She’s Come Undone: Diane Schuler and the 2009 Taconic State Parkway Crash
Diane Schuler, in my opinion, was a ticking time bomb hiding in plain sight, under the veneer of perfection and reliability. She was always going to come undone. Sometimes to get to the truth, we have to examine it in reverse.
One of the most talked about true crime cases has to be the 2009 Taconic State Parkway crash. I believe the main reason for its popularity within the online true crime community has to do with the polarizing duality that was Diane Schuler — a seemingly super responsible and dependable wife, mother, sister, aunt, friend, neighbor, boss, and colleague was the same Diane Schuler who’d willfully drive drunk and high with five children in the car, two of whom were her own five-year-old son and two-year-old daughter, approximately 1.7 miles headlong in the wrong direction at an estimated 85 mph, killing three of her dear nieces and toddler daughter in addition to three men who were on their way to a relative’s house for Sunday dinner — an elderly father, his son, and their friend, not including Schuler, herself, while critically injuring her son — the lone survivor of the Taconic Parkway crash, who’d since made a full recovery.
What had emerged after the historical crash, the worst fatal motor vehicle crash, according to Wikipedia, in Westchester County since 1934, were two vastly opposing realities of the same woman, an ominous splitting construct that websleuths are still debating in Reddit subrooms and on various true crime podcasts today, some fifteen years later.
At the core of the debate is a lingering, nagging question leading up to the devastating Taconic Parkway crash on that fateful Sunday, July 26, 2009: Was it an unforeseen accident with the popularized theory that Schuler had some kind of a medical emergency such as an infected, abscessed tooth, which then led her to “self-medicate,” albeit irresponsibly by way of alcohol and weed, not realizing how far she took it before it was too late, or did Schuler just snap at some point, turning the case from a straightforward DUI to murder / suicide?
I believe there was a specific moment on the timeline when this case turned — fast, and that moment came when Diane’s niece, Emma, took her Aunt’s cell phone while on the toll road leading to the Tappan Zee Bridge, and called her mother, Jackie, telling her that “There was something wrong with Aunt Diane.” Jackie would then ask Emma to put Aunt Diane on the phone, and that was when she realized something was terribly wrong, later confirming that Diane “wasn’t making any sense.”
To clarify, I don’t believe Diane Schuler awoke on the morning of July 26, 2009 with the steely intent on getting totally blitzed out of her mind, and killing eight people, including herself, devastating four loving families in the process. However, I do believe when Diane spoke to Warren for the last time she realized she could be in some real trouble with not just her brother and sister-in-law, but possibly the authorities as well.
Next, Warren ordered Diane to stay put and not to drive, but instead of listening to her brother — the loving father of three minor occupants in the minivan she was driving — a minivan he and his wife owned by the way, she’d leave her cell phone behind atop the guardrail along the Tappan Zee Bridge toll road, taking off again while Warren drove immediately to their last known location.
The Timeline of the Crash
When Warren’s continuous calls to his sister went straight to voicemail en route to the Tappan Zee Bridge, one of their friends would notify the police on The Hances’ behalf to report the missing maroon minivan and the potentially grave situation at play. However, by the time that call was made to police, reportedly at 1:40 pm, the fatal car crash, unbeknownst to Warren and Jackie, had already occurred at 1:35 pm, five minutes before their first call to police.
Steve Fishman, of New York Magazine, would interview Mike and Jeanne Bastardi for his article “I Dream of Diane,” the son and namesake of Taconic crash victim, Michael Bastardi, Sr. along with Mike Jr. ’s younger brother — Guy Bastardi, who were absolutely devastated by their family’s tragic, dual loss. They, too, raised some poignant questions of their own, and felt like Daniel Schuler and Warren Hance knew more than they were alluding to with the conflicting reports by eyewitnesses, who saw Diane, at around 11:45 am, bent over on the side of the road with her hands on her knees “as if she was going to get sick” to only catch up to their car minutes later, honking her horn, and zig-zagging in and out of traffic in a manic manner.
