turbulence

The air is choppy today. The beverage service was cancelled. It’s the kind of flying that I loved in graduate school because I figured if we crashed, I wouldn’t have to write my dissertation, a prospect equally awesome and deeply perverse.

So much of the last twenty-two months has been up in air. I mean that—excuse the galling pun—quite literally. J and I fly back and forth, both less and more frequently than we’d like. When I think about moving to Kentucky, I most often day-dream about a life on the ground with my feet planted beneath me.

But today I’m up in the air not for J, but for my Dad. I’m heading to Chicago for his big surgery. I’ve found myself with surprisingly little to say on this front for the last several weeks, as anticipation has gradually turned to excitement and then morphed—against my will—into dread. It’s strange to be at once be so connected to a process and utterly removed from it in the way that anyone who is not the patient must be.

I’ve spent late afternoons and early morning commutes thinking about what it means to make oneself available to another’s pain, how compassion needs to blend with patience, how when each of us makes a decision to participate in another’s suffering we do it for that person, of course, but also—and perhaps always—for ourselves. I’m conscious each day of making a choice to hold on to my father’s disease, in my head and in my gut. It means inviting disruption and making a pleasant home for it; after all, accepting that disruption means affirming our connections and getting outside of our selves.

I’ve brought familiarity with me to this place of discomfort. A beloved novel for next week’s class and a cashmere scarf that’s been dormant for the better part of three years. These are old friends, the kind you need keep close in times such as these.