Love all, trust few, do wrong to none”
Shakespeare: All’s Well That Ends Well
“That’s a big airplane out there. Do you think it will hold all of us?’
The two women were standing in front of me as I was boarding a flight from Tucson to San Diego.
It was the rhythm of the comment from one of the women that caught my attention. The question was flat, monotone and forceful. The sort of comment one might hear from an adult with downs syndrome.
“Can we get on the airplane now?” she asked. The other woman, apparently her sister gently said, “In a minute. After these other people in front of us get on.”
The question-asking woman turned around, gazing at the other passengers waiting to board and said, “There’s a lot of people here.”
As she turned in my direction and our eyes met…my heart was in my throat. In that moment, she was my sister Nancy.
We never saw it coming, my sister’s journey into darkness. She had always been the bright light. Smart, driven, thoughtful, she made her way in life with her intellect and capacity to interact with people that was amazing.
This woman was always upbeat and could find the sunshine in the cloudiest of life circumstance. Never a victim, never a finger pointer, when things and circumstances created obstacles for her, she simply did whatever it took to figure it out, always finding a way to move forward.
I come from a family of strong smart women, all of whom deeply influenced my early years. In fact, they have influenced all of my years to this very day, in that they are the ones to whom I am drawn. None more than Nancy Jeanne.
A couple of years before we lost her to the unrelenting gravity of Alzheimer’s, I brought her out to San Diego for a couple of weeks, thinking in my naiveté that the Southern California air and ambiance would be good for her. In truth, it was something I thought would be good for me…it was neither.
She was still manageable in that day, but focally verbal, saying whatever came to her mind, in the flat monotone of the woman with her sister on that flight to San Diego. The family member, as I had done, quietly assured her sister things were normal and would be fine. Nancy, like the afflicted woman, was not sure…the verbal flow an expression of her anxiety.
I had come to understand that every day of my sister's pathway to early death, was the best day she would ever have, in the ever-descending spiral of this disease. So the time in San Diego was the best she had for the rest of her life.
As the two women walked down that gangway to the airplane, one gently guiding the other shuffling along, uncertain exactly what was going on, I found myself sitting in the theater of my mind replaying the life and times of the only person I ever knew from birth to death…the only person with whom I felt complete and free resonance…the only person I had loved so deeply for the little more than six decades of her life.
I took my seat, closed my eyes and watched the liquid chemistry videos that flashed through my mind. I whispered to her that I loved her still and looked forward to the ‘time’ when I would make my way down the gangway on my flight of no return, and once again feel her living essence…
May 12th. 😓
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