, and remorse.

I moved out of a house that had my name on it into a rental because that’s what I was advised was the “right thing to do.” And I was seeking integrity with my money.

Again, I trusted this person.

So here’s what I have to say now.

1. My allegiance and my alliance are not toward any bank, corporation, or shareholder of any entity. Because those shareholders’ contract with that banking entity was not their life and their family. It was a contract of money, which is but one thread of energy that exists in the interconnectedness of humankind.

2. I would say that, as my sister Sayra Pinto shared a few days ago, “money is the extraction of humanity’s power”. It is the extraction of the will and the power of us as sovereign beings, and it is used against us. It is bartered with, traded with. People are killed and exploited with that extracted power that is taken without our consent.

3. And I can say now, eighteen years later, that I’m standing in my sovereign power. And my allegiance is not now, nor was it then, to any bank, any shareholder, or anyone’s bond but my own to repay debts as they were contracted. Not with allowances to change the terms in perpetuity.

4. I would say that my allegiance now, in this moment, as it was then, is to my family. First to myself, and next to my children.

Period.

End of story.

No negotiations.

1. I was doing nothing wrong. For a sacred mother and her sacred children to be expected by the patriarchy to give up her home in the best interests of the billionaire and millionaire class that bleep the bleep of corporate patriarchal bullshit is a travesty. It is harm that cannot be measured in words.

   But as one of my beloved students once wrote “werds is all I gots”.

1. Respectfully, I will never stand by in silence, swallowing my power again.

2. Never again will I bow to the bad advice of anyone who seeks to sow the seeds of separation between myself and my hearth.

So, respectfully, corporate America—and anyone who has allegiance to it, whether through themselves, through the people they vote for, through the corporatist people who donate to those campaigns, to banking at large, to those who seek to continually prop up and perpetuate the structures that enable patriarchy through its anti-globalist, anti-hemispheric thinking, that has pushed the nuclear family in so tightly that it is bursting at the seams and screaming with need for the village—I will say again:

Respectfully, sit down.

Take a seat.

I’m done.

We’re done.

And I speak for millions.

In the ’90s, after I found my way through “the system” and found myself with a Section 8 voucher in hand, headed to a new beginning, I advised women who had been living in similar circumstances. I advised them to use the system to shoehorn the perpetrator out of their home so that they could be safe and their children could keep their home and their bed.

Because what happens when that isn’t maintained is that the woman is immediately in a state of poverty.

And poverty is more than money.

Poverty is ecological.

It’s cultural.

We’re cut off from our money, from resources, from food, from our lineage, from our village, from our mothers, from our aunties, from our babies.

But if a woman—or anyone who is the victim of any kind of violence in their home—can stay in their home, they are thus empowered.

Ten years later, I didn’t see how clear the mirror was: that I was once again being forced from a home, not by a violent man, but by a violent system. I was being made homeless for the second time in my life by the filth of the system of capitalism that we have been told is the best government type to support democracy. What a crock.

So now that my eyes are wide open…

Respectfully, take a seat.

My father said that I would chime “peeeeensowwwww” when I wanted a pencil, and then I would say “peeeeeeeessssaa papaaaah” when I wanted paper. Then I would take that pencil that was much too long for my little tiny hand, and I would spread out on my belly on the kitchen floor andI would draw long undulating lines, and I loved it. I loved writing.

There are moments I remember exactly what I looked like when I did this writing. I can see myself from the outside. There are moments where I look into my grown child, Lucy’s eyes and I see that self reflected so clearly. It’s the tenderest spot of me.

After I grew up a little bit and I knew how to write, I wrote stories at home as well as at school. I found writing to be gentle, like that first moment when you push your kayak or canoe off of the embankment, and you feel nothing but water gently rocking you from below. Or that first moment at takeoff when you feel the plane lift off the ground. For me writing was a dance. It was a bird in a tree singing a song I had composed it was a flower that somehow magically smelled exactly as I imagined it would.

When it came to reading, I was always pushing myself. I was always reaching for books that were too hard for me. I loved pushing myself with reading. I remember picking up Tolkien when I was in first or second grade and stumbling through it. When I went back and reread The Hobbit as a young teenager, it was fascinating to watch all my misconceptions come undone, like knots that had been loosened for me.

With writing, though, I never pushed myself in quite the same way. I didn’t have to. I seemed content to grow into it one step at a time. I also loved experimenting with penmanship. I loved the big, loopy letters popular in the 1980s. Then I wanted to write really tiny, in all capital letters, like my dad did. Later, when I worked as a cook at Friendly’s, there was a waitress whose handwriting fascinated me, the way she made her s’s and t’s and lowercase f’s. She added small details— loops and hooks — so precise and charming. There was a wholesomeness to the way she wrote, and I wanted that for myself, so I gave it to myself. It changed my handwriting for life.

I’ve always noticed my students’ handwriting, too, especially students who struggled. Now when they finally get to the essay portion of one of an evaluations, it’s beautiful to watch. A student who struggles through reading and math may suddenly take flight when given permission to put pencil to paper.

There is honesty about writing. Our insides come out in those lines as if our very sinew of is unfurling across the page like ribbon folding over itself.

Some folks have a hard time with that. Some aren’t confident. Some young people haven’t written enough to develop an easy rhythm to the way they form letters or even have poor muscle tone in their hands. Written expression is especially difficult for people who struggle with expression of any kind.

Expression has never been difficult for me.

When I think back over my life, writing has always been there. Long before I knew what stories were or what essays were or what books could become, I wanted a pencil and paper. I wanted to make marks that meant something, even before I knew what meaning was.

When my father was dying almost ten years ago, I had time to prepare. We knew he would be passing, and I had already begun posting stories and memories and photographs of him on Facebook. It was as though the cork had already been pulled.

When it came time to write his eulogy, because I had been posting about him on social media, it was as if a bottle had been uncorked and the bubbles had settled enough so that I could begin to distill what I most wanted people to know about him.

In spite of all the things I wanted people know about my father, things that may be only a daughter would know, I really wanted them to know I had written his eulogy on a yellow legal pad.

Because if you know, you know.

Mental illness is my own worst memory. I don’t think I was born into anxiety. I think it preyed on me, found me unguarded, and took hold. At first it tempted me with sensation. It whispered, just let your mother walk away in this store... watch her... just to see what it feels like... And so I did, letting the heavy, tingly feelings swirl from my little feet into my hands. Then the urge to chase her took over, and I was safe again.

It was like I was playing chicken with my emotions.

The next pieces I recall came in the form of nightmares. Horrific ones that I can remember to this day. A series of two or three that repeated themselves. I’d wake up terrified, knowing the dream was only in my imagination but fully immersed, body and mind. This fear usually drove me to call for my father, who appeared in my doorway in seconds.

One time, my mother tells me, I just cried and cried in my sleep without waking. My father carried me to the living room and held me and rocked me while I cried in my sleep. I have no memory of this. I remember the sleepwalking. I remember the fear that I’d wake up somewhere else.

I also remember the bargaining I did with myself to avoid having nightmares. “If I just remember to...” fill in the blank. Practice my spelling words, take the antibiotics for my strep throat, make it to first base in kickball... I won’t have the dream. The one that started with the same animated intro of the bat screeching in the moonlight over the cabin in the woods with the bare trees all around. When I saw that bat, I knew it was starting, and if I crunched my eyes shut, the bat would stop and the dream would not continue.

I woke up with headaches.

I ritualized my walks to school. In kindergarten I left later than my siblings for half the year—the second half. Only my sister was still in elementary school, and I don’t remember seeing her there except the one time she came into my classroom with the other sixth graders to help me make a papier-mâché pig we named Barney. I crossed the yards to get to the next street over, cutting about a quarter mile out of my walk. Next, I got to the opposite side of Upton Road and tried to follow in Kathleen’s footsteps. Only, she walked with her best friend Angie... two sets of steps. Which ones were my sister’s? I had to double back and walk them both.

One time this made me so late the crossing guard, also a sixth grader, had already gone back in to eat his lunch with his friends in the cafeteria. I imagine him digging his spork into two perfectly scooped balls of spaghetti with an orange-ish sauce that would never pass the 2026 marinara muster. Maybe a piece of floppy “French bread” with his pale green plastic partitioned tray on a green Formica cafeteria table, while I stood with growing dread on the corner knowing I should not cross, but having no choice.

“How did you cross Xerxes Avenue, Mary?” my teacher asked me. “Did you cross alone?”

I imagine I gave her a big-eyed stare. I can remember what I looked like. Straight mouse-brown hair, a side part, a single plastic barrette. A dress with a pinafore. White cable-knit tights and boots covering my feet that were slicked up in Wonder Bread bags.

“Yes.”

I remember the remonstration for that. And the fact that they confirmed my story with the crossing guard, Jim Kraft. Or Craft. Kraft, probably. I thought about him for years. How he would have found my flattened-like-a-squirrel body at dismissal time. I saw it all in vivid detail.

And I was never late again.

That spring I was walking home and cut through the yards again, this time to First Street to Lori-Ann’s house. As we played, her mother said, “Hmm... does your mother know you’re here?”

It hadn’t occurred to me that was relevant.

As instructed, I got my pink sparkly school bag and ran home, crossing through the neighborhood, and began hearing my name being called from multiple directions. A few of the voices belonged to my siblings.

My brother Tom: “You better get home. You’re in BIG trouble.”

Entering the back door, I saw my mother sitting at the dining room table in the chair where my father usually sat at dinner. As she wailed and cried, I remember thinking, I must’ve died.

My parents forbade me from crossing the yards after that. I had scared the bejesus out of my mom, and this was not going to happen again. Rain or shine, I had to walk all the way down my street to 102nd with no crossing over. No shortcuts. No ritualistic path-treading. Just sidewalks. Cement sidewalks with cracks.

Don’t step on a crack or you’ll break your mother’s back.

It was too late for that. My mother’s back was already broken. I remember the brace she wore, the incision line on her spine. Fine and angry. I thought of that tiny incision line as a crack in the sidewalk as I treaded past exactly thirteen houses to Xerxes Avenue, where I’d cross with the other kindergarteners.

That’s when the second nightmare started. This time I was kidnapped off 102nd on my way to school. My best friend Amy wasn’t in kindergarten yet, and so I walked alone. In my dreams, everyone was calling my name not because I was missing and they were looking for me... they were looking for me to take me and hide me in their basement.

They always got me.

That one thing was always the same. I became quite sure the kids on that part of 102nd would do so in reality if they had the chance. I started to want to make friends with those kids—the two or three families with children near the corner of Upton and 102nd. If I was friendly, they wouldn’t want to kidnap me.

In my dreams I was so friendly to my captors. If they liked me, they’d let me go. They always let me go, and I’d run up the stairs and my father would be there to carry me home.

The third nightmare I had was one that, to this day, at age fifty-six, I can still feel in my body where it resides in the skin under my forearms. It was a demon. Red, leathery, and lithe with reptilian scales. He would leap through the picture window of our living room, sending shards of shattered glass across the royal blue low-pile carpet my mother vacuumed with such care.

But that’s where the dream ended: the shattering glass and those impossibly long arms reaching for me.

I became consumed with fear about these dreams and wanted to do anything I could to prevent them from showing up. This took up a lot of my time and attention. School made it nearly impossible to keep them at bay. If I had ponytails in my hair and the ribbons fell out, I’d have the dreams. I’d be so distracted trying to put my slippery ponytail ribbons back in that I’d have to be moved to the kidney-shaped table to finish my work while the others moved on to the next subject. If I got a drink from the water fountain without thinking of drinking from a hose on a hot summer day, I would have the dream. Then I had to drink longer to lock it in. If we had library, it was a no-bad-dream day, but if the librarian was absent and we played eraser tag, I would have the bad dream. If we had music, I would have the dreams. But if we sang the Kookaburra Song, I would not.

Laugh, Kookaburra, laugh, Kookaburra, leave some there for me...

I sang with glee about a bird in a gum tree, knowing I was safe for another night.

When I got a little older, it was more about friends and my social anxiety. If I got teased for my buck teeth—I had one hell of an overbite—or my glasses...

“Four eyes!”

...I was doomed. But if the last kid on our bus route was in school and I was not the last to get dropped off, I would not have the dreams.

That year there was also a song.

Do you know where you’re going to? Do you like the things that life is showing you?

I had recently found a photo of my mysteriously absent maternal grandmother. The image of her face in black and white, an unidentifiable and nonsensical loss, filled my belly. Combined with that song, it would undo me for the day. I’d be near tears.

