Story Frame 58 – The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I stood in the cold outside Greenlife, the natural foods market on the north side of Asheville, staring in excitement at the newspaper I held in my shaking hands. Whether my hands were trembling from the February winds or the name I saw in the paper, I couldn’t tell you.

Inside, stretching out over four pages, was a feature article titled, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being: The Photography of Moni Taylor.”

And I had written it. My name was on the byline.

In a chilly state of bliss, I grabbed half a dozen copies of the paper and placed them in the passenger seat of my Subaru so I could keep an eye on them and revel in the moment.

At last, at last, at last, I thought. I’d been waiting years for this.

Not long after moving to Asheville, I’d noticed an announcement in the Mountain Xpress, Asheville’s cool, indie newspaper, saying they were looking for feature stories. Back then, Mountain Xpress was interesting, funny, irreverent, very un-corporate and insightful. I devoured each weekly free edition, eager to get to know everything about my new town.

That fall, when I read they were looking for feature-length, interesting people stories, I knew exactly who to write about – a woman I’d recently met at a coffee shop.

One morning, not long after arriving in town, I’d decided to treat myself to a morning coffee at Port City Java, just down the hill from my house.

It was an odd name for a coffeehouse in the landlocked mountains, hundreds of miles from the coast, I thought, until I later discovered it was owned by Port City Java in Wilmington, on the coastal side of the state where Zoë was now in university.

I brought my laptop with me so I could linger over coffee, if it wasn’t too busy. Pretending to work, I’d been slightly distracted by two women at a nearby table, both of whom appeared to be close to my age. They were carrying on an animated discussion over what looked like a collection of artful black photo albums. Curious to know where in Asheville I might be able to buy similar artist journals for my photographs, I waited for a pause in their conversation before walking over and introducing myself. They were friendly and responded to my question.

I eventually went back to my laptop. I was drafting an email, lost in thought, when I realized someone was standing near me. Looking up, I saw it was Moni, the tall blonde from the other table. She asked if we could continue chatting.

“Sure!” I said. And with that, a new friendship was born, one that would span various countries and last decades.

Moni (whose name is pronounced mah-nee) and I quickly discovered in addition to artful, black-paged photo books, we also shared a passion for photography, especially candid people photography. In addition to being a photographer, Moni told me she also worked as a nurse in the neonatal intensive care unit at Asheville’s local hospital. At one point in our conversation, she mentioned that she occasionally combined both professions by photographing the heartbreaking endings that sometimes are a part of a neonatal hospital ward – the fetal demises.

Moved by the almost unbearable poignancy of her photography, I felt an instant connection to her. And so, when I saw the announcement about feature articles in The Mountain Xpress, I called Moni to ask if I could write about her photography.

She agreed and a week later, she was in my living room overlooking the mountains, perched on my sofa, her blue jean-clad slender legs tucked up under her, a cup of tea by her side. She told me the story of her life and showed me more of the black and white photographs she’d taken.

“When you tell them you’re a Labor & Delivery nurse, people think, ‘Oh, that’s so wonderful!’ That’s the fun, happy place to be!”

“And it is,” she said. “But it can also be the saddest. When you’re an L&D nurse, you can be living the saddest of times in the happiest of places.”

“There’s that magic moment,” she said, her blue-green eyes narrowing with the poignancy of what she was trying to convey. “That little sliver of space where you just don’t know. When you wonder, is it going to happen? Will the baby make the transition from living inside its mom to living by itself outside?

“It’s a little magic line,” she said. “Even if everything is perfect, you’ve been changed, your skin’s been changed. Everything’s different, and you’re different. People get a light years’ worth of experience in that moment.”

For the little ones who that didn’t make it, Moni’s photography offered an opportunity to pay tribute, not only to this ‘tiniest sliver of a life,’ but also to a fleeting tableau of a family that would soon exist only in those photographs. Over and over, she emphasized what an honor she felt it was to be part of a space in time that was, in the words of author and priest, Henri Nouwen, “Arrival and departure … yesterday and today … all compressed in one blink of an eye.”

Moni was a private person, but on this topic she opened up and we ended up talking for hours.

Mountain Xpress editor, Peter Gregutt published my feature on Moni’s photography in February 2006. Just seven months after I’d moved to Asheville, I could finally say, “I’m a published writer” – the kind that actually gets paid.

Getting a feature story published in the local newspaper was very affirming – not only of the move to Asheville, but also of my love of writing about people.

After I’d picked up my bundle of newspapers at Greenlife, I called Moni with the good news. That morning, both of us drove all over Asheville, picking up a few copies here, a few copies there, amassing small stashes of them in our excitement.

It wasn’t something I could announce or link to on social media. It was 2006 and Facebook was still quite new and pretty much the domain of college and university students. It would be another few months before I’d get my first friend request – from Aundrea Hart at WFYI, the PBS station in Indianapolis.

High on the excitement of seeing my name in print, I decided to start my very own documentary film production company – and Asheville Productions was born!

[photograph of Moni Taylor by me – Asheville, 2008]