Questions were being raised in Fishman’s article — “I Dream of Diane,” published on November 12, 2009, as to why Warren and Jackie had waited so long to call the police after receiving Emma’s frantic call from the bridge, reportedly at 12:58 pm.
Here’s an excerpt from “I Dream of Diane”:
Mike and Jeanne focus on that 1:02 call when Warren learned that Diane was incapacitated. Warren raced in search of Diane. Danny was out of the loop. Warren didn’t call him, though he besieged Diane with calls, at 1:20, 1:24, 1:28. There was no answer. The phone had been abandoned. But Warren didn’t call 911. The first call from the Hances to the state police comes at 1:40, by which time everyone is dead.
“If he’d called 911 immediately, we wouldn’t be here,” Mike tells me. In Warren, Mike sees a kind of depraved indifference. When Warren told a terrified Emma to stay put, the minivan was parked directly across from the state-police barracks.
More questions were being asked like why was Daniel Schuler, the husband of Diane and father of Bryan and Erin, kept out of the phone loop that perilous hour leading up to the fatal crash? Perhaps more importantly, why hadn’t Daniel Schuler touch base with his wife on his own, who was driving a minivan with five young children onboard, during the four hours since they’d left the campsite in Parksville, New York, a trip that should’ve taken approximately two hours and twenty-six minutes, not including Diane’s first stop at a McDonald’s in Liberty, New York?
At 12:08 pm, twenty-three minutes after eyewitnesses had first spotted Diane bent over on the side of the road, Jackie Hance would speak to her sister-in-law by cell phone, who reportedly sounded coherent, raising no alarm bells at the time. But by 12:58 pm, 50 minutes later, Emma would call her mother to report that there was something wrong with Aunt Diane.
According to the New York Magazine’s article:
Jackie heard the kids crying in the background, but after two minutes and 33 seconds, the call cut out. Warren, Emma’s father and Diane’s brother, called back at 1:02 p.m. and heard Diane slur her words. She was disoriented. She referred to him as Danny.
The Bastardi Family felt like there was a window, however brief, where Diane Schuler could’ve been stopped in time, especially when parked right across from the state-police barracks. Once Diane got onto the Taconic State Parkway, albeit in the wrong direction, the chances of survival were close to nil due to the high speeds. The time to call the police, according to Mike and Jeanne Bastardi, was when Diane Schuler was stationary on the toll road leading to the bridge, allowing, at best, for a ten-to-fifteen minute window of intervention.
I think it’s important to note here that The Bastardi Family still has compassion for Warren and Jackie Hance, and for their tremendous loss. At the time of the New York Magazine’s published article, which was only four months out from the historic fatal crash, Mike and Jeanne Bastardi would reserve most of their anger for Daniel Schuler, who seemed to be in total abject denial over his wife’s substance abuse issues, bordering on willful ignorance, which was later echoed in Liz Garbus’ 2011 documentary, two years after the fatal crash.
I can’t imagine the fear, shock, and utter distress that Warren and Jackie were facing during those last thirty-to-forty minutes prior to the crash. They trusted Diane completely, or they would’ve never allowed their three young daughters to go on a two night camping trip with their aunt in the first place. I think the Hances’ delayed response in not immediately calling the police that day reflected more upon their shock and cognitive dissonance rather than out of protection for Diane. She hid her demons very well.
Their friend’s recorded conversation with police can be heard in Liz Garbus’ haunting documentary There’s Something Wrong with Aunt Diane, supposedly Emma’s last words to her mother. In the recording, their friend mentioned that Jackie was “freaking out.”
Jeanne Bastardi would go on to write a book entitled The Taconic Tragedy: A Son’s Search for the Truth, published on August 23, 2011. One Amazon customer wrote the following review of Bastardi’s book:
“The sadness of course is that no-one will ever know exactly what happened in the days leading up to and following the crash. Even if we did know it wouldn’t bring any of the victims back but for the Bastardis at least the not knowing is a terrible affliction. The end of the book reveals Mike Bastardi’s own theory about how Diane Schuler came to be driving drunk and stoned at 85 mph in the wrong direction. It even offers a theory as to why in the aftermath of the crash despite there being three families claiming to want the truth, in the end only the Bastardis actually meant what they said.”