If I can just get through the day without thinking of that song, if I can just not cry, I’ll be okay.

The only way to avoid the nightmares was on non-school days. That’s when all the variables were erased and I was fully free. Sleepovers, picnics, road trips, and flights to Boston—free. Long bike rides, explorations down by the creek on a Saturday afternoon? Free. Afternoons on the railroad tracks imagining wonderfully sinister dark plots with Amy, forts under ping-pong tables, climbing trees... all free.

No bargains to be struck.

Every weekend, every summer, every school break, I was free as a bird.

The fact that I never told an adult any of this is, perhaps, one of the most telling parts of the story.

Listening to Pearl Jam has become one of my adult bargains. Somewhere deep inside me lives a little girl who believes that if Eddie Vedder starts singing, anxiety will come looking for me.

.

I was raised in a religious family. I inherited a worldview that told me what was true, what was sacred, what was possible, and what was not. As I’ve grown older, I have found myself less interested in certainty and more interested in mystery.

What I have come to believe is not that I know more than I once did, but that I know less.

I no longer see humanity as the center of creation. I no longer assume that our species is the sole expression of intelligence or consciousness in the universe. I no longer believe that mystery exists merely to be solved.

Instead, I find myself increasingly in love with mystery itself.

I love this planet with a devotion that sometimes feels almost unbearable. The trees. The rivers. The oceans. The rocks. The birds. The wind moving through leaves. The more-than-human world feels alive to me in a way I cannot adequately explain.

And perhaps that is why I find myself wondering: if consciousness exists throughout nature, if intelligence takes forms we barely recognize even here on Earth, how can we be so certain that we are alone?

Around the age of forty-two, something shifted in me.

Through dreams, meditation, conversations with mediums, and experiences I still struggle to explain, I began encountering a reality that felt larger than the one I had been taught to inhabit.

One meditation changed everything.

I found myself standing outside a place that felt more real than imagination. It was not a place I invented. It was a place I discovered. Since then, I have spent years looking for its physical counterpart, convinced that somewhere on this Earth exists the landscape I encountered that day.

Standing nearby was a being.

He was impossibly tall.

I could not see his face. I remember his hands. I remember a strange familiarity. At first I thought of my grandfather. Then, oddly, I thought of my niece Scout.

Years later, when I encountered illustrations of what people call Nordic aliens, I felt a shock of recognition.

The image matched the being from my meditation.

For fourteen years, I have occasionally returned to that image during meditation and prayer.

I expected Spielberg’s Disclosure Day  to explore profound questions about aliens. Why are they here? What have they learned? What do they understand about consciousness? What role do they play in the larger web of existence?

Instead, I left disappointed.

The film seemed less interested in mystery than spectacle. It felt disconnected, emotionally fragmented, and oddly unconcerned with the deeper questions it raised.

Perhaps what bothered me most was that the film portrayed people horrified by the suffering of extraterrestrials while, outside the theater, human beings continue to suffer in wars, refugee camps, detention centers, and systems of oppression that most of us have learned to look away from.

I found myself wondering why compassion is sometimes easier when the suffering belongs to someone—or something—we consider other than human.

For decades we have been living through forms of disclosure. Technological disclosure. Political disclosure. Institutional disclosure.

The exposure of abuse, corruption, exploitation, trafficking, and hidden systems of power.

The stories we were told about ourselves are unraveling. Perhaps that is what disclosure really means—the revelation that much of what we believed was never the whole story.

Last night I had two vivid dreams. In the first, I lost Jeff. I was in the wrong place, unable to find him, frightened and disoriented. I woke up crying. He comforted me and then I fell asleep again.

In the second dream, my father and my brother Kevin stood on either side of me. I could feel their arms around me. I could feel their warmth.

They were impossibly tall.

So tall that I could not see their faces.

I stood between them and leaned into them.

There was no fear.

Only love.

When I woke up and walked into the kitchen, Jeff was making breakfast. Out of nowhere, he began talking about Nordic aliens. I hadn’t mentioned my dreams. I hadn’t mentioned the meditation. I hadn’t mentioned the tall beings.

For a moment, the boundary between dream, memory, coincidence, and mystery felt very thin.

But I am no longer convinced that understanding is the highest goal.

Reverence, and curiosity and love are. The invitation it to enter it more fully. There is a sacred task before us, it is not discovering whether we are alone.

It is learning to love.

Read more

I have always loved Memorial Day, though perhaps not in the way people expect.

My memories are not filled with military pageantry or triumphant patriotism. They are softer than that. Smaller. More human. I think of little-town parades where children waved from sidewalks and elderly veterans sat in folding chairs beneath maple trees. I think of low-key cookouts with great uncles and great aunts, grandparents whose faces carried both hardship and warmth. I think of gardens.

Always the gardens.

The magical riot of peonies in impossible pinks and creamy whites. The heavy scent of lilacs drifting through damp spring air. Iris blades rising like green flames from the earth. The first deep green of Memorial Day weekend always felt less like nationalism and more like remembrance through continuity — life returning again despite everything.

As a child, the adults around me possessed a kind of mystique. Their smiles, their cigarette laughter on porches, the quiet cheek kisses exchanged in kitchens, the casseroles arriving wrapped in foil. Ordinary holiness disguised as ordinary people.

Now, as a grandmother and great aunt myself, I understand it differently.

I understand that one of the great wonders of life is watching it expand outward from you. Like an old heirloom quilt unfurling across generations. The babies become parents. The cousins become elders. The stories become recipes, habits, gardens, gestures, warnings, blessings.

And then, one day, you realize you are part of the generation carrying memory forward.

For me, Memorial Day has gradually become less about glorifying war and more about gathering close to what remains. It is not the machinery of war that moves me. It is the fragile persistence of human tenderness despite war.

I am a pacifist. I believe all war is a tragedy. Not an inevitability to romanticize, but a wound humanity keeps reopening in itself. Every war leaves behind mothers who cannot sleep, children who inherit silence, bodies that never fully come home even when they physically return.

Yet Memorial Day persists because grief persists. Love persists too.

The generation in my family most shaped by World War II is now largely gone. What remains are fragments: photographs curling at the edges, stories half remembered, certain recipes no one quite makes the same anymore. A way of laughing. A cadence of speech. A reverence for tomatoes grown in one’s own soil.

So now Memorial Day arrives for me as a day of planting.

It is the first true moment each spring when the earth feels ready to trust us again. The bees return. The air softens. The garden asks to be tended. I find myself pulling winter debris from flower beds, trimming hedges, turning soil with quiet gratitude.

I study the woody stems of hyacinth and peony, searching for signs of what survived the frost. The daffodil heads have long since bowed and dropped away. Iris leaves stand sharp and upright, promising blooms still to come.

And I think perhaps this is remembrance too.

Not only mourning the dead, but caring properly for the living.

Not only remembering loss, but participating in continuation.

Not only naming what violence destroyed, but protecting what tenderness still remains.

There is humility in gardening that feels deeply connected to peace. Rearranging mulch. Pulling weeds. Watering something fragile and wordless. It reminds me how small my own part is in the vastness of life — and yet how meaningful even small acts of care can become.

Maybe that is my Memorial Day faith now.

Not faith in nations or wars or borders.

Faith in people gathering together under trees. Faith in peonies returning each May. Faith in cookouts and porch laughter and children running barefoot through grass. Faith that humanity’s deepest calling is not domination, but stewardship.

To tend.

To protect.

To remember gently.

To leave behind more beauty than harm.

Today is the five-year anniversary of my son’s suicide attempt.

Yesterday was the six-year anniversary of rescuing a cat from a man whose violence left visible injuries to the animal’s whiskers and face. Even now, the imagery of what may have happened to that cat still enters my mind uninvited. Memory is strange that way. Trauma is strange that way. The body keeps things long after the immediate danger has passed.

Last night, for the first time in a while, I slept deeply.

My doctor doubled my Klonopin temporarily, and I slept through the night and then slept in until nearly nine in the morning. Twelve hours altogether. When I woke up, I realized something simple but profound:

The light was different.

Part of that was literal. Morning light at nine o’clock is softer and fuller than the gray-blue anxiety light of dawn that usually accompanies exhaustion, racing thoughts, and obligation. But it was more than that. My entire nervous system experienced the world differently.

I felt space.

I felt more ready. More prepared. Less hunted by the day before it had even begun.

And it made me realize something I have struggled to articulate for years: trauma is not only memory of the past. Trauma becomes fear projected into the future.

When painful memories surface, they do not stay neatly confined to history. They ripple outward. A vivid memory does not simply say, This happened. It whispers, This could happen again. This will happen again. Look what suffering becomes over time.

That is the exhausting part.

Not just remembering, but forecasting.

The traumatized mind becomes a kind of survival machine, constantly scanning forward through time, trying to outrun pain by imagining it first. It studies patterns, probabilities, symptoms, expressions, moods, body language, silences. It attempts to prepare for catastrophe before catastrophe arrives.

And when you love deeply—especially as a parent—those projections become even more unbearable.

A memory from five years ago becomes fear about ten years from now.

An anniversary becomes prophecy.

A body sensation becomes a future diagnosis.

A difficult season becomes imagined permanent collapse.

This is one of the cruelest aspects of intrusive thinking: the past begins vibrating into the future. Fear stops being a response to reality and becomes an atmosphere through which every possible future is interpreted.

And yet.

This morning, while driving to work with a decaf coffee in my hand, clean clothes on my body, my hair in a simple bun, no makeup, no contacts, eyes clearer than they have been in days, I had another thought.

What if hope can ripple forward too?

What if the nervous system can slowly learn to anticipate safety the way it once anticipated catastrophe?

What if healing is not the complete disappearance of fear, but the gradual strengthening of another current running alongside it?

Because even today, on a hard anniversary, there were good things:

I slept.

My labs were reassuring.

Lucy’s birthday went well.

I stayed within budget.

My coworkers feel supportive.

I know what is expected of me today.

The light is different.

None of these things erase trauma.

But perhaps healing is not erasure.

Perhaps healing is teaching the body that the future is not obligated to repeat the worst thing that has ever happened.

My hope is that, little by little, I begin to feel ripples from the future that are not made entirely of fear. That some future version of peace, steadiness, connection, or relief might begin reaching backward toward me the same way dread once did.

Not denial.

Not delusion.

Not forced positivity.

Just the possibility that the future is not only where catastrophe lives.

Maybe it is also where healing has been waiting.

I am not sure I will ever fully understand addiction, but my brushes with it have been plentiful. I was born into a family where suffering ran on both sides, and in each generation it manifested differently. On one side, alcohol functioned as self-medication for minds and nervous systems that likely would now be recognized through the language of trauma, depression, anxiety, neurodivergence, and inherited mental illness. Science has revealed so much about the ways trauma and physiology travel through families—not metaphorically, but biologically. We inherit nervous systems. We inherit susceptibilities. We inherit patterns of survival.

And we inherit silence.

When I look back at previous generations, I do not simply see “addicts.” I see suffering. I see women who endured things they could not metabolize. I see men who carried grief without language. I see people attempting to soothe nervous systems they did not understand with the only tools available to them.

One of my grandmothers drank. I never knew her in this lifetime, but through her writing and through the stories that remain, she has become deeply real to me. I do not sit around condemning her alcoholism with some tidy moral superiority. I do not despise her. I grieve for her. She suffered, and she used substances to ease that suffering, and in doing so she caused suffering that rippled outward into my mother, and then into me.

This is how family disease works. It moves through generations changing shape.

It did not break me entirely, but it dented me. It made me permeable. Amorphous. Hyper-attuned. I became someone capable of adapting into whatever emotional shape was needed in a given moment. That quality made me compassionate, intuitive, creative, nurturing, emotionally intelligent. It also made me vulnerable to disappearing inside the suffering of others.

The healthiest relationships in my life are the ones where people allow me to remain a whole person rather than turning me into a container for their pain.

Because I am not merely someone who fixes suffering.

I am someone who exists in my own right.

I think many people who grow up inside addiction become experts at creating vast internal worlds because we never learned how to fully take up space outside ourselves. We become writers, artists, thinkers, empaths, caretakers, visionaries. We create enormous interior landscapes because our external emotional realities often felt unsafe, chaotic, or overcrowded.

We create as much space inside because we do not know how to take up space outside.

