Abby Hunt is a class member of the Liminality Seminar, a tutorial in the Honors College of the University of Missouri. She is a Geography and International Studies major and an Undergraduate Kinder Fellow.
Plunging into liminal studies has been a powerful experience for me. As I have read, digested and discussed the intense and textured liminal stories of others, I have realized, on an emotional level, just how my own brushes with trauma, illness and death have brought me close to threshold experiences, my own experience of liminality.
I thought of my Aunt Lorna. She lost her son five years ago this July. He worked with my dad, and always hung around the house. Eric was part of the family. He still is, at least his memory is. While his death—violent and unforeseeable—shook even the far branches of our family tree, it decimated his mom, dad and sisters. I remember walking down their driveway the morning after we found out. It felt like a war zone. Like a bomb had just gone off and I was approaching ground zero. I remember seeing my aunt. The absolute anguish on her face. I remember hugging her, and each of my cousins. I asked about Elizabeth, three years older than me. We were the two youngest of the family and had largely grown up together. She had lived through some of the worst months when Eric had been in his worst stages. She was the closest thing I had ever known to a sister.
I vividly remember walking into her room. Hugging her tight. We talked for hours. We managed to laugh as we recalled his memory. We cried. She wept. She was angry. Sad. Heartbroken. She was mourning, yet she was only beginning to know what that word would mean. She didn’t yet know the aching that was to come for the next few years as her family tried to put itself back together after shattering. That day was the beginning of a very big liminal period.
The progressions of Elizabeth and Aunt Lorna closely followed the well-known stages of grief. They moved in a linear way through the emotions, yet within each step there was chaos. Sometimes it was violent and explosive. At other times it was quiet and achy. Loss, I learned, is a journey. It is a road that rebuilds a reality without the person you always imagined would be there, without the person walking alongside you as before.
All of this has made me think of pilgrimage. Immediately, I thought of Cheryl Strayed: author of Wild. When she was in her twenties, following the death of her mother, Cheryl developed a heroin addiction, cheated on her husband countless times, and generally self-destructed. Then she decided to walk the PCT. She started at the Mexican border in California and made her way up to Bridge of the Gods in Washington. The whole thing is very liminal. The book cover even holds the caption “from lost to found on the Pacific Crest Trail.”
I also thought of the rock-climbing community, in particular, one prominent photographer and climber. I briefly met her and her boyfriend in El Potrero Chico last winter and followed them on Instagram. In early March, about a month later, I heard the news. He had died. He was climbing a multi-pitch in northern Mexico when rock fall cut his rope and knocked him off the wall. He was a few thousand feet in the air.
She mourned the loss very publicly, posting photos, videos, poems, anything that helped her to process the sudden and shocking news. The wall where he died was very remote and authorities had yet to find his body. Of course, it was impossible that he survived, but there was a very tangible sense in the community that his fate was still uncertain, even though we all knew it wasn’t. So, as she cataloged on Instagram, she and some other prominent
climbers went down to find him and “bring him home.” The trip marked a shift in her posts. There seemed to be so many stages of the actual journey down to Mexico, to the mountain, to his body, and then back home.
It seemed like a microcosm of grieving through the lens of liminality. I think that the journey, painful and morose as I can only imagine it was, served as a type of pilgrimage for all those who went, and for the rest of the climbing community, too. Many who didn’t even know him were rattled by the death. He was being safe. But the rock didn’t care. And that was that. It made the danger of the sport feel much more imminent; suddenly, the abstract risk we vaguely pondered became very real and very immediate.
And then there is my own experience with grief. Last October my mom very nearly died. It was a freak disease. It came out of nowhere. The night it started to get bad I was at school. I remember being out with friends and having a sickening feeling. I went home but was unable to sleep. So, I drove home at five the next morning (I had randomly been planning to come back that weekend for an art fair my mom and I always attend). When I got home, I parked in the driveway and started to walk up to the house. My dad stopped me and told me something was wrong. He was scared, confused: the general slew of feelings that come from unexpected illness. By that night she had been transported to the main hospital in St. Louis. I remember walking down the winding halls of the ER to the trauma wing and seeing her surrounded by what seemed like ten doctors. I had never felt fear like I felt it at that moment.
By way of a miracle, she recovered. The doctors saved her. God spared her. She fought hard. That first night, though, when it was all so uncertain, I remember getting home around one in the morning. I remember standing in the driveway with my dad, yet again, but this time looking up at the stars. The house felt haunted. For all my life, we were three. The fact that there were only two people standing in the driveway that night, standing on a metaphorical as well as very real threshold between the garage and the driveway, was dark, unyielding, and terrifying. The passage between three to two seemed utterly insurmountable.
Thankfully, I didn’t have to make it. I can’t imagine how I could have.
This all feels like a brush with the liminal. I was able to stay in the driveway. In the hallways. The spaces that defined the experience stayed out on the edge. I experienced the hospital, but not the funeral. I experienced the house, but not going through her things. I experienced the idea of fear, loneliness, grief, and impossibility, but didn’t have to live with it. The experience changed me, but it didn’t change everything.
There is a very fine line between having a brush with the liminal and passing through the liminal itself. Or are those two things really the same thing, by degree?
Recent Comments