Kathleen Caprario-Ulrich

Some parents bond with their kids coaching soccer games or going camping. We drove. Seventy miles an hour in an enclosed space. Just us two.

Widowed seven weeks after 9/11, I became the suddenly single mom of a sixteen-year-old boy. My son and I had very different grieving styles, but we came together every evening to watch Star Trek: Voyager reruns. Stranded 70,000 light-years from home, the starship and its intrepid crew made it back to Earth from the Delta Quadrant over seven televised seasons. Captain Kathryn Janeway became my guide for how to traverse the oceans of grief that I had to pilot my little crew of one through as I hoped for a swift return to the normal life that had been ours—once upon a time.

A sun-faded Star Trek air freshener dangled from the Toyota’s rearview mirror. One side featured the image of a Borg drone who gazed out at me with his ocular implant, his expression sphinx-like and impossible to read or decode. Even when I took a corner a little too fast and his shaped-cardboard domain swung wildly, he could not be made to react. Impervious to all human emotion, his free will and sense of self erased, he existed as one with…nothing. No grief. No loss. No guilt. I envied the drone.

As the air freshener twirled, its flip side appeared with the oft-quoted Borg catchphrase, “Resistance Is Futile.” Despite its artificial pine-based scent being long gone, it served as a mantra and a reminder to me that things outside of my control were exactly that—outside of my control. A simple lesson for my prefrontal cortex to acknowledge but difficult for my heart to accept.

My son was a master of the two-word reply. “I’m good” was his typical response when I’d pick him up from school and ask how his day went. Those two words were then followed by silence. His resistance to hashing out our common loss frustrated me as I persisted and he retreated. I grew up in Jersey, where you talked on cue and avoided dead air at all costs. He wasn’t from Jersey. He wasn’t me.

Over time, I finally took the air freshener’s advice. Rather than peppering my son with nonsensical chatter or intrusively probing his inner thoughts, I listened, with love, to the silence between us and heard what needed not to be spoken, but simply accepted.

Resistance is, indeed, futile.