And now I am a mother myself, watching my own beloved child struggle with a severe and frightening constellation of psychiatric illness and substance abuse. She turns nineteen today. She is brilliant and suffering and impulsive and chemically consumed in ways that terrify me. She crushes prescribed medication and snorts it. If she cannot snort it, she smokes it. Foil appears in strange places. Burn marks appear on objects. Bits of residue and improvised paraphernalia accumulate like physical manifestations of desperation itself. I watch her nervous system seek alteration compulsively, relentlessly, as though unmodified consciousness has become unbearable to her.

And I need to say something that feels culturally forbidden:

These behaviors are symptoms.

Terrifying symptoms.

Dangerous symptoms.

Exhausting symptoms.

Sometimes grotesque symptoms.

But symptoms nonetheless.

We have normalized public witness for some illnesses while demanding secrecy around others. Families chronicle cancer treatment openly. We create CaringBridge pages. We organize meal trains. We document vomiting, blood counts, surgical drains, complications, medication regimens, setbacks, and triumphs because suffering is allowed to be visible when the organ in crisis is culturally legible.

But when the organ in crisis is the brain—when illness manifests through addiction, psychiatric instability, self-destruction, compulsive behavior, impulsivity, psychosis, emotional volatility—we exile families into silence and shame.

I am no longer willing to participate in that silence.

Not because I want to expose my child.

But because I want to humanize her.

And because families living beside addiction are often quietly disintegrating while pretending to function in public.

There is something profoundly disorienting about loving someone you cannot save through love alone. Something almost biologically intolerable about watching your child move repeatedly toward things that may harm or kill them while your own nervous system screams at you to intervene.

People speak often about the suffering of the addicted person. Less often do we speak honestly about the physiological devastation experienced by the people who love them. The hypervigilance. The interrupted sleep. The headaches. The elevated blood pressure. The terror. The constant scanning. The way imagination becomes colonized by catastrophic possibility.

Watching someone live can begin to feel like watching them die in slow motion.

And still, I refuse to reduce my child to the sum of her symptoms any more than I would reduce a cancer patient to nausea or a dementia patient to memory loss. She is a whole person. A suffering person. A beloved person.

I do not know how this story ends.

I am writing from the middle of it.

Many people live in a near-constant state of reaction.

Their mood depends on the news, traffic, social media, politics, a partner’s tone of voice, a child’s choices, a text message, a boss, an argument, a bank account, or the emotional weather of the people around them. Over time, the nervous system begins to believe that safety and peace exist somewhere outside the self.

This is what psychologists call an external locus of control: the feeling that life is primarily happening to you rather than being shaped through you.

The nervous system can learn a different pattern.

An internal locus of control develops when we repeatedly teach the body and mind:
“I can influence my internal state. I can return to myself. I have practices that help me regulate, respond, and choose.”

These are not abstract philosophies. They are daily physical and mental practices that slowly retrain the brain and body.

1. Begin the Day Before Input Enters Your Brain

Do not start the morning with social media, texts, email, or news.

For the first 10–20 minutes after waking:

• drink water

• stretch

• step outside

• pray or meditate

• light a candle

• write three intentions

• breathe slowly

This interrupts the habit of immediately surrendering your nervous system to external stimulation.

2. Use Your Body as a Regulation Tool

A dysregulated nervous system cannot think clearly.

When overwhelmed:

• walk for 10 minutes

• shake out your arms and legs

• stretch your neck and shoulders

• put your bare feet on the ground

• breathe out longer than you breathe in

• splash cold water on your face

• hum, sing, or chant

These practices activate the parasympathetic nervous system and communicate safety to the body.

3. Limit Exposure to Outrage Loops

The brain is not designed to absorb endless streams of conflict, catastrophe, and argument.

Set boundaries around:

• doom-scrolling

• comment sections

• rage-based media

• repetitive political fixation

• gossip

• conflict-heavy group chats

Choose specific times to consume information rather than remaining psychologically plugged in all day.

Attention is energy.

4. Create One Small Daily Ritual You Control Completely

An internal locus of control grows through repeated experiences of agency.

Choose one thing you will do every day no matter what:

• make tea in a favorite mug

• water plants

• journal for five minutes

• pull a tarot card

• walk around the block

• read poetry before bed

• make your bed

• light incense at dusk

Small rituals stabilize the nervous system because they create continuity and predictability.

5. Learn to Identify Nervous-System Signals Early

Most people ignore dysregulation until they explode.

Start noticing earlier cues:

• irritability

• jaw clenching

• sound sensitivity

• racing thoughts

• snapping at people

• doom-thinking

• compulsive checking

• exhaustion

• hypervigilance

Instead of criticizing yourself, pause and ask:
“What is my system responding to right now?”

Awareness creates choice.

6. Replace Monitoring with Boundaries

People with an external locus of control often spend enormous energy monitoring others:

• checking locations

• rereading texts

• predicting moods

• scanning for danger

• trying to prevent chaos

This creates chronic nervous-system activation.

Boundaries redirect energy toward actionable choices:

• “I will leave the room if yelling starts.”

• “I lock medications.”

• “I do not engage in circular arguments.”

• “I turn my phone off at 9 PM.”

• “I will support recovery, but I will not manage another adult’s choices.”

Boundaries calm the body because they restore clarity.

7. Practice Completing Stress Cycles

Stress that is never discharged stays trapped in the nervous system.

Complete the cycle physically:

• cry

• sweat

• dance

• laugh

• stretch

• breathe deeply

• rest

• talk honestly with someone safe

• create art

• spend time in nature

Human beings were not designed to remain in constant vigilance without release.

8. Shift from Catastrophic Thinking to Immediate Stewardship

When overwhelmed, the brain jumps toward:
“What if everything falls apart?”

Return instead to:
“What is mine to tend today?”

• one meal

• one phone call

• one room

• one boundary

• one walk

• one honest conversation

• one moment of rest

Grounding in immediate stewardship reduces helplessness and restores momentum.

9. Build Community Around Presence, Not Drama

Some environments keep the nervous system addicted to intensity.

Seek relationships and spaces that support:

• honesty

• creativity

• spirituality

• embodiment

• grief processing

• music

• nature

• mutual care

• meaningful conversation

Spaces like Forest & Village exist partly because humans regulate in community. Around fires, songs, stories, movement, ritual, and authentic conversation, people often remember what it feels like to inhabit themselves again.

10. End the Day by Returning to Yourself

Before sleep, gently gather your energy back from the world.

Turn down lights.
Put away the phone.
Breathe slowly.
Place a hand on your chest.
Ask:

• What drained me today?

• What nourished me?

• What do I need tomorrow?

• What can I release tonight?

The nervous system learns through repetition.

Every time you return attention to your own body, choices, values, breath, and practices, you strengthen the internal sense that your life belongs to you.

That is how an internal locus of control is built:
not through force,
but through thousands of small moments of returning home to yourself.

Forever and a day ago, someone I went to high school with met my mother. When that friend—who had known me for at least twenty years by that point—realized their connection, she said, “Mary is an activist.”

When my mom told me about that conversation, I found myself reflecting on the times and contexts in which that friend had known me, and wondering what it was that led her to sum me up that way. Was it my coveted position as Class Feminist? My propensity for wearing cardigans and penny loafers while listening to alternative music? My refusal to overprocess my hair or have big bangs? Was it my direct manner of speech? My distaste for anything conventional? Maybe it was just my vibe. I think now at 55 I get it. She was referring to my rebel heart.

Over time, I’ve come to appreciate this part of myself and to recognize that at my very core is a bit of fire—a drive to right wrongs, to take action, to refuse bystander positions, and to speak out. I’ve also found reflections of myself in social groups and settings where I fit, and in causes that hold real meaning for me. But it hasn’t been simple.

Even my chosen field of education lost me from 2007 to 2019 because I didn’t see the work reflecting my ethic—especially in public school settings, where I had worked from 1997 to 2003 before moving into a private school where I could make my own way. That school was run by a narcissist who, despite everything, had a great idea. There, I discovered how much I love driving process and projects. I loved the idea that kids graduating from 8th grade should know how to make fire by friction. Maybe even whittle their own pencils.

My academic path followed a similar pattern. With my rebel heart in the lead, I didn’t start with a BA in education. My first attempt at college ended with me dropping out with just eleven credits to go—completely demotivated by the most intensive challenge being how to laminate items for bulletin boards. I was embarrassed by the lack of intellectual grit required, and since I had none for that, I left and returned later when the time was right.

When I came back, I designed my own master’s program—Early Thought & Language—building on a self-designed foundation in Cognitive Development and Learning Theory. I named it after a book by Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist who had zero problem calling things out. He debunked Piaget’s theory of play. He refused to see difference as deficit. He was a rebel with a cause. His work wasn’t even translated into English until the late 1960s, but when it was, it revolutionized education, especially early childhood education in the United States.

In my undergraduate and graduate work I studied constructivism. Constructivism says, essentially, that we are designed to create our own learning. The teacher’s job is not to dominate or direct, but to create exploratory environments where students build understanding through scaffolded experiences, meaning-making, and multiple ways of demonstrating what they know.

By the time I returned to school again in 2019—this time for a very conventional M.Ed. done in a very unconventional way, a clinical master’s with coursework and full-year classroom internships—I remember picking up my first textbook and being genuinely surprised to find constructivism in Chapter One. I was like, oh—education finally caught up with me, and my rebel heart.

Now that I’m in the last ten years of my career, I have had the headspace to explore other interests—one of them being a desire to understand myself more deeply. Why do I have such a strong sense of how things are supposed to be? Why am I always looking for reflections of that—past or present—and wanting to bring it forward again?

Right now, that inquiry has led me to a bigger question. I’m interested in how we might create parallel systems—because this one isn’t working. This horrific, white male-dominated way of being is not making life better but worse. Never-ending war, corporate-owned politicians, funding of genocide, destruction of the planet, has only increased over the lifespan of our species. Our history is horrific. So what inside of me tells me this is now how we were supposed to be.

In this piece, I’ll be exploring what we can learn from matriarchal societies as history, and as aspiration. Because that’s where I’ve begun to recognize more of my own ideals, and where I think we may be moving.

Our Lineage: History of Matriarchal Societies

When researching this topic, what begins to emerge from the archaeological record is not a single anomaly, but a pattern: across time and geography, there are documented societies in which women were structurally central to lineage, residence, and social continuity. The specifics vary, but the throughline holds.

At Çatalhöyük, in southern Anatolia (modern-day Turkey), this pattern appears early and at scale. This was a 9,000-year-old proto-city that persisted for over a thousand years—long enough to rule out the idea that what we’re seeing is incidental. Within that continuity, kinship structures point toward matrilineal organization. Individuals buried beneath house floors were often linked through maternal lines, suggesting that the household itself was anchored through women. This placement reflects how social belonging and continuity were organized. The distribution of prestige goods reinforces this. Women’s graves contained more and more varied items, indicating status and influence within the community (University of Wollongong; Schotsmans et al.; Smithsonian Magazine).

A similar structure appears later in Neolithic China, in Shandong Province along the eastern coast. Dated between 2750 and 2500 BCE, this site provides genetic evidence rather than primarily spatial or material inference. Ancient DNA reveals a two-clanned matrilineal community, indicating that lineage and social organization were explicitly structured through maternal lines (Zhang et al.; Sixth Tone). Women were present and valued, and also the system itself—its organization and continuity—moved through them.

By the Iron Age, this pattern surfaces again in a different form among the Durotriges of southwest Britain, in what is now Dorset, south Somerset, and east Devon. There, at the Winterborne Kingston burial site, genetic analysis shows that nearly two-thirds of individuals belonged to a single maternal lineage that persisted for at least ten generations, roughly 250 years (Cassidy et al.). This level of continuity suggests both matrilineality and matrilocality—women remained in place while men moved into the community. That residential pattern created a stable female-centered network: women formed the enduring core, surrounded by daughters, sisters, and extended kin. The material record again aligns with this structure, as women were buried with the highest concentration of prestige goods, suggesting influence over resources and social standing (Cassidy et al.; NPR).

Across these three cases—Neolithic Anatolia, Neolithic China, and Iron Age Britain—the details differ, but the structure repeats. Lineage traced through women. Residence anchored by women. Continuity maintained through women. Non-identical systems that weren’t always fully matriarchal, but consistently organized in ways that place women at the center of social life.

And that’s the shift for me. Once it appears in one place, it’s interesting. Once it appears across time and geography, it becomes a pattern.

Daily Life and Village Structure in Female-Centered Societies

Çatalhöyük

What stands out to me about Çatalhöyük is how it was organized in ways that would have shaped daily life in very specific, grounded ways. This was not a village with streets and open pathways between homes. Houses were built directly against one another, forming a dense, continuous structure. Movement happened across rooftops, with entry into homes through openings in the ceiling rather than doors at ground level (Hodder; Mellaart).

