Killing Me Softly

I went to school with Jeanna. Her mom was the coolest.

In the backseat of her top-down, some-type-of-Ford car, she’d twist the dial of bass and volume on the CD player into the double digits. With her hip haircut and mother of four equally popular daughters, just being in the backseat, trying to sing along, I mostly just absorbed a less rigid parenting style than what I knew.

Earlier, I heard the Fugees’ song “Killing Me Softly.” Lauryn Hill’s powerful presence and voice hit the air in the ’90s, as well as over the speakers at Jeanna’s mom’s funeral.

She’d been about my age, mid 40’s, when she died. A head-on car wreck that left her pinned, alive, left to say goodbyes—or so I remember it that way—before they unpinned her and her organs failed.

My retelling of this story comes from hearing the song earlier and it transporting me back to that time. To Jeanna shortly after, at the age of 16, getting pregnant. To later, when my good friend’s dad, a father-like figure to me, had said he’d worried about me more than he had her.

You see, a year later, I also became a motherless daughter, a lesser-known and less desirable club.

But my not becoming a mom, not knowing a mother’s love and that connection like Jeanna had soon after her mother’s death, had been something he held in his heart and worried about.

I didn’t know then what to think of his statement. And still don’t.

It felt like a twisted-up slinky, with too much trauma, too much insight, and too little understanding on my part. So I put it in a jar of interesting-but-backwards thoughts.

And I share it here because I needed to, yet am unsure as to why.

Love, Jaclynn