All Diane had to do was wait for Warren to arrive at the bridge as directed, and this crash would’ve never unfolded in reality the way it did. Those beautiful children would still be alive and well today: The Hance sisters — Emma, Alyson, and Katie, who were eight, seven, and five respectively would now be twenty-three, twenty-two and twenty. And Erin, their little cousin and Diane’s daughter, who was just two in 2009, would be seventeen today, a year away from graduating high school.
So why didn’t Diane stay put that day?
To answer this question, we have to dive deep into Diane’s childhood, where she experienced a major trauma at the tender age of nine, after her mother was rumored to have run off with a neighbor, essentially abandoning her young family of four. Being the only girl surrounded by a bunch of brothers, three to be exact — two older and one younger, I’m sure had its unique challenges. Domestic chores may have fallen squarely on Diane’s small shoulders; this was the machismo early eighties after all. She had no loving female figure to hold or nurture her when life got hard or confusing, especially during those difficult teen and young adult years. Diane learned early on to grow an extra hard exterior as a way of survival. Vulnerability, for Diane, was never an option.
Diane’s group of girlfriends from high school would describe her as funny, the class clown, and very well-liked. People who knew her from high school — onward, including her own husband, would comment in the documentary that she never talked about her mother. One of her friends thought her mother had passed away because Diane never mentioned her. It was like her mother had never existed.
The Perfect Wife and Mother
Diane’s brothers would later reconcile with their mother, but she refused to forgive her. Instead, Diane would become the “perfect” mother, which I believe was her way to overcompensate for the exorbitant pain of a lost childhood.
Diane’s children were always neat and clean. She would iron their clothes everyday; not a hair out of place, not a spittle of toothpaste around their starched collars. After making dinner, giving baths, and having individual story time with Bryan and Erin, Diane would stay up late making custom photo albums of her children, sometimes as gifts for family and friends. She was the first person to arrive at morning drop-off and the first person to pick her children up at school and preschool in the afternoon, even though her job was located the next town over, working as an Accounts and Billing Executive at Cablevision, earning a reported $100K salary a year. She would join the PTA, participating in endless school functions. Diane was also a very well-liked colleague and boss. She was a real force of nature. She did it all.
Diane had met her husband, Daniel Schuler, at one of her high school friend’s weddings. She had lost a significant amount of weight, the slimmest her high school friends had ever seen her. Daniel was described by his own mother in the 2011 documentary as Diane’s “oldest child.” He worked nights as a security guard, and was not a hands-on father to Bryan and Erin. In fact, he didn’t want children, and deferred to Diane when it came to the day-to-day care and rearing of the children. He appeared emotionally unavailable to his wife and young family. Her friends from high school said in the documentary that Daniel was her first and only boyfriend. They confirmed that Diane didn’t have the same sexual experiences as her peers. It was like she had married the first guy who showed her the slightest bit of attention. She carried the weight of their family just like she carried the weight of her family-of-origin. No one was looking out for Diane while she had to look out for everyone else, all of the time.
Jay Schuler, who was married to Daniel’s brother, would voice her frustration at her brother-in-law in the documentary, calling him out for his general lack of interest toward surviving child, Bryan:
“It’s black and white with him, very black and white. He has completely different views about things. I don’t get it. He’s off all day, you know, you’re off all day. No offense, you don’t even see Bryan, you bring him to school, you see him for five minutes, and you go. I’m working 14 hours a day, and then I’m going over there, doing things. It’s driving me crazy. Everyone is waiting to put their foot down about him.”