That spatial organization suggests that the “outside” and “inside” were structured differently than what we assume now. The roof was a shared, communal space—people moving, working, interacting above—while the interior of the home was more contained, more intimate, and importantly, more continuous across generations.

Inside those homes is where the social structure becomes visible. Burials took place beneath the floors—under platforms where people lived, worked, and slept. And those burials were not random. Individuals buried together were often linked through maternal lines, which suggests that the household itself may have been organized through those relationships (Schotsmans et al.; University of Wollongong).

So when I think about daily life, I don’t picture isolated nuclear families. I picture multi-generational groupings anchored through women—people who stayed in place, who maintained continuity of the home, the land, and the relationships within it. That continuity would have shaped everything: who raised children, who passed down knowledge, who held memory.

The material record adds another layer to this. Women’s graves contained more prestige goods, which suggests that influence—whether social, economic, or symbolic—may have been held in particular by women (Smithsonian Magazine; Schotsmans et al.). That doesn’t automatically translate to formal political power, but it does point to a system where women were not peripheral to the organization of daily life.

Work itself was embedded in this structure. Activities like food preparation, tool-making, weaving, and craft production took place within or directly around the home. With homes clustered so tightly together and connected above, these activities would have been visible, shared, and learned through observation and participation. Knowledge transmission, then, wasn’t abstract. It was lived, repeated, and reinforced across generations within the same physical space (Hodder).

And children would have grown up inside that continuity. Not moving away from their core network, not being absorbed into a completely different household structure, but remaining within a web of relationships that extended through mothers, grandmothers, siblings, and kin. That kind of environment creates a different kind of social grounding—one where belonging and remaining require each other.

So when I step back and look at Çatalhöyük this way, what I see is a systematized way of organizing space, kinship, and daily life that centers continuity through women—in a concrete sense through the physical layout of homes, the placement of bodies, and the distribution of material goods.

And while we can’t reconstruct every detail, the patterns that are visible point to a consistent village structure where women were embedded at the center of social life, and where that centrality shaped how people lived, worked, and stayed connected over time.

Durotriges

When I look at daily life among the Durotriges as suggested by the artifacts and research presented, their village structure most assuredly shaped how people moved through their lives—who they lived with, who they relied on, and where they belonged.

The Durotriges lived in settlements often organized around farmsteads and hillforts such as Maiden Castle and Hod Hill. These were not dense, roof-connected environments like Çatalhöyük. Instead, homes were more dispersed, typically roundhouses made of timber and thatch, grouped within enclosures or clustered around defended sites. That difference in layout points to social cohesion wasn’t created by shared walls—it had to be maintained through relationships (Sharples).

What the genetic evidence reveals at the Winterborne Kingston site is how those relationships were structured. Nearly two-thirds of the individuals buried there belonged to a single maternal lineage that persisted for at least ten generations—about 250 years (Cassidy et al.). That kind of continuity doesn’t happen accidentally. It suggests a system where women remained in place across generations, forming the stable core of the community, while men moved in from outside groups.

So when I try to picture daily life, I don’t imagine households forming and dissolving with each marriage. I imagine something much more anchored. Women living their entire lives within the same community, surrounded by mothers, daughters, sisters, cousins—a network that doesn’t reset with each generation, but deepens. That kind of structure changes what “home” means. It’s continuous, not temporary or transitional.

Men, by contrast, would have entered into that system. They would have been the ones adapting—learning the rhythms, relationships, and expectations of a place that was not originally theirs. That dynamic alone shifts the center of gravity in the household. The social knowledge, the lineage, the land—all of it remains with the women who stay.

The burial record reinforces this. Women at Winterborne Kingston were buried with a higher concentration and diversity of prestige goods, suggesting that they held influence over resources and status within the community (Cassidy et al.; NPR). Again, that doesn’t necessarily mean formal political authority in the way we might define it now, but it does point to a system where women were central to the distribution and continuity of wealth.

Daily work would have been embedded in this structure. The Durotriges were known for agriculture, pottery production—particularly Black Burnished ware—and trade networks that extended beyond their immediate region (Sharples). These activities would have taken place within and around the household, meaning that knowledge and skill were passed through lived experience, within the same stable kin networks.

Children growing up in our current environment are raised by a shifting set of unrelated adults: teachers, child care workers, and even babysitters. In the Durotriges, they would have been embedded in a consistent network of maternal kin, learning from people who shared both lineage and place. That continuity likely shaped identity itself—who you are, where you come from, and who you belong to.

And then there’s the larger social effect. Cassidy suggests that this kind of structure—where men come from different external groups while women form the internal core—may have reduced internal conflict between competing male lineages, creating a more cohesive community structure (NPR; Cassidy et al.). If that holds, it means that the organization of family life wasn’t just personal—it had broader implications for stability and cooperation.

So when I step back and look at the Durotriges, what I see is a system where social life is anchored through women—in-residence, lineage, and daily interaction. A village structure where continuity is not rebuilt each generation, but is inherited by staying.

Limitations of Historic Perspective

At a certain point, the evidence shifts from what we infer to what has been directly observed. There are societies—across different regions and time periods—where matrilineal and matrifocal systems are lived and recorded. What I have presented here is what has been reconstructed from burial patterns and DNA. In these communities, lineage, inheritance, and identity move through the maternal line, and women hold central roles in maintaining continuity.

What stands out is that these systems are unique, and they share a core structure: women remain embedded within their communities, and social organization builds outward from that stability. Whether in West African, Indigenous North American, South Asian, or Southeast Asian contexts, the pattern holds—kinship, property, and social identity are anchored through women in ways that shape both daily life and long-term continuity (Goody; Schneider).

Looking across regions and time periods, what becomes clear is that these are continuities in how matrilineal and matrilocal systems function: women remain in place, lineage is traced through them, and community stability is built on that continuity. These patterns appear in Neolithic settlements, Iron Age tribal structures, and historically documented societies, suggesting a recurring form of social organization rather than a singular cultural exception (Cassidy et al.; Zhang et al.).

At the same time, there are variations in how these systems are expressed. Some emphasize lineage more strongly, others residence, and others the distribution of resources or social influence. The material and environmental context shapes how these structures take form, but the underlying pattern—continuity through women—remains recognizable. So it’s a set of related structures that adapt while maintaining a shared foundation.

Once the definitions are established, the question becomes how they are applied. Across these case studies, researchers use different terms—matrilineal, matrilocal, matrifocal—depending on what the evidence can support. That variation reflects both the limits of the data and the caution within the field when it comes to naming systems of power and organization.

There are also ongoing debates about interpretation. At what point does centrality become authority? When does influence over kinship and resources translate into broader social or political power? These are not settled questions, and the answers often depend on how narrowly or broadly those terms are defined (Smithsonian Magazine; Cassidy et al.). What remains consistent, though, is that the evidence repeatedly challenges assumptions about what is “typical” in human social organization.

There are limits to what can be claimed, as archaeological evidence—burial patterns, genetic data, material goods—can reveal structure and continuity, but it cannot fully reconstruct lived experience. It shows patterns, not interior realities. It tells us how communities were organized, but not always how individuals experienced that organization.

Even in ethnographic contexts, interpretation is shaped by the perspective of the observer. Cultural frameworks, language, and bias all influence how systems are described and categorized. So there is always a distinction between what is visible in the evidence and what is inferred from it. Holding that boundary is part of maintaining credibility while still recognizing meaningful patterns.

And still, across all of this, the patterns suggest that human societies have not always been organized around dominance, hierarchy, and male-centered lineage in the ways that are often assumed to be universal. There have been enduring systems where continuity, belonging, and social organization were structured differently—where women were central to the functioning of the community.

For me, that doesn’t resolve into a single conclusion. It shifts what feels possible because once that pattern is visible—across time, across geography—it becomes harder to argue that the present structure is inevitable. It starts to look more like one version among many.

Conclusion

What began as a question—whether there is historical grounding for female-centered social organization—has unfolded into something more layered. Across prehistoric and historically documented societies, there is consistent evidence of systems in which women were central to lineage, residence, and continuity. These systems were each unique, and they do not always meet strict definitions of matriarchy. But they do challenge the assumption that current dominant structures are universal or fixed.

What remains is not a prescription, but a reframing. The archaeological and historical record expands the range of what we understand as possible. It offers examples—imperfect, partial, but persistent—of societies organized around different principles. We are not starting from nothing.

This is where my rebel heart comes back in.

Because it’s one thing to trace the past, to point to Çatalhöyük or the kinship structures of the Durotriges and say—see, it wasn’t always like this. It’s another thing entirely to sit inside the present and ask what we’re willing to do about it.

I work within the system. Government job, institutional structures, all of it. And still, there’s this steady knowing that the way we are organized—socially, economically, relationally—is not sustaining human life in the way it could. Not honoring the earth. Not holding people in continuity. So the question for me isn’t whether to opt out completely. It’s how to begin building parallel systems.

What I keep coming back to is this: parallel societies don’t start as revolutions. They start as relationships.

They start with a small group of people who choose to stay connected over time. Those who eat together regularly. Who shows up when someone is sick, overwhelmed, or falling apart. Who begin, slowly, to rely on each other for pieces of life that are usually outsourced—to institutions, to systems, to strangers. It’s undramatic and consistent.

And that consistency begins to shift things.

Instead of constantly moving outward—buying, hiring, delegating—you start to move inward. Skills are shared. Resources circulate. Childcare becomes collective, even in small ways. Meals are not just individual tasks but shared rhythms. The network starts to hold weight.

That’s where I see the echo of what I’ve been studying. Not a direct recreation of the past, but a pattern that feels like continuity through relationship. Stability through those who stay. It also changes how decisions are made. Less about efficiency, more about impact. Less about authority, more about relationship. It’s slower. Sometimes frustrating. But it’s also more accountable, because you are not making decisions among strangers. You are making them among people whose lives are intertwined with yours.

And I don’t want to romanticize it. This isn’t easy. It requires time, patience, and a willingness to stay when it would be easier to step away. It asks for sustained commitment without immediate return.

But it also feels like the only place where something different can actually take root.

Because if the past shows us anything, it’s that there are other ways human societies have been organized—ways that center continuity, relationship, and shared life. Not perfectly. Not uniformly. But consistently enough to matter.

So for me, this isn’t about recreating a matriarchal society in some idealized form. It’s about paying attention to the patterns that existed, and asking what of those patterns can live again now.

That’s the work my rebel heart recognizes.

Ten Ways to Begin Building Parallel Systems Now

1. Commit to a small, consistent circle
   Gather a core group of people who meet regularly—same time, same place—and prioritize staying in relationship over time.

2. Share meals as a practice, not an event
   Create a weekly or biweekly shared meal where food, conversation, and presence become the foundation of connection.

3. Create informal mutual aid
   Start small—cover a bill, share groceries, offer rides, lend tools. Let resources begin to circulate within the group.

4. Build shared childcare rhythms
   Trade childcare, co-supervise kids, or create spaces where children are held by more than one adult.

5. Keep skills within the network
   Notice what people know how to do—cooking, fixing, teaching, organizing—and begin relying on each other instead of defaulting outward.

6. Establish a physical gathering place
   Anchor your group in a consistent location—a home, a yard, a shared space—where continuity can take root.

7. Practice relational decision-making
   Make decisions together using conversation, consent, and awareness of impact—not just efficiency or majority rule.

8. Mark time together
   Create simple rituals—seasonal gatherings, celebrations, or shared acknowledgments—that build a sense of shared life.

9. Show up in moments that matter
   Be present for illness, stress, transitions, and need. Let care become something lived, not outsourced.

10. Stay
    Resist the impulse to drift when things get uncomfortable. Continuity is built by the people who remain.

Works Cited

“Ancient Celtic Tribe Had Women at Its Social Center.” NPR, 15 Jan. 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/01/15/nx-s1-5258236/ancient-celtic-tribe-had-women-at-its-social-center.

“Ancient DNA Reveals That Men Moved in With Their Brides’ Families in This Neolithic Settlement.” Smithsonian Magazine, 2 July 2025, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ancient-dna-reveals-that-men-moved-in-with-their-brides-families-in-this-neolithic-settlement-180986915/.

“Ancient Skeletons Reveal the World’s First City Çatalhöyük Was Female-Centred.” University of Wollongong, 27 June 2025, https://www.uow.edu.au/media/2025/ancient-skeletons-reveal-the-worlds-first-city-atalhoyuk-was-female-centred.php.

