Memories from Seat 24E
It was summertime, August. It must have been 2016.
My partner and I had been neck-high in entrepreneurial mud for a million years, and it had subsided to a thick gloop of thigh-high mud. Trudgeable, and so, we decided we could take a vacation, and hyperbole aside, it was the first vacation in several years. We’d thrown a dart at a map (no, we didn’t) and it landed straight on Washington DC (okay, we have friends over there.)
This anecdote is not about Washington, DC, but rather the flight that took us there.
When Jeremiah and I travel together, I volunteer for the middle seat so that he can squish into me rather than into a stranger. So, that long flight from Portland, Oregon, to Arlington, Virginia, I spent squished in a middle seat.
The woman seated next to me had arrived on the plane before me. She was small with a deep skin tone and in her 60s or maybe 70s, based on her manicured hands. Making a note of who I am sitting by is about as far as I go toward making friends on an airplane.
Here’s the thing, though:
I don’t make small talk on planes. Polite, but without conversation. If I notice someone glancing at a magazine I brought, I will offer it to them when I finish reading. I will not wake them up if they are sleeping and the flight attendant passes by or ask them their name.
And so my seatmate agreed to the plane performance of strangers. We spent an hour, or two, in the air: silent. Reading, looking out the window, sweating, drinking sips of water, listening to sniffles, waiting for our ears to pop.
Eventually, the woman needed to get up to use the bathroom, and when she came back, as we shuffled out and in of our seats, she said thank you.
“Are you from DC?” She asked after her seat belt clicked into place and we had each airplane shuffled back into our assigned spaces. The air beside me was tinged with a faint smell of gardenia or rose lotion as I sat into place.
“Oh no,” I murmured, “Portland. You?”
“Portland, too,” she stated.
The flight attendant rolled by, offering shot glasses of ice with three drops of cold water and a package of salt and flour snacks.
I offered the woman my plastic-packaged pretzels; she shook her head no. She then mentioned what she did for work, detailing some of the aspects of the program she had built, which largely facilitated the connection of black children, adopted by non-black parents, to their roots and cultural heritage.
“So,” I asked, “are you going to DC for a conference? Or for a vacation?”
“No,” She said.
No. As in neither.
“I’m visiting a friend,” she continued, slightly quieter.
“Oh, so are --,” I began and stopped.
She had looked down at her hands that rested on her lap.
“She’s one of my oldest friends,” she continued, “and she had a stroke. I need to go help her. Her sister can’t be there all the time.”
I leaned down, knocked around the items in my purse nestled between my pair of Converse, and fished out a container of small Kleenex. It pays to be allergic to everything, sometimes.
I handed the woman the package of facial tissues, and she removed one, dabbing at her eyes, “thank you,” she said.
“I’m so sorry,” my voice broke, and I offered her my hand. “My dad had a stroke,” I told her, “A year ago.”
It hadn’t even been a year. Ten months. The previous October.
She had accepted my hand and was waiting.
“Oh, he’s okay,” I continued, then asked, “Is she still in the hospital?”
“No, she’s at home. She doesn’t want to do the work,” her speech verged towards staccato, “she’s always tired. I tell her, you have to keep working, keep trying. Needs comfort, though, someone to remind her to keep going. I don’t know if she’s getting better.”
I nodded. “My dad couldn’t write after the stroke,” I told her, “but he’s already back at his architectural firm. He had to work really hard. Your friend needs to work hard. Every day.”
I felt like I was giving a pep talk to a woman who was both 65 and 5.
Word hard. Go faster. Do more. Be better.
The things we tell children.
The things we tell adults.
It felt fruitless.
I sought to offer something tangible and supportive, “Make sure she’s eating,” I said.
My seatmate’s speech had become livelier, less clipped as she outlined a series of meals she had planned to cook. As she described the dishes, I imagined the home of the DC woman: a tiny side table cluttered with pills to keep her blood thin. A white-and-metal walker beside it. Worn-out armchairs with the stuffing flat but draped with striped afghans. An 80s-style wooden dining table with a sticky vinyl tablecloth topped with steaming dishes of food with the August sun slipping in from a nearby window.
When she finished, I thought about what the nurses had told us when my dad was first admitted and relayed that to my seatmate.
“The first few weeks are crucial,” I said. “How long has it been?”
Seven months.
Seven months had passed since her friend had suffered the stroke.
If you know very little about strokes, you should know that if a stroke patient survives past the first 48 hours, the next 90 days are crucial to rewiring and reorganizing the brain. Some of the brain will be irretrievable. But stroke survivors must work incredibly hard. You cannot do it only when it is convenient, and after a stroke, you only want to rest. Want to walk again one day? Start immediately. Want to speak? Hours of work. Want to read? Hours. Hours. Hours. But it cannot wait.
So at that moment, I saw what I had done.
I had given her hope. (My dad got through. So can your friend)
And I had taken it away. (The first few weeks are most important.)
In less than a handful of minutes. (Oh, it’s already been seven months.)
The weight of the passage of time settled on me. I had mistakenly assumed her friend had just been discharged from the hospital. It had been months. The pressure in my ears intensified, and I remembered where I was by the hot scent of gardenia lotion, and stale pretzels, and people’s body odor. The dabbed tissue was wadded and damp in my left hand, leaving white lint between the lines of my fingers.
She probably knew all this.
Knew her friend was not working hard enough.
Was likely frustrated with her friend enough as is.
Had probably spoken with doctors.
Knew the potential outcomes.
Oscillations between hope
and disappointment
and gratitude
and anger.
“You are a good friend,” I told her.
What else could I have said?
What else would have made a difference?
I handed her my magazine, and she accepted it, placing it on her lap, unopened. She watched the clouds outside the window.
After our plane had taxied, I helped get her luggage from the overhead compartment.
I have never seen her again.
But I think about this every time I get on a plane.
Lately, that moment has sat in my thoughts. Trying to teach me something, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to be taught. Maybe it’s just a memory on repeat. Forever.