One of the telltale signs of the state of Daniel and Bryan’s father/son relationship, at least back in 2011, when Bryan was seven, was at the end of Garbus’ powerful documentary. There was a shared awkward moment between father and son as they walked their blonde labrador retriever along what looked like a nature path. Daniel reached out for his young son’s hand, but instead of grabbing it with enthusiasm, his initial reaction was to slap his father’s meaty hand away, but then reached out for it — perhaps changing his mind just as Daniel pulled his own hand away, missing the opportunity to share affection with his young son. It was like they were locked in some awkward relationship dance between a young son who’d just lost his mother, the center of his little world, and his only sibling — a baby sister, and a cold, distant middle-aged father who had to grow up for the first time in his whole adult life.
Diane’s Personality
Christine Lapani was Diane’s closest friend at the time of her death. She was interviewed for the popular HBO documentary There’s Something Wrong with Aunt Diane and said the following to Liz Garbus concerning Diane’s personality:
“We were kind of not very similar in a lot of ways. I’m a very easy going person, and let a lot of things pass. She had to be in charge of everything. There was nothing left to chance. You know, everything had to be planned, precise. She was a powerful woman. She was very much in charge of everything — at work, at home, in the car, in the friendship.
Lapani continues:
“She certainly was not a perfect person. She loved you, she loved you, and if she didn’t like you, she could be difficult. She was OK as long as she was in control of everything.”
Diane could be an intimidating character. Her sister-in-law, Jay Schuler, made this passing comment at the beginning of the documentary that had reminded me of Sally Field’s 1984 “You really like me” Oscar speech for the film Places in the Heart that would later become the subject of a Mandela Effect, a collective false memory conspiratorial phenomenon. But I digressed.
“Diane, like when she asked me to be the Godmother of Erin. I’m like Oh my god, she really does like me. You know, I was so thrilled.”
She had a singular proclivity to honk her horn more than the average person, even for New York standards. Her best friend, Christine Lapani, described the time when she’d programmed her own GPS while Diane, being the passenger, would insist that the GPS had the directions all wrong, and wouldn’t allow her best friend to follow her own GPS so it kept rerouting Lapani, nonetheless. That absolute control had sustained Diane as a small child, but as an adult it had created a deep sense of psychological isolation.
There was no one in Diane’s life whom she felt safe to be vulnerable with; perhaps to say, “Hey, I’m really struggling right now.” A mother, or sister, may have filled that void but Diane had a cavernous, festering mother-wound, most likely the source of all her control and vulnerability issues.
July 26, 2009, The Day of the Taconic Parkway Crash
Two days leading up to the crash, Diane, Daniel, and their two children, Bryan and Erin, and Diane’s three nieces — Emma, Alyson, and Katie would spend the weekend at a familiar camping spot — Hunter Lake Campground in Parksville, New York. On the morning of July 26, 2009, Daniel would drive back to West Babylon in his pickup truck, taking the family dog with him while Diane borrowed her brother and sister-in-law’s 2003 Ford Windstar minivan, driving back home with all five children onboard. She and the kids would stop first at a McDonald’s in Liberty, New York for breakfast and to have some cousin playtime. Diane ordered an orange juice and an iced coffee — no food. It had been purported that the orange juice was a mixer for the vodka, a simple cocktail called the Screwdriver.
The Liberty McDonald’s employee who’d taken Diane’s order on that sunny July morning reported that she seemed sober and was acting totally normal. That observation was echoed by another eyewitness, an employee at Liberty’s Sunoco gas station, who had limited interaction with Diane that day as she popped in to inquire about a specific brand of pain reliever that they did not sell, reportedly, according to a 2009 ABC News article, either Tylenol or Advil gel caps. Their brief conversation was captured on security video albeit no accompanied audio. In addition to the two employees, the co-owner of the campground, Ann Scott, featured in the HBO documentary, had confirmed that Diane appeared alert and sober when the family happily left together that early Sunday morning.
Jackie Hance had reportedly spoken to Diane by cell phone at 12:08 pm as the two sister-in-laws discussed tickets to Emma’s upcoming play. Jackie reported that Diane sounded fine and was coherent during their brief conversation.