“Archaeologists Uncover Evidence of First Women-Led Society in Europe.” Artnet News, 21 Jan. 2025, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/earliest-women-led-society-in-europe-2599887.

Cassidy, Lara, et al. “Continental Influx and Pervasive Matrilocality in Iron Age Britain.” Nature, 15 Jan. 2025, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08409-6.

Goody, Jack. Production and Reproduction: A Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain. Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.

Hodder, Ian. Çatalhöyük: The Leopard’s Tale. Thames & Hudson, 2010.

Mellaart, James. Çatal Hüyük: A Neolithic Town in Anatolia. McGraw-Hill, 1967.

Schneider, David M. American Kinship: A Cultural Account. University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Schotsmans, Eline M. J., et al. “Female Lineages and Changing Kinship Patterns in Neolithic Çatalhöyük.” Science, 26 June 2025, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adr2915.

Sharples, Niall. Social Relations in Later Prehistory: Wessex in the First Millennium BC. Oxford University Press, 2010.

“The Mother Line: Oldest Matrilineal Society Unearthed in China.” Sixth Tone, 6 June 2025, https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1017193/the-mother-line%3A-oldest-matrilineal-society-unearthed-in-china.

Zhang, Fan, et al. “Ancient DNA Reveals a Two-Clanned Matrilineal Community in Neolithic China.” Nature, 31 July 2025, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40468069/.

The propeller plane was louder than Nina expected. Not frightening, exactly. Just insistent—a constant metallic drumming that seemed to live inside the bones of the aircraft rather than outside it, as though the plane itself were remembering every flight it had ever made and replaying them all at once.

She pressed her forehead lightly against the window as California receded beneath her in pale blocks of farmland and haze. The coastline thinned. The light changed. Even the sky seemed to shift tone the farther they flew from it.

Beside her, Caroline was talking without pause.

“I swear,” Caroline said, leaning across the narrow armrest, “if they make us march in circles all day, I am simply not going to do it. I didn’t join to walk in circles.”

“You joined to get out,” Nina replied softly.

Caroline blinked, then laughed. “That too.”

They had signed the papers in a small office that smelled faintly of carbon copy ink and coffee gone stale. Two girls from Northern California, barely out of high school, with neat hair, pressed skirts, and futures that had begun to feel too small. The recruiter had spoken in clean, efficient sentences about opportunity, service, travel, and structure.

Structure.

That word had stayed with Nina.

Now the plane dipped slightly, and her stomach lifted and settled in the same breath.

She did not cry when the land disappeared.

Instead, she folded her hands in her lap, smoothing the fabric of her skirt as though that could smooth the moment itself into something orderly and manageable. She had chosen her best blouse for the flight—white, with a modest collar—and a skirt she had hemmed herself to sit just below the knee. Her hair, dark and thick, was pinned back with two careful barrettes, the ends curled inward with the precision she had practiced since she was thirteen.

“You look like you’re going to a job interview,” Caroline teased.

“I am,” Nina said. “Just a very long one.”

Basic training began with waiting.

Waiting in lines. Waiting on benches. Waiting in hallways that smelled of polish and starch and something medicinal that clung faintly to the air. The onboarding process unfolded in a series of clipped instructions delivered by women whose uniforms fit like second skin and whose voices carried the calm authority of people who had long ago stopped explaining themselves.

Names were checked.
Papers were stamped.
Hair was inspected, though not yet cut.

They were issued uniforms in a room that felt colder than the others: navy blue wool, crisp white shirts, and shoes that were practical rather than flattering. Nina ran her fingers over the fabric, noting its weight, its durability, the way it held its shape even when folded.

“You’ll get used to it,” the woman issuing the garments said without looking up.

Nina nodded, though she had not spoken.

The barracks were larger than she expected and quieter, too. Rows of bunks. Metal frames. Thin mattresses tucked so tightly the corners made perfect right angles. The room smelled faintly of soap and starch and the lingering echo of previous occupants.

Caroline claimed a bunk near the window immediately.

“I need air,” she declared. “Or at least the illusion of it.”

Nina chose the bunk directly across from hers. Not by accident. Not consciously, either. Simply because it felt symmetrical.

That first night, the sounds were unfamiliar: the shifting of springs, the occasional cough, the distant echo of footsteps in the corridor. Nina lay on her back, hands folded over the blanket, staring at the ceiling.

She did not sleep right away.

Instead, she cataloged the rhythm of breathing around her, the exact distance between bunks, the way the overhead light flickered once before settling into steadiness.

When she finally slept, it was lightly, as though her body understood instinctively that morning would not wait for her readiness.

Training began before sunrise.

Whistles. Commands. The sharp cadence of instruction that allowed no hesitation. They marched in formation across gravel paths that crunched beneath identical shoes. They learned posture first, then timing, then endurance.

Caroline complained loudly and often, but she never fell behind.

“I am suffering,” she would whisper dramatically while jogging. “Deeply and artistically suffering.”

“You’re keeping pace,” Nina would murmur.

“That is not the point.”

Yet Caroline’s humor became a kind of shield for the others, a soft rebellion against the rigid structure that surrounded them. By the second week, several girls gravitated toward her bunk after lights out, whispering stories about home, about boyfriends, about fears they would never admit aloud during the day.

Nina listened more than she spoke.

But she watched everything.

The precision of drills. The hierarchy of instructors. The subtle difference between discipline and care in the way certain supervisors corrected posture with a tap instead of a shout.

Medical training lectures caught her attention immediately.

Anatomy charts. Sterilization procedures. Infant care modules that were, at the time, still referred to as neonatal ward preparation rather than anything more specialized. She leaned forward in her chair, absorbing every detail, every demonstration, every diagram of fragile lungs and tiny heartbeats.

“You’re taking notes like it’s a university class,” Caroline whispered once.

“It is important,” Nina replied simply.

Weeks passed.

Uniforms began to feel less foreign. Her hair was now styled in regulation waves, pinned neatly beneath her cap. Off-duty, in the rare hours they were granted, she began adapting her old clothes to fit the East Coast sensibility she was beginning to observe in magazines and shop windows.

By late 1959 in Annapolis, her style had shifted subtly.

She wore tailored blouses tucked into high-waisted skirts she altered herself, slimming the silhouette. Cardigans fitted close to the body. Low heels polished to a quiet shine. Her hair, darker against the softer light of the East Coast, was often set in structured curls that framed her face but never fell carelessly.

She restyled one of her high school skirts by removing the bottom hem and resewing it slightly shorter, adding a narrow waistband detail that made it feel less provincial and more modern.

“You did that yourself?” Charlotte asked the first time she saw it.

Charlotte arrived like a burst of color into the otherwise orderly routine.

She was stationed with Nina after training selection and had a laugh that began in her shoulders before reaching her mouth. Zany was the only word that fit—bright scarves, dramatic gestures, and stories that unfolded in elaborate tangents.

“My boyfriend Ken says Maryland air is different,” Charlotte announced one afternoon while applying lipstick with theatrical precision. “He’s Lebanese, you know. Very romantic. He writes letters that are three pages long and somehow all about me.”

“Does he exaggerate?” Nina asked mildly.

“He adores,” Charlotte corrected. “Which is more useful.”

Selection day arrived in a quiet room filled with sealed envelopes.

Nina’s hands did not shake when she opened hers.

Neonatal medical training. Hospital assignment track. Annapolis.

For a moment, the room seemed to narrow into a single clear line of thought.

Infants. Precision. Care. Structure within tenderness.

It was exactly what she had hoped for but had never allowed herself to expect.

“You got your dream,” Caroline whispered, reading her expression before seeing the paper.

Nina nodded once.

“I will do it well,” she said.

The hospital in Annapolis was both bustling and strangely serene: white corridors, polished floors, and the constant hum of activity tempered by the quiet gravity of medical work. She was assigned to a neonatal unit where the smallest patients demanded the steadiest hands.

She learned quickly how to hold an infant so lightly it felt like supporting breath itself, how to measure and monitor, how to remain calm when others grew anxious.

The nurses noticed.

“You’re precise,” one supervisor remarked. “Not cold. Just… steady.”

That steadiness drew people to her.

Sam was the first.

Charming in a way that felt effortless rather than practiced, he had a habit of leaning against doorframes as though the world itself amused him. He worked in another department but found reasons to pass through her floor frequently.

“You never look rushed,” he said one evening, walking beside her in the hallway.

“I am,” she replied. “Internally.”

He laughed softly.

“You should let yourself be less serious sometimes.”

“And risk making a mistake?” she asked.

Sam did not answer immediately. Instead, he walked with her to the stairwell and spoke of music, of places he hoped to see, of the possibility of transferring to another base. His attention was warm, sincere, and undeniably romantic, though Nina accepted it with polite distance.

When his transfer orders arrived months later, he told her in the courtyard.

“I would have stayed longer,” he admitted.

“For the work?” she asked.

“For the company.”

She smiled, but gently.

“You will do well wherever you go, Sam.”

He kissed her hand once, dramatically, and then he was gone.

Suitors came and went in similar fashion—officers who admired her composure, interns who noticed her quiet beauty, enlisted men who found her elegance intriguing in a sea of uniform practicality. She was polite, gracious, distant in a way that did not offend but did not invite.

And then there was him.

She first noticed him at a staff gathering.

He stood near the bookshelf, slightly apart from the center of the room, holding a glass he had not yet touched, listening more than speaking. Tall. Fair-haired. Not striking in the obvious sense, but composed in a way that felt deliberate. When someone spoke to him, he listened fully before responding. When he laughed—rarely—his eyes sparkled with sudden warmth that transformed his otherwise reserved expression.

“Pharmacy,” Charlotte whispered. “Different floor. Very intelligent. Very quiet. Possibly Scandinavian.”

His name, she later learned, was Nils.

Norwegian and Swedish lineage. A pharmacist in the hospital who worked long hours in precise, methodical silence.

They were introduced only in passing.

“Miss Nina,” someone said. “This is Nils.”

He nodded. “Pleasure.”

His voice was softer than she expected.

After that, they began to notice each other in hallways. Not deliberately. Accidentally. A turn of a corner. A brief pause. A polite nod. A recalculated route.

Common friends began to draw them into the same orbit. Charlotte, of course, orchestrated gatherings with theatrical innocence, Ken often present, warm and expressive, filling rooms with laughter that contrasted sharply with Nils’ quieter presence.

Hanging around with Charlotte and Ken became a regular thing for Nina and Nils. They went to the movies together, out for dessert, attended Catholic Mass, and took long walks around the bustling streets of Annapolis. They talked easily, laughed often, and fell into a companionship that felt natural rather than dramatic.

Nina came to love Nils’ laughter most of all.

When it came, it was not loud. Not boisterous. It was hearty but strangely silent—his shoulders shaking slightly, his head tipping back just a fraction, his eyes brightening until they nearly disappeared in the expression. His mouth opened in a grin that revealed perfectly straight teeth, but the sound that emerged was soft, contained, as though hilarity lived within him but had been taught manners.

It did something unexpected to her heart.

A small flutter. Quick. Uninvited.

Their friendship formed in layers—shared walks between floors, quiet conversations in stairwells, cups of coffee taken standing near the window where the light fell best. He never flirted. Not once. Not overtly, not clumsily, not even accidentally.

Instead, he listened.

If she spoke about an infant’s progress, he asked precise questions. If she mentioned a procedure, he remembered it days later. Sometimes she would find him with his nose in a book during breaks, completely absorbed, glasses low on his nose, as though the world around him dimmed when he read.

His clothing, even off-duty, remained slightly out of step with emerging trends—high-waisted trousers, well-pressed shirts, practical jackets that suggested function over fashion.

Charlotte once whispered, “He dresses like a man ten years older than he is.”

“He dresses like someone who values order,” Nina replied quietly.

And yet, when he wore his Navy corpsman uniform, the effect was different.

The crisp lines suited him. The neat tailoring emphasized his height and quiet steadiness. The first time she saw him fully in uniform during a hospital function, her heart fluttered again—more distinctly this time. Not because he was overtly handsome, but because he looked so entirely himself within it: focused, precise, reserved, and unexpectedly warm when he laughed.

Their companionship deepened without announcement.

By early spring of 1960, they had, without naming it, become best friends.

April arrived with softer air and longer light in the corridors. One afternoon, Nina turned down her usual hallway only to see Nils approaching from the opposite direction.

He paused.

“So,” he said at last, voice measured and earnest, “I was thinking…”

Nina blinked.

