Strawberries and Swans

A mammogram, a missed subway stop, and the unexpected joys of making mistakes

Apr 14, 2026

April 13, 2026 in Prospect Park ©Deborah Copaken

Four things happened on a single day thirteen years ago that would alter the course of my life. My then husband and I ended our 20-year marriage; he moved 3000 miles away; I drove our eldest son to his first year of college; I felt a lump in my breast.

The rest of that story lives on in my divorce memoir, which ended on a hopeful note. Alas, that cautiously optimistic note would transpose into a harshly hammered minor chord on the eve of the book’s publication, thanks to a new partner who sabotaged what should have been a celebratory day with his shenanigans. And so life goes. Or so mine has gone often enough that I’ve learned its secret formula: you make a mistake (“That was a really poor choice”); you self-castigate for the mistake (“How could I have not seen the red flags?!”); you mourn the mistake (“I’m so sad!”), you start singing Carole King ballads (“I am strong! I am invincible!”); and then—this is the key final step—you start to appreciate how that mistake has transformed your life into something better, softer, and maybe even wiser, now that it’s in the rearview mirror (“Wow, if I hadn’t experienced that, I would have never appreciated this.”)

Sometimes this process can take years. Other times, the entire five-step cycle happens within the course of several minutes.

Take yesterday afternoon. Around 12:30 pm, I took the Q train back to Brooklyn from my mammogram/ultrasound/oncologist appointments at Sloan Kettering. I have to block off five hours every six months for this mirth, ever since that lump appeared in my left boob thirteen years ago, with the occasional afternoon biopsy (or two or three) thrown in for good measure. At my last set of appointments, I wasted a lot of time in my seersucker gown between procedures and on the subway back and forth to my appointments doom-scrolling through America’s horrors, so yesterday I decided to bring a book instead: Lily King’s Heart the Lover, which I’d heard was good.

The book, in fact, was so good and so engrossing, I ended up nearly finishing it in the Evelyn Lauder Breast Center and missing my stop on the subway home as I tore through its final pages.

Suddenly, there I was, standing on the opposite end of Prospect Park from my office, kicking myself for yet another stupid mistake. I have a play I’ve been commissioned to write and a looming deadline. Every minute of time at the desk in my shared office space is precious. Disoriented, I pulled out my google maps, noted that my office was a 34-minute walk through the park, decided to just accept/mourn my mistake, play some Carole King through my new hearing aids1, and hoof it through the park.

Within minutes, I was already appreciating my mistake and realizing what a stroke of good luck it had been.

The trees of Prospect Park were in full bloom, reminding me of springtime rides on the back of my late father’s bike as a small child. I spotted twin swans, periodically dipping their heads under Dog Beach pond. This made me think about my twin sisters’ birthdays the day prior, which will forevermore fall on the same day as the twin deaths of both my beloved Uncle Barry, who helped create the Internet and died of a brain tumor on April 12, 2018, and of my partner’s stepfather, an archeologist who died of Covid on April 12, 2020.

Life and death, forever intertwined. As they are every day of our fleeting lives, whether we pay attention to this truth or not.

“Strawberries and swans, baby,” I texted my love, along with a video of one of the two swans dunking his head. It’s our shared shorthand for taking a moment to really pay attention to and appreciate our lives down here on earth while we still have it, born of the time I’d undergone ketamine treatment for my tinnitus and loopily exclaimed, while still somewhat high, “Imagine a world in which there are strawberries and swans!”

The themes of Heart the Lover, the book responsible for my distraction and missed stop, were all about missed connections, appreciating the present moment, the thin line separating life and death, and the constant interplay between past and present, particularly when it comes to lovers and love. Does everything that has happened or will ever happen in the universe exist at all times? Or do we simply have this present moment on this spinning rock right now? The book does not provide answers. It simply keeps asking the dueling questions.

And so as I walked across the park to my office, these dualities, fed by having just finished King’s book and received a clean mammogram, kept coming into sharp focus.

I spotted a baseball field filled with orthodox yeshiva students, which reminded me of my ex-husband being forced to attend yeshiva after immigrating to the U.S. from the Soviet Union at age nine. How hard that must have been for him. How unnatural. I thought of my orthodox parents-in-law, who adopted my ex-husband and his twin brother when they turned fifteen, after their single mother died in the wake of heart surgery. Those parents-in-law had insisted that I both dunk myself in a mikvah before our wedding day and that I walk around their adopted son seven times under the chuppah.

Orthodox yeshiva students playing baseball in Prospect Park ©Deborah Copaken

I am Jewish but not religious, so I’d never been to a mikvah to purify myself after a period because I don’t believe such things are necessary or even appropriate. I believe menstrual blood does not make me or anyone else impure. It’s a natural, monthly part of being a female of reproductive age. But wanting to appease my soon-to-be parents-in-law and their traditions, I reluctantly agreed to go.

The orthodox woman who dunked me into that weird-smelling pool immediately chastised me for not knowing the proper purifying prayer for a pre-wedding mikvah. She even questioned whether or not I was actually Jewish. I turned my head in profile, so she could clock my enormous schnoz, then I crawled out of the mikvah, covered my naked body with a towel, and cried tears of humiliation. How dare she question my origins. How dare she shame me for not knowing something I was never taught nor cared to know.

Watching those orthodox boys in Prospect Park trying to play baseball in black wool pants and white button down shirts, a formal style of clothing better suited to strolling the sidewalks of early 19th-century Krakow than to swinging a bat in a modern Brooklyn dirt lot, I could still feel the fresh sting of that mikvah lady shaming me—as I stood there stark naked and vulnerable—for not knowing ancient prayers which, to me, had not only lost all relevance to modern day womanhood but were a patriarchal insult to the natural functioning of my body. As for those seven circles around my then husband on my wedding day, representing, I was told, both the walls of our home and the way he was supposed to become the center of my world, I should have paid attention to that sexist symbolism and insisted he circle around me, too.

Maybe then I might have been the center of his world, too, instead of its unacknowledged support system.

Next, I passed by the Prospect Park bandshell, where I got soaked in the rain watching The National play a summer show back in 2019 with the man I met and moved in with several years after my marriage imploded. That concert had once been a fond memory which, like all of our shared memories over the course of our four years, is now sullied by the knowledge that his head, heart, and body were often elsewhere. Was he texting his sidepiece during that concert? Or were we as happy as I thought we were on that music-and-rain-drenched evening in Prospect Park? I do not know the details or the timeline of his dalliances. Or whether there were others claiming pieces of his heart and body too. I suspect there was a second paramour in Nantucket—if so, oh, the possibilities for bawdy limericks!—but I’ll never know. He simply walked away, moved to Mexico, and never explained himself or apologized.

It has taken me years to be okay with this not knowing. With all the unanswered questions. But also thank goodness for my discovery of that errant bobby pin on my bedside table, which opened the floodgates of his treachery. I would not have had the life and love I now have otherwise.

Finally, I made my way out of the park and was less than a block from my office when I spotted an older woman of around 90 or so sitting on her front stoop in a ray of light, smiling widely at the world passing by, enjoying the first warm afternoon after an extended spring cold snap in New York. I smiled back and acknowledged her unmistakable joy. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” I said, because, “We’re both still alive, and I didn’t even need to stay for an extra biopsy today!” would have been weird to shout at her. Even if that’s precisely what I was thinking.

“Oh, yes!” said the woman. “It really is.”

Then, before heading inside to my cubicle to work, I stopped off at the local deli to buy myself some strawberries.

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