Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone

In the Air (3)

(1980)

The majority of airline crashes occur in the first twenty seconds after take-off...

As the plane prepared for the flight out of Dulles she repeated the words she'd read, or heard, and then been unable to forget, unsure if they were comforting or some type of cruel compulsion. She didn't like to fly. She hated to fly alone. She could barely get her mind around the idea that she was flying, alone, back to Boston, to be with her mother at the hospital. I want to be there when she wakes up, she'd said. I need to see her when she comes out of surgery, she'd explained to her husband. My mother is sick, she'd told her son and daughter, hoping their father could handle any other questions after she'd left. She thought about her son, whose birthday she was going to miss. He was old enough to understand, which made it easier. She wondered how much easier it would be if he was younger, unable to realize what was happening: no questions, one less thing to try to explain. But then he might never remember her if the plane crashed... No-she couldn't allow herself to go there, not yet.

(What is life, she'd thought as she looked down at her mother, a month earlier, shortly after the diagnosis. How bad is it? she'd asked. It's bad, her father had said. A flash of preparation, a test of faith. (My faith is being tested...) How could this loss be endurable without a conviction that our lives are transitory, part of a process we remain unable to understand? Her mother wasn't ready to die. She wasn't ready for her mother to die. It was too soon, too sudden, nothing to make sense of.)

She held her rosary beads and thought about her son. He'd been disappointed, of course, but he was also excited about his new record player with the built-in speakers. He was young enough to find simple distractions through the things that occupied his time-music, reading, writing, the pictures he used to draw turning into little stories. Mostly, he was still young and she tried to appreciate things for what they were. She had attempted to absorb his vitality and take it with her.

She closed her eyes and thought about her life.

...

Boston. Engaged at twenty-two. She had said yes when he asked her to spend the rest of her life with him, but balked-and almost recanted-when she found out soon after that the moderately well-paying job he'd just landed (right out of college) would require the rest of their lives to begin together in Arizona, over two thousand miles and two time zones away from her family and friends-her life. He may as well have asked her to move to Alaska, or even to Ireland, where she knew his grandparents had emigrated from (hers had come over a few decades later, from Italy). The desert. It couldn't have been more dissimilar from the cracked and well-traveled streets of Boston, a familiar, comfortable landscape-cramped, noisy, even dirty. But that dust and grime was beautiful in its own peculiar way; it was an unmistakable signal of life. A sign of people, and where there were people there was security. Nothing could seem more ominous and oppressive than the vast open spaces and quiet desolation of Flagstaff, Arizona.

Incredibly, it was her own mother who'd done the most to convince her to keep an open mind about this unexpected, undesired rite of passage. Do you love him? Very much, she'd replied. More questions. Do you see this as the man who will protect you and be the father of your children? Why do you think there are jobs for the taking out in places like Arizona? And answers. Because that's where the jobs are; all the jobs here are already taken, and no one is giving them up. Things will be different for you; the days of living in the same town as your parents are passing. Besides, what are you going to do, stay here and marry a milkman?

The last question had been in jest, and they'd both laughed over it, but as years went by, she often thought back on what her mother had said. Not the words so much as what they were meant to signify-Don't you want to do better than us, to live better than we did? Meeting and marrying a college graduate was not to be taken lightly-a scientist, even! There are two types of people, her mother said, the people who grow and change, and the people who stay the same. And when you come visit us in a few years, you'll see what I mean, and you'll know what you would have missed if you'd stayed here.