“We should get married.”

Silence filled the hallway—not uncomfortable, just suspended.

She stared at him, genuinely stupefied.

He continued, as though presenting a practical conclusion rather than a declaration of romance.

“I was thinking the end of June,” he added. “At my mother’s church. In West Newbury, Massachusetts.”

Nina opened her mouth.

Closed it.

And for the first time since boarding that propeller plane two years earlier, she found herself entirely without a prepared response.

Minneapolis, 1981

Nina’s house is loud with teenagers, and somewhere in the middle of it all moves Lizzie—eleven—small, serious, and perpetually in motion with purpose.

“Lizzie, you’re going again?” her mother calls from the kitchen one Sunday morning.

“I’m late,” Lizzie answers, already buttoning her white cardigan with trembling urgency, as if Mass might begin without her if she does not hurry.

“You just went yesterday.”

“That was Saturday vigil,” Lizzie replies, as though this is self-evident. “Today is Sunday.”

Her parents do not argue. They rarely do about religion. They do not drink, they do not go to church, and they do not stop her. They are not hostile to it—just apathetic, like it is a language they once spoke and no longer feel the need to use.

So Lizzie goes.

She goes every Sunday.
She walks herself home afterward, rosary looped around her wrist, lips still quietly moving through prayers long after the final hymn. The priest nods when he sees her. The ushers smile.

“There she is again,” someone whispers once, not unkindly.

She is there for every first Friday novena. She is there when the lights are dim and the incense hangs low. She is there when the pews are half empty. She is simply always there.

And when Mass ends, she does not go home right away.

Instead, she takes the city bus across town to the Orthodox church in Saint Paul, sitting upright with her Bible clutched to her chest while the bus rattles and sighs at every stop.

The driver glances at her in the mirror once.
“You on your own, kid?”

“Yes,” she says, without hesitation.

He shrugs and keeps driving.

Other days she attends the parish in Bloomington—Nativity of Mary—where the stained glass catches the morning sun and throws colored light onto the polished floors. On weekdays she rides her pink Schwinn bicycle, the sparkly seat flashing as she pedals across the train tracks to the Lutheran church.

After sleepovers, she follows her friends’ families into whatever church they attend, sitting stiffly beside them, observant, reverent, watchful.

Then there is the Pentecostal church on the other side of town.

The first time she walks in, the air is electric. People raise their hands while singing. Voices swell and tremble. Someone shouts, someone cries, someone leaps over a pew in a burst of ecstatic praise.

Lizzie freezes halfway down the aisle.

“Oh!” a woman with a southern accent beams. “Well hello there, sweetheart!”

Lizzie nods politely but clutches her rosary tighter.

The singing grows louder. Someone begins speaking in tongues.

Her eyes widen.

She stays through the service, rigid, respectful—but when she leaves, she exhales sharply on the sidewalk and whispers to herself, “I prefer the Mass.”

Because she does. The quiet. The ritual. The order. The reflective, devout experience of kneeling and standing and kneeling again.

At eleven years old, she is deeply, unwaveringly devout.

She carries a rosary everywhere.
She owns her own Bibles.
And she is collecting more.

Everywhere she goes, someone notices she is alone.

“How did you get here?” a Lutheran pastor once asks gently.

“I rode my bike,” she says.

They look outside. There it is: the pink Schwinn with the sparkly seat. Not a banana seat. A short one. Banana seats belong to her brothers’ bikes, and she would never ride a boy bike.

“Well,” the pastor says slowly, “would you like a Bible to take home?”

“Yes,” she answers immediately.

And so she accumulates them.

New Standard Version.
King James.
American editions.
Pocket Bibles.
Study Bibles.

They stack in her room like sacred trophies.

Lizzie herself looks like she stepped out of the wrong decade. She wears glasses. She desperately needs braces. Her hair is always slightly greasy, combed but never stylish. She loves her white cardigan. She insists on saddle shoes—even though it is 1981 and other girls are switching to Nike tennis shoes and listening to secular music on cassette tapes.

She does not.

She listens to Catholic radio.

Every morning.

Sometimes she sits at the kitchen table before school, quietly eating toast while the Mass plays softly through a small radio.

Her mother walks by once and pauses.
“You’re listening to that again?”

“It’s morning Mass,” Lizzie says.

Her mother just nods and keeps moving, wiping the already-clean counter.

One afternoon, while her mother is out running errands, Lizzie stands in her parents’ bedroom with an iron in hand.

Steam hisses.
She presses her clothes carefully—skirts, blouses, socks—lining them up for the week. Devotion, to her, is not only prayer. It is order. Preparation. Discipline.

Her mother’s bookshelf looms beside the ironing board. It is not just books. It is a hiding place.

Orange-handled scissors.
A seam ripper.
Small tools that always seem to disappear when left in common spaces.

“Where are my scissors?” her mother had demanded just days earlier.

So now they are hidden here, behind books, because no one comes into the bedroom. And if they do, they do not search the shelf.

Lizzie reaches for the starch spray.

And then she stops.

There, half tucked behind a stack of books and sewing supplies, sits a thick green Bible.

Her breath catches.

“Oh my goodness,” she whispers.

She pulls it free, reverent as if lifting a relic.

It is heavier than the others. The cover is deep green. The pages are edged faintly in gold.

She opens it.

Her eyes scan the table of contents.

Her mouth falls open.

“The Book of Maccabees…” she murmurs, flipping pages faster. “It’s all here.”

A Catholic Bible.

A real one.

Not the versions she has been told by some churches are “missing books” or “extra texts.” To her, this is the inspired word of God—complete, sacred, authoritative.

“How is Mom holding out on me?” she whispers in astonishment.

She turns another page.

The Bible falls open.

Something slips slightly between the pages.

A photograph.

Black and white.

Lizzie freezes.

The image shows a woman turned slightly over her shoulder, looking back toward the camera. Soft expression. Beautiful brown eyes. A poised, almost mysterious posture.

Lizzie frowns.

She has never met her mother’s parents. She does not know their names. She does not know if they are alive or dead. She only knows they live in California. That is all anyone has ever said.

No stories.
No visits.
No phone calls.

She slides the photograph out carefully.

She does not take the Bible.

Only the picture.

In the living room, her father sits sunk into the couch, royal blue shag carpet stretching beneath his feet. The massive console stereo hums softly—six feet of polished wood, giant speakers, rows of vinyl records lining one side. The turntable spins steadily.

Shostakovich.

Her father wears enormous headphones, eyes closed, holding the record sleeve loosely in one hand, completely elsewhere in the music.

Lizzie stands quietly for a moment.

“Dad?”

No response.

She steps closer.

“Dad.”

He opens his eyes slowly, blinking as if returning from another world.

She holds up the photograph.

“Who is this?”

He doesn’t answer right away.

Instead, his eyes sharpen.

“Where did you get that?”

“In Mom’s Bible,” she says plainly. “The green one.”

He exhales through his nose, long and quiet.

“That’s…” He hesitates, then finally says, “That’s your grandmother.”

Lizzie turns the photo over.

Audrey.
A date. 1937.

She looks back at the image again.

“She looks… familiar,” Lizzie says softly.

Her father leans back, glancing at the picture.

“Old peekaboo pose,” he mutters. “Looking back over the shoulder like that. Very popular in that time…”

Lizzie studies the woman’s eyes.

Brown.

Her parents both have striking blue eyes. Her father’s are a deep denim shade. Her mother’s are sharp, almost icy.

“Serial killer blue,” her father always jokes, earning an immediate glare from Nina every single time.

“Stop calling them that,” her mother snaps whenever he does.

But Lizzie’s eyes are different.

Brown.

She has always noticed it. Always wondered. Every sibling—blue eyes. Both parents—blue eyes.

Only her.

Now she stares at the photograph again, heart quietly thudding.

“My eyes…” she whispers.

Her father glances at her.

She holds the photo closer to her face.

“They’re brown,” she says slowly. “Like mine.”

And for the first time, the mystery of where they came from is no longer abstract.

It is staring back at her from a black-and-white photograph hidden inside her mother’s Bible.

What Happened vs. What It Meant

There’s a popular phrase on social media — “but did you die?” — that points to something we’re often reluctant to name: not every intense moment is a crisis, and not every surge of emotion reflects what actually happened.

Although I’m referencing education here, this reflection is for anyone who works in high-activation environments and cares about how we manage our minds, our emotions, and our responses.

Many years ago, I worked with a brilliant woman named Kellie Wardman, who was my supervisor when I was a director at the YMCA. In five years there, so much shifted that it felt like far more. That period taught me something lasting: change and learning are deeply intertwined.

Around that same time, I read Women’s Ways of Knowing by Mary Belenky and her colleagues. One of its central insights is that people move from one “way of knowing” to another through disruption—through education, or through the end of a relationship. Learning is often born from disorientation.

One of the most enduring takeaways from my work with Kellie was this deceptively simple insight: in any conversation or thought process, there are always two things present—data and inference.

I use this distinction as a thinking framework. It’s not about policing conversation; it’s about organizing understanding. Inference isn’t the problem—it’s human, meaningful, and often emotionally true. But when it goes unnamed, it can become stormy enough to obscure what is actually observable.

Attending to emotional reality matters. Ignoring it doesn’t make us clearer; it makes us reactive. What has helped me is learning to separate cycles—to acknowledge emotion while holding it slightly to the side, so it doesn’t drive every conclusion.

A mentor once described me as “extremely efficient.” What she was naming wasn’t speed—it was clarity. Once I land on data, especially in my work as an academic evaluator, I look carefully at what the data suggests. I don’t offer those interpretations as fact. I’m not an arbiter of truth. I am a professional interpreter of data.

The irony of my own career arc isn’t lost on me. I went from being a YMCA executive in my late thirties to becoming an educator ten years away from retirement—still learning, still evolving, and now working daily with the very concepts of data and inference that once lived more intuitively in my life.

During my internship in Manchester, I saw teachers who had worked in this environment for decades—an environment that functioned, in many ways, like a tour of duty. They carried the weight of students’ stories, often without naming it. Through brief connection with one another—sometimes humor, sometimes quiet presence—something shifted. They were, in a sense, wounded and healed in the same short span of time. That rapid recycling of emotional energy allowed them to return to their classrooms without carrying the full burden forward. It was not dramatic. It was functional. It was essential.

What struck me was the discipline. Emotion was acknowledged and metabolized quickly enough that it didn’t harden into narrative or drive unexamined conclusions.

This is why I’ve become intentional about slowing things down.

One practice I use is following up with something like: “These are the facts I heard. Can you please verify them and get back to me within 24 hours?” That pause matters. It creates space for accuracy without dismissing emotion.

In a time when misinformation circulates quickly—even among well-intentioned people—fact-checking becomes an act of care, not cynicism.

Data grounds us in what is verifiably true. Inference often carries the emotional meaning of what we’ve experienced. When we learn to honor both—holding space for inference while allowing data to guide our problem-solving—we practice a form of leadership that is both humane and effective.

Many years ago, I was working with a brilliant woman named Kellie Wardman, who was my supervisor at the YMCA when I was a director there. And in my five years at the YMCA, so much shifted and changed in my life that it feels like I worked there for fifteen years and not five. That lines up with how much I learned at that time, and I think change is directly related to learning—100%.

I remember years ago reading Women’s Ways of Knowing by Mary Belenky et al., spoiler alert, was that women move from one “way of knowing” to another as a result of change brought about by education or the end of a relationship—not necessarily romantic, but any kind of relationship or understanding of yourself. Something that brings about learning.

That period brought about a lot of learning for me, and I moved through tons of pain and trauma—both from this lifetime and inherited. One of the key takeaways I have from Kellie—because she is just so brilliant—is the statement that in any conversation, any thought process, any language-based manifestation of thought or energy, there are two things present: data and inference.

I’m not exaggerating when I say I use that tool daily. I use it with myself, with others, when I listen to people, when I assess situations. I use it to help myself and others. I use it to calm myself in personal situations and to guide my communication—frontloading with facts, checking facts—because inference is like another level of existence that is valid and true but can be so stormy and ungrounding that it blocks our awareness of the facts.

It’s important to be present to emotional and psychological ties—the tethers and tentacles of what’s happening—because if we’re not, we’re not taking care of ourselves. We have to attend to emotional and psychological truths. I carry a ton of emotional energy; that’s just true. I need to validate myself emotionally and psychologically, acknowledge recurring pain from recurring patterns, and learn to see that cycle separately. Visualizing it off to the side helps me set aside the storm, the emotion, the hamster wheel, so I can move into problem-solving.