I suspect that Diane started to add the stashed Absolut Vodka that she had taken from their campsite, hiding the 1.75-liter bottle under the front passenger seat — later recovered broken after the crash, to her orange juice while at McDonald’s as the cousins ate together before playing at the restaurant’s courtesy playground. I also believe Diane was a novice drinker but a frequent user of weed. She was clueless about the severe effects when mixing these two substances together. Although I believe she enjoyed her Screwdrivers, I’d venture to guess that she enjoyed her weed much more, mostly in the evenings to aid in relaxation as she was wound too tight — perhaps smoking a joint, or nibbling on hidden edibles, after her kids winded down for bed and with her husband away working nights.
Diane didn’t have a lot of history of mixing alcohol and weed together. For one, if she had, then she wouldn’t be able to function at her high-profile job — a job where she was gainfully employed for years. I’d glean that mixing substances was quite new for Diane.
The drive from the campground in Parksville to the Schuler’s home in West Babylon, New York should’ve taken approximately two hours and twenty-six minutes — 142.4 miles to be exact, not including the stop at McDonald’s right after leaving the campground. However, by the time Diane got to the Tappan Zee Bridge toll road, four hours had passed. By this point, she had trouble seeing and was slurring her words.
The five children began to cry in stereo, becoming frightened by their mother and aunt’s erratic behavior. This was when Emma used Diane’s cell phone to contact her mother and then father, giving him clues to their location. She told her father that she could see signs for Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown from the bridge. Warren had spoken to Diane briefly, and he could glean right away that the situation was serious, ordering her to stay put — not to drive.
Diane’s Fatal, Ego-Driven Decision
At the beginning of the essay, I mentioned that there was a precise moment when this case would take a sharp turn from a straightfoward DUI to murder / suicide, and that moment came when Diane left her cell phone on the guardrail at the Tappan Zee Bridge toll road, right after speaking to her brother, Emma’s father. This harkened back to her wounded childhood need for absolute control. In that moment, I believe Diane feared exposure and vulnerability more so than death and capital murder charges, if she’d survived the fatal crash of seven innocent lives, four being children, who she had always loved and protected — till now.
Diane knew at that precise moment the jig was up. She knew that she was in a lot of trouble, not only with her brother and sister-in-law, but surely the police and the New York court system as well. Diane had a blood alcohol concentration of 0.19%, more than double the legal limit, and according to Wikipedia an additional “6 grams of alcohol in her stomach that had not yet been absorbed into her blood” notwithstanding high levels of THC as well.
If caught at the Tappan Zee Bridge toll road that day, Diane may have faced the possibility of real jail time, or possibly forced rehab as a first time offender. As a result, she may have lost temporary custody of her children, and had to breathe into a tube everyday in order to start her car — the humiliation. Her high paying job at Cablevision may have been put in jeopardy as well, not including the shock and disappointment from her family, friends, and colleagues. These stakes, in my opinion, were just too high for a psychologically-wounded personality type such as Diane Schuler’s — a secretive, at times — difficult, successful, strong-willed, highly controlling person, who eschewed exposure and vulnerability at all cost.
This was where Christine Lapani, Diane’s closest friend, had given a prophetic motive, unbeknownst to her, in the 2011 HBO documentary:
She was OK as long as she was in control of everything.
But as we all know, Diane Schuler was not in control on July 26, 2009; thus, was not OK. All bets were off at that moment on the bridge where she had two choices to make: Should I stay, or should I go?
Her ego and pride mattered more in that moment than doing the right and responsible thing, which was to stay put until her brother arrived. Eight lives, including her own, would’ve been saved if she had just listened to her brother, but her pride wouldn’t allow it.
At least a half-dozen witnesses called 911 that day to report “on the northbound Taconic a minivan in the right lane going southbound.” Several reported the maroon minivan driving between 80–85 mph like some rogue bullet on a mission. Another eyewitness, Peter Grotto, who was featured in Garbus’ 2011 HBO documentary, had safely dodged the death-spiral minivan by moving over a few lanes, out of its immediate way. He would describe Schuler’s driving as “dead pin-straight,” saying the statement twice for emphasis, even using his hands for demonstration.
