Thomas Turner was 16 years old when the simple act of opening a door gave him a jarring glimpse into the future.
In the 25th Anniversary Edition of Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul, Turner, now 35, shares the story of how a simple, polite gesture of holding the door for a frail cancer patient jolted him from “unbridled optimism” about his mother’s own recovery from the disease to a “wiser, scarred view of the world” where the loss of his mother was a reality.
“Before this simple experience, endings in life were always happy for me,” Turner writes. “There was no outcome that ended any other way than my mother beating this disease – until I held that door.”
Mary Elizabeth Turner passed away just a few months before Turner’s high school graduation. The loss was devastating for Turner and his family.
“After my mother passed away, I wasn’t living a very good life,” he said. “Nothing I did seemed to help with the pain or the depression.”
Turner said that he struggled with mental health issues for years following her death. It wasn’t until he suffered a second loss – the death of his step-mother, Angela Turner – that he began to see a way out.
“It just kind of all came to a head when my step-mother passed away,” Turner said. “At my step-mother’s funeral, I was standing next to my sister when I saw her, my half-sister. She was 12 years old, and I realized that she was in the same position that my sister and I had been in when we were her age. I don’t know how to describe it. It just kind of all made sense to me at that moment; maybe I’ve gone through everything that I’ve gone through in order to be there to help her.”
Turner decided to see a doctor through the Veterans Association about his mental health.
“I started talking about my problems, and I started the therapy I needed to feel better and do better,” he said.
As Turner began to heal, he started to share his story with his family.
“I wrote ‘Holding the Door’ for them, for my family,” he said. “It seemed to help them, and it was helping me through my grief. I think listening to other people who have been through similar things and how they recovered is really helpful.”
Diane Shepard, Turner’s aunt and co-owner of Main Street Books, began encouraging Turner to share his story with others outside the family.
“I was worried the story would be too depressing,” Turner said. “I told my aunt that I wanted it to be something to help people, but that the frame of the story made it sad. She encouraged me to submit it anyway.
“I eventually submitted ‘Holding the Door’ to Chicken Soup just hoping that it would help somebody else that was maybe going through some of the same things that I went through. I thought maybe someone else will read it and think that maybe it’s not always so bad.
“You know how people talk about silver linings? You gotta find the silver linings. It’s an overused expression, but it’s true. Bad things are going to happen, and you can’t stop them. There’s nothing you can do but deal with it the best that you can.”
Turner said that it was a complete surprise when Chicken Soup for the Soul actually selected his story for publication. According to the company, Chicken Soup only publishes around 2% of all submissions.
At the end of “Holding the Door”, Turner writes, “At the time of my mother’s passing, I was oddly thankful for the events that day at the clinic unfolding the way they did. They prepared me for everything that was coming.”