A dear friend and mentor, Erica Keeley, recently pointed out that I am “extremely efficient,” especially in my work creating documents. Writing helps me sort my thoughts, and editing is an energetic shift. That efficiency comes from being able to pull through the weeds of inference and reach the data.

Sorting through situations—distinguishing data from inference, extracting information and using it—lets us hold space for frustration, sadness, and the emotional toll of events. In education we are energetic recyclers, constantly processing because we hold space for so much. It’s almost like retail; we interact with the public, families, colleagues—multiple ecosystems of humanity. That brings up a lot.

As I said to a colleague, this is true across careers, but I name it in education because that’s my wheelhouse. Even in Community Action doing publicity, I had an education lens. It’s my calling.

We grow and change in our careers. Education is extremely activating; it brings up personal stuff. I’ve seen people impose their 25‑year pattern onto a four‑year‑old without realizing it. They might not get it even when it’s pointed out. There’s so much language and so much revelation, because language lifts patterns in our minds—patterns of thinking, being, meaning-making. Writing changes our minds. I believe that fully.

Teachers must heal themselves while working. Those with trusting workplace relationships get wounded and healed simultaneously. During my internship in Manchester, NH the trauma among some of the students was palpable. Teachers felt their own stuff, then turned to each other—primarily other women—and through humor, presence, or simple connection, they were wounded and healed at once. Micro-healings. Then they’d return to their classrooms and show up for kids walking in with horrific stories.

Education is an energetically active field.

Returning to data and inference: there’s talk and chatter, and we’re activated by language. People bring their experiences tenderly, and I hope I always show up fully. But if I don’t check myself, I can spin out based on what I hear. I believe people wholeheartedly, but I can’t act on what they’re saying without doing my homework. Sometimes people can’t distinguish their own data from their inference in the moment.

Gossip is a major issue in education. Inference often shows up as gossip. Gossip, for me, is when you say something you wouldn’t say to the person. Venting is different; venting stays in a closed space and goes nowhere.

My group chat helped me clean up my language—maybe drop name‑calling. It feels great in the moment but awful later. Gossip also shows up when people bring problems to non‑supervisory people who cannot make a difference. I need to be able to say: I’m not that person. I can’t fix this. I can’t take action on it. The buck stops there, not here. If the complaint is valid, it needs to go in writing to the person who can act.

We create echo chambers regularly.

All this connects to how we handle inference. We absolutely need space for the emotional cycle. But at the end of the conversation, we must say: “Okay, let’s look at the facts.” That’s the part people don’t want repeated. That’s the part I’m tempted to act on—old rescuer patterns. But I can’t.

I can follow up with: “These are the facts I heard. Will you please fact‑check the following and get back to me within 24 hours?” Let’s ensure accuracy before taking next steps.

Sometimes people only reach out when they’re at the end of their rope. And I still want to swoop in and fix it. But acting on facts is powerful. It’s where our power as humans lies.

People I’m politically aligned with have posted misinformation recently. I download and fact‑check because if Facebook were real, everything would be collapsing. We’d have holidays deleted from the calendar. It’s absurd. Let’s not make reality worse than it is.

Fact‑check. Research. Verify. Make sure it’s reported elsewhere. Basic research. Journalism has faltered in many ways, but I’m not a journalist. I’m a writer. I deal in inference, data, emotions, history, trauma, healing. That’s my strength. But when I pick up fact‑checking as a tool, I am “extremely efficient”.

Northern California, 1958

Nina O’Rourke was seventeen the summer she realized she would never belong to the life she’d been born into. That morning she stood on the back steps of the caretaker’s cottage, the fog lifting off the rose fields like a pale ghost, dampening her sleeves and the hem of her slacks. Her father always said the flowers woke before people did, and that gardeners rose with the sun because it was the only time the land was quiet enough to speak.

He wasn’t wrong about everything.

But Nina no longer trusted the wisdom of men who drank from a hidden bottle before the day’s work began. She no longer trusted the quiet before sunrise, either — not after so many years of learning that danger could be silent, soft-footed, delivered in whispers through a half-open door.

Behind her, someone shut a cabinet too hard. The cottage rattled. Her mother’s voice floated through the window — a muttering hum at first, then the scrape of a chair, then the familiar clatter of a glass bottle against the table. It was barely seven-thirty.

Nina didn’t turn around. She had learned, in the slow creeping way children in unsafe homes do, that some mornings could only be survived by pretending not to hear.

Instead, she smoothed the front of her pressed Navy-blue slacks, the ones she’d saved her wages for while working weekends at the diner in town, and took in one last look at the rows of roses stretching toward the estate. They grew in such orderly lines — hundreds of bushes trained upwards by wire frames, trellised like cathedral spires of thorns and blooms. Her father coaxed beauty out of them each season with a reverence he never extended to the people inside the house behind him.

She looked over at her little brother, Will, as he stepped onto the back porch. Fourteen, tall but not yet filled out, with eyes far too old for his years—eyes the same clear blue as hers. He rubbed them with the heel of his hand, as if waking from a dream he never asked to be part of.

“You’re going today,” he said. Not a question.

“I am,” she answered.

“Caroline’s going too?”

Nina nodded. She had been her best friend since kindergarten. Caroline, who wore her hair in a ponytail and kept her secrets like sealed envelopes. Caroline, who had asked no questions when Nina announced she’d enlisted, just said, “Okay. When do we leave?”

“She’ll meet me at the bus,” Nina said.

Will stared at her Navy duffel resting by the steps, the white lettering sharp against the canvas. “I wish I could come with you.”

She placed a hand on his shoulder — careful, gentle, the way she wished someone had been with her. “Three more years,” she said. “You’ll be old enough to get out then.”

He swallowed, gaze fixed on the roses. “Will you write?”

“Every week.”

The screen door slapped open. Their mother staggered out, one hand on the doorframe, her robe half-tied, her hair unbrushed, her amber-brown eyes unfocused. “You leaving already?” she asked, the words thick, almost syrupy.

Nina felt the old ache rise — that mix of duty and resentment, longing and dread. She forced her voice steady. “I have to catch the 8:15.”

Her mother nodded, arms wrapped around herself against a cold she couldn’t feel. “Your father’s already out in the garden,” she murmured. “He said to tell you goodbye.”

Nina didn’t ask why he couldn’t come himself.

She picked up the duffel, adjusted its weight, and stepped off the porch.

“Wait,” her mother said. She reached into the pocket of her robe and pulled out a rosary — dark wooden beads worn smooth by a hand that had once, long ago, believed enough to use it. “This was mine when I was your age. Maybe it’ll… I don’t know. Maybe it’ll help you.”

It was the closest she’d ever come to an apology.

Nina accepted it, closing her fingers around the cross. It felt surprisingly warm, as if someone else had clutched it in prayer just moments before.

“Thank you,” she said softly.

She walked down the narrow dirt path toward the road, the duffel thumping against her hip. At the property gate, she paused out of habit, glancing back toward the rose fields. She expected to see her father bending over a trellis, trimming the spent blossoms. Instead, she saw him standing upright among the rows, motionless, one hand shielding his eyes as he watched her. She couldn’t read his expression from this distance — only that he didn’t wave.

Nina touched the rosary in her pocket, took a breath, and stepped through the gate.

This was the moment — the first cut in a seam that would divide her life into before and after.

The moment she decided she would never return to this place, no matter what letters came, no matter who sent them, no matter who begged.

She didn’t know it yet, but decades later her daughter — a girl she had not even imagined — would kneel in a church pew in Minnesota, praying to meet the woman Nina walked away from that morning.

A daughter with amber brown eyes.

A daughter who would one day look for her own beginning in the cracks left behind.

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The infusion room had been remodeled again.

New paint — pale green, optimistic in a way only hospitals attempt.

New chairs — sleeker, smaller, arranged in a semicircle instead of rows.

New nurses — younger, faster, their ponytails bouncing as they moved.

But the bell was the same.

They had polished it, remounted it, moved it three feet to the left, but it was unmistakably the same brass bell Deanna had rung with her bright lipstick and stubborn grace. Amya recognized the little nicks in the metal, the faint patina at the base of the rope.

She reached out and touched it.

The metal was cool.

Her fingers trembled — from neuropathy, from exhaustion, from the memory of a hand she once held that trembled the same way.

She didn’t come for an infusion today.

She came for labs.

She came because her liver numbers were dropping more quickly now, and she didn’t like the way the whites of her eyes looked this morning.

But mostly, she came because it was the anniversary.

Not of Deanna’s death.

But of the day they rang the bell together a decade earlier.

A nurse noticed her standing there.

“Are you waiting for someone?” she asked gently.

Amya shook her head. Her hair was cropped close again — not from chemo this time, but because she couldn’t stand the way it fell out in uneven patches.

“No,” she said softly. “Just… visiting.”

The nurse smiled, sensing a boundary she shouldn’t cross, and walked away.

Amya kept her hand on the bell’s rope.

She remembered the sound it made — bright and sharp, filling the hallway with a kind of defiant hope. She remembered being eleven, wrapped in a too-big hospital blanket, thinking Deanna looked like a movie star even in chemo. She remembered the years between — the transplant, the steroids, the days her legs were so swollen she couldn’t walk without help, the afternoons when Marie brewed coffee that tasted like burnt pennies because it was the only thing she could hold in her hands to stay grounded.

And she remembered Deanna’s last words.

“I’m ready to fly.”

Amya whispered them now, barely audible.

“I’m getting ready too.”

Not with fear.

Not with drama.

Just with the soft clarity of someone whose body had told the truth for a long time.

She stood there for another minute, hand still on the rope but without any intention of pulling. Bells were for beginnings and endings. She wasn’t starting anything today.

She wasn’t ending anything, either. Not yet.

Instead, she let go of the rope, slow and careful, the way she had learned to do everything lately. She walked — stiffly, deliberately — to the wide chair in the corner. They had replaced the old bariatric recliner with a newer model, but the shape was the same.

She lowered herself into it.

The chair sighed under her weight — a familiar, welcoming sound — and Amya let herself lean back, eyes drifting shut.

For a moment, with the hum of the vents and the soft murmur of nurses down the hall, she could almost feel Deanna beside her.

Not as a ghost.

Not as a memory.

As presence.

As warmth.

Amya opened her eyes again and looked around the quiet room. She felt the strange calm she had felt only twice in her life: once in the oversized recliner next to Deanna, and once in the moment after Deanna’s last breath.

Not peace — not exactly.

But a readiness.

A soft, steady readiness.

She stood, adjusted her sleeve, and walked toward the exit. On her way out, she passed the bell again and tapped it lightly with her fingers.

No sound.

Just a touch.

Just enough.

Outside, the late winter sky over Minneapolis was the same color it had been the morning she first met Deanna — pale, cold, and impossibly wide.

Amya pulled her sweater tight around her shoulders and stepped into the light.

She wasn’t flying yet.

But she was closer.

And she wasn’t afraid.

Author’s Note

This story brings together two women who shaped the deepest parts of my life in ways they never knew, and in ways the world never allowed them to know each other.

Names were changed before publication. The people behind the names, however—their spirits, their influence, their quiet power—remain unchanged.

I met Amya first.

We lived behind one another in Bloomington, Minnesota. I was barely a year old when she entered my life, and she remained part of its fabric until I was thirty. Amya was small, particular, funny, stubborn, and bright. She was diagnosed with leukemia at eleven years old, after a bicycle crash we had together left her with bruises that wouldn’t heal. For years, I believed I had caused her illness. Later I learned the truth: that the accident revealed the leukemia early, and ultimately gave her fifteen more years of life. Fifteen years she lived with grit and grace.

When Amya spoke, you listened. When she faltered, you held your breath. When she suffered, she endured more than her little body should ever have been asked to bear. And when she died in 2000 at the age of twenty-nine, her very last words were, “I’m ready to fly.”

Deanna came into my life much later.

I met her when I was twenty-two and living on the East Coast. She was glamorous, particular, wickedly funny, deeply faithful, and already in the thick of her fight with recurrent ovarian cancer. Deanna was the kind of woman who left an imprint—bold, warm, surprising, unforgettable. She died in 1996 at the age of forty-five, on my twenty-sixth birthday.

But Amya was still alive then.

And the night Deanna died, I fell apart on the phone—with Amya. We were in two different states, halfway across the country from each other, but she held that grief with me as fiercely as anyone ever could. By then, Amya’s own prognosis was worsening. The graft-versus-host disease from her bone marrow transplant and the Hep C had severely damaged her liver, and she wasn’t eligible for another transplant. We knew—quietly, honestly—that her time was limited too.

