That's Why Planes Exist

Don't stay home because you're scared of what will happen if you leave.

My mom, my gram, and my Aunt Marianne…some time in the 90s?

What if something bad happens? 

This was one reason not to move to California, we thought. Our family is all on the East Coast. What if something bad happens and we’re so far away? Could we bear it?  

I tried to visualize “it” happening. This is a terrible thing I do, imagining in great detail what it would be like for one of my nightmares to come true. When I was little, sometimes I’d randomly think what if grandma dies and I’d instantly be brought to tears and try to imagine anything else. It still makes me cry because though she’s not dead she’s still gone. 

Once my sister sat next to a woman who, on the runway just before take-off, received a call that her father had died. It’s the kind of stunning thing you don’t think you’ll ever sit with a stranger through, and if you do, well, you have to laugh when recounting the story because it’s just so shocking. She didn’t laugh when it happened though, she held this stranger’s arm while she cried.  

Before moving, I thought, could I do that? Could I be a person who has to mourn on a flight because she’s so far away from the source of the problem? I decided I could. Bad things are going to happen no matter where I live. They happen all around me. 

On Friday Brian and I sat in the last row on a flight to New Jersey, we booked the flight a couple days before. I typically refuse the back of the plane as it’s where turbulence feels the worst and I’m the kind of person who breaks into a sweat the moment the seat belt sign blinks on, but they were the only two seats next to each other that didn’t require a paid upgrade.

We packed just one bag, it was a 36 hour trip. Walking through the terminal, I thought it was nice that I didn’t have to schlep too much: I wish all travel days felt this empty and essential.

It was an uninteresting flight, as all flights should be, except for ten bumpy minutes during which I cursed at Brian for not paying the $360 upgrade so we could sit closer to the front. 

“We shouldn’t have taken these fucking seats,” I mumbled, rolling my eyes, furious at everything, still reeling from a traumatizing experience we had several days before, just starting to process the new pain related to our trip that I had been compartmentalizing out of necessity.  

“You’re right,” he held my hand a little tighter. “We should have taken those seats.”

(We shouldn’t have. It’s a rip off. I apologized later, though I cannot be blamed for what I say during turbulence.) 

The next morning we arrived at my uncle’s church for my aunt’s celebration of life. He is a pastor. She was 65. My grandma wasn’t there. My aunt died after living with a glioblastoma, a rare and aggressive form of brain cancer that kills most people in a year. She lived for two and a half. 

After the service, my cousins stood in a receiving line for a couple of hours while hundreds of people from church lined up to give their condolences. She was beloved.

Later, at the repast, I asked my cousins if people say weird things when they reach the front of the line, and we shared a laugh over one guy who kept repeating: “ya know, cancer sucks.” Yes. Thank you sir. It does. 

It’s hard, knowing what to say to someone who’s experiencing a shattering loss. A loss they’ll live with forever. As my uncle said in his sermon, “I will walk with a limp for the rest of my life, but I will walk.” 

Our beautiful, brave, brilliant aunt died while we were in California. She was diagnosed while we were in New York. Bad things happen no matter where you are — living closer to something that feels safe doesn’t actually keep you or the people you love any safer. 

It’s valid to want to live close to family, to a person in your life you cannot imagine dying, but don’t choose to live near them out of fear of what will happen if you don’t. Live near them for any other reason. If you want to go somewhere else, even for a brief adventure, but are held back by fear of something bad happening while you’re away — go anyway. You can always come back.

“Thank you for making the trip out here,” my cousins and uncle said when we first hugged after the service. 

I said, “That’s why planes exist.”