Me and My Shadow: From Boxing to Dancing to Wholeness

“Within everyone there is light and shadow, good and evil, love and hate. In order to be truthful, you must embrace your total being. A person who exhibits both positive and negative qualities, strengths and weaknesses is not flawed, but complete.” — Rumi

Today marks 15 years since my beloved mother, Wendy, took the A Train to the spirit realm, ending her life and forever changing the course of mine.

It was Mother’s Day 2008. Her final, violent act of self-determination — of self-liberation really — was as bold and unexpected as it was heartbreaking. At 71, she had been battling severe anxiety and depression for the better part of two decades. A dark, brooding cloud of mental illness had appeared seemingly out of nowhere the year I graduated from college, replacing my animated, purposeful, type-A supermom with someone I dearly loved yet barely recognized.

In her last years, like Schrödinger’s cat, she seemed simultaneously dead and alive. Her light had gone out, giving her a haunting, ghostlike quality, as if she was dead but still walking amongst the living.

Then, one Sunday, that Sunday — the Sunday on which we celebrate the divine feminine beings who gave us life — on that Sunday, May 11th, 2008, with one courageous and profoundly tragic leap off of a platform at 42nd Street, she chose to end her life and her 42-year journey of motherhood, unwittingly paying tribute to The Hitchhiker’s Guide’s universal wisdom in the numerology of her final act. In that instant, spontaneously — and I imagine unintentionally — she birthed me anew, offering me the gift…