So we made a promise.

If the time came when she was dying, she would let me know, and I would come.

We kept that promise.

When the end approached, Amya hadn’t recognized anyone in weeks. She was slipping in and out of consciousness, body swollen from steroids, skin yellowing, voice nearly gone. But when I walked into her bedroom—after all the years and all the love and all the losses—she opened her eyes, saw me clearly, and said:

“You came.”

There has never been another moment in my life like that one.

Deanna never knew Amya.

Amya never met Deanna.

One lived in Minnesota; the other lived on the East Coast.

Their timelines did not intersect in a way that would have ever placed them in the same room.

So this story places them in the same room for the first time.

I altered timelines.

I bent geography.

I let seasons shift and years fold together.

I gave them a shared infusion ward, a wide recliner, a winter morning, a sense of recognition—because I recognized them in each other. Their courage, their humor, their stubbornness, their vulnerability, their grace. The way each of them taught me, in different decades of my life, what it means to face suffering with an open heart.

This is not their biography.

It is not literal truth.

It is emotional truth.

A way of letting two lives touch when life itself kept them apart.

A way of honoring the echoes they left inside me.

A way of giving them companionship at the end—the companionship they gave me, in different years, in different states, but with the same quiet power.

This story is for them.

And for the moment, Amya looked at me, against all medical expectation, and said,

“You came.”

It is my way of saying back:

I’m still here. And I remember.

This was a different quiet.

A held-breath quiet.

Rob wheeled her in carefully, his hands trembling only at the edges. Marie followed behind them, her oversized purse bumping softly against her leg. The nurses had already prepared the wide recliner.

Blankets warming in the metal oven.

A slightly raised headrest.

Extra pillows for her back.

Everything set as if they had known this would be the day.

Deanna’s breath rattled faintly, but she was calm. Her eyelids fluttered, her body sinking into the chair the moment they transferred her. She felt herself drifting before she was fully settled.

Within a minute, Amya arrived.

She was slower now — swollen legs protesting each step, face round and taut from steroids, eyes tinged yellow. Marie tried to guide her arm, but Amya shook her off gently, determined to reach Deanna on her own strength.

She lowered herself into the chair beside Deanna — less climbing now, more folding, as if her body were made of tired cloth.

Their hands found each other without searching.

Deanna’s breathing hitched, then steadied when she felt the familiar small fingers curl around hers.

A nurse checked the IV line.

Another draped a blanket across both their laps.

Someone dimmed the overhead lights.

Rob sat behind them, hand over his mouth.

Marie eased into the chair on the other side, holding her paperback but not reading a single word.

The room slowed.

Deanna’s chest rose and fell in small, effortful movements. The sound was soft but unmistakable — the kind of breathing that made the nurses speak even more quietly than they already were.

Amya leaned closer, her voice barely more than a breath.

“Deanna… hey. I’m here.”

Deanna blinked slowly, as if opening her eyes from underwater.

She didn’t see much — her vision was all blur now — but she heard everything. She heard Amya’s soft breathing. The hum of the pump. Rob’s quiet sniff behind her. She heard life.

And felt rest approaching.

Amya squeezed her fingers.

“You’re okay,” she whispered. “You’re not hurting.”

Deanna exhaled, long and low.

“No,” she murmured. “Not hurting.”

For a moment, the air felt warm.

Still.

Almost holy.

She drifted in and out of a light sleep, tethered to consciousness only by the warmth of Amya’s hand in hers.

A nurse approached quietly.

“Deanna… sweetheart… if you need anything, we’re right here.”

Deanna barely moved her head, but her mouth curled faintly at the edges.

Her voice came out as the faintest whisper:

“Is she hurting?”

The nurse hesitated only a second, her voice soft and sure.

“No. She’s not hurting anymore.”

The words hung in the air, a gentle truth she could rest in.

Deanna inhaled.

A small, shuddering breath.

Then, after a stillness that felt like the world pausing its turn, she whispered:

“I’m ready to fly.”

Amya’s face crumpled — not in panic, but in a deep, aching tenderness. She pressed their joined hands to her cheek.

“Okay,” she whispered. “Okay.”

Deanna’s next exhale was longer.

Her fingers loosened gently in Amya’s hand.

Her shoulders softened.

Every line of effort left her body.

The room stayed quiet.

No alarms.

No sudden movement.

Just the hush that comes when a spirit leaves softly, without struggle.

Rob bowed his head.

Marie put trembling hands over her mouth, coffee forgotten.

A nurse touched Deanna’s wrist, then nodded slowly, respectfully.

Amya didn’t let go of her hand.

Not at first.

Not for a long time.

She kept holding it, because she knew — without anyone telling her — that Deanna had taught her how to let go, and she wanted to return the gift.

The IV pumps hummed gently.

Snow fell outside in slow, thick flakes.

And Deanna — after so many winters, so many battles — was finally free.

She had flown.

.

The days blurred.

The storm passed, but Deanna seemed to drift further into a winter of her own. Rob brought her in daily for fluids now. She was too dehydrated to stay home, too weak to skip a day, too frail for hospital admission without inviting interventions she didn’t want.

So they came to the infusion room — the last familiar place.

Nurses greeted her softly, their eyes gentler now, as if volume might disturb something delicate inside her. They warmed blankets in the big silver oven, tucked them around her with reverence, and dimmed the lights above her chair.

Deanna slept more than she woke.

When she was awake, the world around her came through in fragments:

• the beep-beep of an IV pump resetting
  
  

• the murmur of nurses at the desk
  
  

• the soft shuffle of Rob’s shoes as he paced behind her chair, pretending to read
  
  

• the faint tap of Marie stirring powdered creamer into her coffee
  
  

• the slow, labored breaths of Amya in the chair beside her
  
  

Her vision dimmed first.

Everything became haze — shapes without edges, colors without borders. But her hearing sharpened, as if her body knew which sense she needed most.

One morning, she heard Rob speaking quietly with a nurse.

“Her kidneys aren’t clearing anything anymore,” he whispered. “Should I… should I call hospice?”

“Not today,” the nurse murmured. “She’s comfortable. Let’s keep her comfortable.”

Comfortable.

Deanna would have laughed if she’d had the strength. Comfort had never been the point. Being present — that was the point. She clung to the sounds around her like a child clutching a blanket.

Amya came nearly every day now. Her own infusions were no longer a time-limited protocol but part of a long, weary battle against GVHD. The swelling in her legs worsened. Her skin bruised with impossible ease. Her eyes yellowed further — liver distress whispering its truth.

But Amya came.

She sat beside Deanna in the oversized chair.

Sometimes reading.

Sometimes drifting in and out of sleep.

Sometimes just existing quietly, the soft hiss of their two IV poles blending.

“Does this hurt?” a nurse asked once, repositioning Deanna’s line.

“No,” Deanna whispered. It was true. Pain had retreated, replaced by a deep heaviness, a near-weightlessness. “I’m not hurting.”

Amya nodded, eyes glassy but steady. “Good.”

Deanna could hear fear tucked inside that single word.

Once, while Marie dozed upright in her vinyl chair, paperback slipping from her fingers, Amya leaned closer to Deanna and whispered:

“Do you ever… feel like your body just isn’t you anymore?”

There was no self-pity in her voice. No drama. Just the simple, exhausted honesty of someone who’d lived too long with illness.

“Yes,” Deanna breathed.

“Every day.”

It was the closest they ever came to talking about death.

Deanna heard the nurses whispering again, not unlike the first time she’d heard them whisper about “the little one” ten years ago.

“…liver numbers… dropping fast…”

“…she’s jaundiced through her chest now…”

“…Marie’s barely holding it together…”

Except this time, they weren’t talking about a child on the far side of the room.

They were talking about Amya.

That night, Deanna stayed slept curled into the crook of the wide recliner, IV line wrapped safely, breath shallow but calm. She could feel Amya beside her — not touching, but close enough that the two warm blankets covering them rose and fell in steady, alternating rhythm.

A strange peace filled her.

Not hope.

Not dread.

Just peace.

She could hardly open her eyes, but her ears were sharp, listening.

A soft voice — familiar, beloved — spoke at her side.

“You’re not hurting, right?”

Amya’s voice. Thin. Cracked. But present.

“No,” Deanna managed. It was barely a whisper.

Not a lie. Just… the truth of this moment.

Amya exhaled slowly, a faint tremor in her breath.

“Good,” she said. “Good.”

A nurse adjusted Deanna’s oxygen tubing. Rob kissed her forehead. The world dimmed a little more.

Amya’s hand found Deanna’s in the space between them in the big chair.

Deanna curled her fingers around Amya’s — a gesture without strength, but full of recognition.

The hum of the IV pumps blended into something soft, almost melodic.

Breathing became lighter.

Time stretched thin, quiet, tender.

And Deanna — for the first time in a long time — did not fight the pull of sleep.

She rested.

Fully.

Deeply.

Ready for whatever came next.

The infusion room was nearly full by midmorning. A winter storm had pushed several appointments into the same narrow window, and the nurses moved briskly, improvising, apologizing, shuffling chairs and IV poles like orchestrators of a weary symphony.

Deanna had been settled for almost an hour, her breathing shallow but steady. Her skin looked translucent in places, papery above the wrist, and each inhale felt like it had to decide whether to stay or go. Yet she kept her lipstick on — smudged but present — a final act of dignity she refused to surrender.

Two recliners down, Amya shifted in her seat, trying to adjust her swollen legs. The steroid moon-face had blurred the sharp angles of her youth, and the swelling from GVHD made her movements stiff, uncertain. A faint yellow tint around her eyes told a deeper truth — her liver was murmuring its slow distress.

Despite everything, she still held her strawberry milk.

The hospital café had changed vendors since her childhood, but the cartons were the same shape, the same blunt pink. Amya drank it slowly, savoring it, like it was the last remnant of a world where she was small and unbroken.

A flurry of noise erupted at the entrance — two new patients arrived, both pale, both shaky, both looking like they needed chairs that did not exist.

Carla scanned the room, eyes tight.

“We’re short two recliners,” she whispered to another nurse.

“I know. I know. We’ll figure it out.”

Amya watched this, her brow knitting. Then she turned toward Deanna, who was dozing lightly, chin tucked, breath fluttering like a small bird’s wing.

“Move over,” Amya whispered.

Deanna opened her eyes with the slow confusion of someone waking from a deep place.

“Hm?”

Amya nodded toward the enormous bariatric recliner in the corner — wide, overbuilt, meant for bodies three times their size.

“Move over,” she repeated. “We’re taking the big one.”

Deanna blinked. And then — with the faintest twitch of mischief returning to her face — she said, “Bossy,” the same way she had said it a week earlier.

Amya grinned. “Well? Come on.”

Two nurses turned — and immediately froze — as Deanna carefully pushed herself upright, guided by Rob. Amya untangled her IV tubing like a woman negotiating with a stubborn marionette. It took effort, intention, and a kind of quiet stubbornness that belonged only to the dying.

Together, they shuffled toward the oversized recliner.

Rob hesitated, worried. Marie pressed a hand to her mouth, torn between stepping forward and stepping back. In her other hand, her coffee steamed faintly — the scent of a thousand tired mornings at her kitchen counter.

No one said a word as the two women eased themselves into the enormous chair.

Deanna sank into the corner, face soft with relief. Amya followed, settling close enough that their shoulders touched. The chair swallowed them both — two worn, strong, fragile bodies inside a single island of vinyl and foam.

Then Amya giggled.

It was small and breathy but real.

“You realize,” she whispered, “that they’re going to yell at us.”

Deanna smiled — a true smile, faint but unmistakable.

“Let them try.”

A nurse walked back into the room with two fresh warm blankets and stopped mid-stride.

“Oh my God,” she said under her breath.

“What are you two—?”

Amya shrugged. “Teamwork.”

Deanna lifted a hand. “Do not ruin this for us.”

The nurse exhaled in surrender and placed a blanket across both of them.

Another nurse, seeing the empty recliners now available, steered the waiting patients toward them with a grateful nod.

The storm outside smudged gray across the windows. The infusion pumps hummed their steady hymn. And in the oversized chair, the two women leaned lightly, instinctively, into each other.

For a few precious minutes, they were not dying.

They were not sick.

They were not statistics or diagnoses or bodies in decline.

They were just Deanna and Amya.

Two souls who had intersected twice in a lifetime —

once in hope,

once at the end.

And even now, they could still find room for laughter.