Other eyewitnesses featured in the same documentary were Lorna Ramos-Morel and Richard Morel. Ramos-Morel’s account was haunting:
“It’s like playing chicken. I mean she was going straight on the road. We saw something coming at us. We reacted, we moved. She had no reaction at all. She didn’t stop. She didn’t slow down. She didn’t move. I thought it was somebody dead set on killing themselves.”
During my extensive online research, I’d find a random, yet intriguing, comment on a YouTube video about the Diane Schuler case, one of many videos I’d watch, raising the question for murder / suicide because of how Diane continued to ignore the persistent cries, pleas, and screams of all five children onboard which went against basic maternal instinct irregardless of being drunk and high. Nonetheless, there should’ve been a slight flicker of that fierce, protective instinct still intact. If it was not purposeful, then why not pull over and try to comfort your children and nieces, or put their safety first? Why continue to plow straight ahead — “dead pin-straight?”
It was reported that Warren and Jackie had heard their middle daughter, Alyson, crying in the background during their last cell phone conversation with Diane, telling the concerned parents that her crying was “just playing” before the call abruptly ended. This was around the time when she placed her cell phone atop the guardrail along the Tappan Zee Bridge toll road, later found by police.
Jackie Hance ended up suing Daniel Schuler, according to an article by lawyer Mark A. Siesel, “alleging that due to Diane Schuler’s negligent and intoxicated operation of the minivan, her daughters suffered “pre-impact fear and terror, fear of impending death, extreme horror and mental anguish.” This lawsuit was commenced in the Suffolk County Supreme Court.
Some have theorized that Diane Schuler was either in a full-blown blackout, or had acute delirium at the time of impact while others believe she was in the throes of an intolerable tooth abscess, and had turned to vodka and weed as a way to (temporarily) self-medicate during the long drive home with a minivan full of kids. If you follow this My Bad logic, then one will arrive at this conclusion: Diane’s DUI and subsequent crash, one of the deadliest in Westchester County history, was unintentional, just a total miscalculation of substances on her part by way of self-medicating.
I’d say that there were a minority of true crime sleuths out-there who believed that Diane Schuler had committed murder / suicide by way of her chronic, unflappable need for control, a form of pride. And the fatal decision was made right after she’d left her cell phone behind at the Tappan Zee Bridge toll road — it was that quick and sudden. To me, this theory made the most plausible sense out of all the theories put forward, especially when factoring in Diane’s traumatic childhood abandonment issues, which she never spoke of let alone sought real therapy for, and the subsequent deficiency in personality e.g., rigid, super controlling, secretive, thwarts exposure and vulnerability at every turn; a tendency to overcompensate. Sadly, her pride had cometh before the fall. And what a devastating fall it was; destroying seven innocent lives, and wrecking four families in the process.
The Aftermath
Jackie Hance, Diane’s sister-in-law and devoted mother to Emma, Alyson, and Katie, was interviewed by Ladies’ Home Journal in July 2011, around the same time of Garbus’ riveting documentary release of There’s Something Wrong with Aunt Diane, an HBO film production that The Hance Family did not participate in.
At the time of this interview, Jackie was pregnant with a miracle IVF baby due that Fall, a beautiful daughter they would name Kasey Rose in honor of her three big sisters. The special name was a combination of her sisters’ first initials: K is for Katie, A is for Alyson, S is for sisters, E is for Emma, and Y is for You. Here, she breaks her silence on Diane for the first time since the crash:
‘People always ask how I feel about Diane. You can’t imagine how complex that question is. How does a person go from being like a sister to me — adored by my girls and cherished by my husband — to being the one who ruined our lives?
‘How could this person I trusted completely have done something so unthinkable that I couldn’t — and still can’t — wrap my head around it.’
Jackie would go on to write a New York Times Bestseller memoir entitled I’ll See You Again, released in 2013. The book ends with an enduring wisdom:
“I knew better than anyone how little influence we have over the direction our lives take. Whether you call it destiny or fate or the randomness of the universe, some things happen for reasons we can’t begin to understand. Trying to exert control over the events of our lives is ultimately a fool’s game. All we can truly master is our own responses.”
