Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone

In the Air (2)

(1996)

The only thing he was nervous about was actually missing his flight. As always, he had left too late and had not counted on the traffic, the parking, the lines, the families checking in with more suitcases than sense, the inefficiency of underpaid employees as well as the unanticipated forces that conspire to make modern travel the mess that it is.

He had traveled enough to know better, but he was young enough to think he would never have to change and not yet old enough to realize he never would. This being more than five years before the day that altered airports forever, he was able to sprint to his gate, and the cabin door was still open five minutes before its scheduled departure. Success.

All on board, another chance to fly the friendly skies, this time to visit a friend on the West Coast. As he settled into his assigned seat this was what he thought about: The next time I set foot on the ground it will be on the opposite side of the country. Dark here, light there, he thought. Cold here, warm there.

...

Not long after the plane was in the air, he noticed a man seated several rows ahead of him. This man, whose face he couldn't see, made him think about his Pops. From where he sat, the man in front of him could very well have been his own father, ten years down the line: the patch of receding hair widened, the gray that had struggled to overtake the brown now wrestling with the white creeping in at all corners.

Someday he's going to be an old man and I'm going to be responsible for him.

Where did that come from? This unprompted realization kicked off an unfamiliar apprehension: the future, assuming his place in the world and all the things over which he exerted only mutable degrees of control.

...

He tried to sleep but was unable to shake the sudden and disconcerting image of his father as an elderly man. As he himself was just entering a period of stability, the prospect of witnessing his father's eventual deterioration was horrifying. Unendurable. It was worse, somehow, than confronting his own mortality. The reason for this, he knew, was that he was cognizant, if not entirely comfortable with his own fragility-the vulnerability of being human-and accepting it. He had never found himself (allowed himself?) to imagine his father revealing a lack of control. He had never known his father to cry, even at the funerals of his own parents. Over time the son had taken for granted that his father was at once inscrutable and incontrovertible: an entity that precluded explanation. In other words, even as he had embraced so many of the assumptions and illusions most adults successfully grapple with at some point, he had scarcely ceased to view his Pops from a child's perspective.

His father, he had figured out many years before, was a piece of work-even for an Irish Catholic of his time and place (post-Depression, Boston). Over time it had become obvious that the only perceptible distress he would betray was the possibility of actually revealing an unguarded emotion, any sign of weakness.

...

"You've never seen your father cry?" a girlfriend had asked, a few years before.

"No, I never have," he'd said, deciding to tell the truth.

She hadn't believed him.

"I'm serious," he'd insisted.

"But, how is that possible?"

"Well, he's old school..."

"That's just weird."

"We're not an unweird family."

"The rest of you seem pretty normal."

"You don't know the half of it," he'd said, deciding to tell half the truth.

"So...if your father doesn't cry, what does he do?"

"Uh..."

"I mean, instead of crying, does he show no emotion at all?"

"He's Irish."

"What does that mean?"

"He can do anger, and silence, and he even allows himself to be amused sometimes."

"But what about if...when he's upset?"

"He's Irish."

"What does that mean?"

"He keeps it locked up in there."

"In there?"

"In the vault."

"The vault?"

"You know, inside."

"That's just weird."

"I don't disagree."

"You cry."

"Of course I do; I'm my mother's son."

"So your mom cries?"

"She's Italian."

"You're a disaster! You cry during movies...and not even sad movies!"

"You don't know the half of it."

...

He did cry during movies. And conversations. He often cried alone, especially when he listened to music. And not even sad music.

(So, you might ask him, are you really suggesting someone should want to listen to music that's capable of making them cry?)

(Yes, he would reply.)

(But, you might ask, why would someone want to do such a thing?)

(It's simple, he would say. So you know you're alive.)

...

Now unable to take his eyes from the back of the head of the man who might have been his father, ten years down the line-with his thinning hair and almost imperceptibly sagging shoulders-he realized that he'd come to rely on his father's unflappable manner. Even as he had grown and changed, and gone through some of the transitions that led him-and allowed him-to accept that in many ways he was not like his father, he always could count on his old man's consistency. Perhaps he had, in part, even trained himself, if unconsciously, to condition his temperament and a burgeoning artistic sensibility in contrast to his father's intransigence, which had often befuddled him in earlier years.

He'd never seen his father cry, but who knew what happened when he wasn't watching. He knew his father had been on a plane, alone, visiting his own mother those final times after her stroke: a languid decline, more a resignation than a surrender. And before that, dealing with his own father's death: immediate, unplanned for. At age eighteen and then twenty-one he had watched his father, a man who never forgot to pray and always remembered not to cry, standing over his parents' coffins-first his father's and three years later, his mother's-resolute if not necessarily serene. His father's faith was his safeguard: against emotion, against injustice, against ambiguity; a bulwark against the darkness. He believed in his father's faith; that belief was possibly more strong and secure than the faith his father held.

He had seen his mother cry, and he knew she'd taken several flights of her own-right around his tenth birthday-alone and afraid, anxious yet dreading the idea of seeing her own mother, who was slipping away, too fast and too young.