My heart continues to go out to The Hance, Schuler — especially Bryan, Bastardi, and Longo Families. The grief of losing a child, let alone three children at once, is something unfathomable — the stuff of nightmares. I’m sure the pain never goes away as grief continuously shape-shifts with time.
The Dangers of Unresolved Childhood Trauma, and the Creation of The False Self
I believe Diane Schuler had created, out of her childhood trauma, a false “I Got This” self, which, over time, was not sustainable thus her dependence on weed and alcohol grew into a secret side for the sheer purpose of escapement from the constant pressure of her “perfect” life. She had worn the false mask all too well, fooling everyone in her orbit until that fateful Sunday — July 26, 2009, when her mask would slip for the first and last time, sparking a hard to shake cognitive dissonance in those she’d left behind for years to come.
I knew someone back in college who had seen right through my tough, Lilith Fair false-feminist exterior, calling me out one day while I sipped coffee from a gigantic mug, the one with the diameter of a supersized, New York-style bagel that was popularized on Friends, telling me quite matter-of-factly from across the table where we sat in mismatched chairs: “Whatever you put forth the most is who you are the least.” I was left mentally stewing in that quiet truth for hours, possibly for days.
What he said to me that day was reminiscent of a poem by Post Office poet, Charles Bukowski, entitled “The Genius of the Crowd.” Here’s an excerpt:
and the best at murder are those who preach against it
and the best at hate are those who preach love
and the best at war finally are those who preach peacethose who preach god, need god
those who preach peace do not have peace
those who preach peace do not have love
Time Bomb
Diane Schuler, in my opinion, was a ticking time bomb hiding in plain sight, under the veneer of perfection and reliability. She was always going to come undone. It was only a matter of time.
A new poem published in May 2024:
Time Bomb
The photograph is concerned
with the power that the past
has to interfere with the present:
the time bomb in the cupboard.— Penelope Lively
Sometimes complicated emotions,
too heavy to bear, require suspension,
not in a mid-air dangling kind of way
like ribboned mistletoe suspended
over a lone threshold,
or a golf course green-colored piñata
in the shape of an angry T-Rex
suspended over the heads of small children
at the birthday party but rather a suspension
of reality — some faraway, metaphysical place
Where The Wild Things Are, and the emotional
baggage I refuse to feel right now;
you know — painful things
like my estranged mother’s suicide,
whom I loved from afar, where it felt safe,
and a nagging dread that history
may repeat itself as only dysfunction can
so I hit an invisible pause button on life:
on CPAP machines and separate bedrooms;
on a daughter, whom I can’t reach
no matter how hard I try;
on our mid-century modern home
where the floors are made
entirely of delicate eggshells.But in this suspension, this pause,
I’m free to binge-watch YouTube videos
under cute animal channel names
like GeoBeats and Cuddle Buddies,
becoming a much-needed comfort
in the tumult like the one about
a lonely black and white yak
named Marge and a lonely
black and white cow
named Maxine that soon become
fast friends under the swath
of bright pink and orange sky,
living out the rest of their days
together on a humane ranch
in the middle of Montana.Or the video about the quirky,
purple-haired retiree named Pauline,
who rescues a baby squirrel,
she names Earnest,
that falls from its nest, landing
serendipitously in the sanctuary
of her backyard.Pauline ends up remodeling
half her home to accommodate
the on-going gymnastics
of an indoor pet squirrel;
perhaps filling some kind
of maternal void.It’s amazing what I can keep
at bay while suspended
in this jelly-like grief.For one, an ocean of emotion
resides just outside myself
wanting full entry the way water
demands — by way of a slow, steady
seep into the depths of my cracked
psyche-boat as I stay afloat — for now
with the help of non-stop amusement
and Starbucks.Yesterday, my daughter called me
Karen, and right now there’s a massive
beehive suspended under my roof’s eave
in the shape of a furious, ticking time bomb
about to fall and scatter, changing everything
for good.
