Dealing with Grief While Mid-Flight
This photo is from Sveitarfélagið ölfus, a place I visited in 2018 for a dip in a hot spring before sprinting back to my rental car on the way to the airport.
Two years ago this week, on a flight home from my solo trip to Iceland, I met a woman named Arna who changed how I think about grief.
We were in the same row next to each other with a vacant middle seat, and consequently began chatting here and there as the flight took off. She was an American ex-pat now based in Norway, and we exchanged small talk about our lives, how was my trip, what was Norway like. It's always nice to find someone interesting to pass the time with on an international flight, I thought, but you also never know when the how-are-you's and small talk will dry up, leaving you each to politely nod off or become occupied with a book.
Then about 45 minutes into our 5-hour flight, she pulled out her phone to read a text message, and began to cry.
It was a muffled sort of weep, the kind that at first I wasn't sure if she wanted to keep to herself, or if she was simply trying to be considerate of the space she occupied and people around.
I asked if she was OK, and she replied that she just got a message that her mother—who she was on her way to see in Baltimore—had passed away.
This was the second time I had watched someone receive such a long distance message. The last time had been my own mother answering the call about my grandma 16 years ago.
Perhaps it was this memory that cemented my understanding that this woman could not grieve alone, trapped in the din of an airplane. She also could not un-know what she knew until she could be with her family, and for that my heart ached.
I'm so sorry, I told her, and asked if I could give her a hug. I wasn't sure she would want one from a near-stranger, but she did. It felt like an invitation somehow. I think that the hug helped us both to feel less alone.
It happened to be Iceland Air's anniversary on this flight, and in what I can only now look back on as a sort of jester offering from the cosmos for this awful scene, the flight attendants soon came through the aisles to offer us ice creams. I remember thinking, on this graciously non-turbulent flight, about how those little bars had felt like a sort of ceremony. No other passengers were part of this grief exchange, but in a way they were.
Sometime before the ice creams arrive, and after the initial tears, and the hug, and some silence held between us, I asked her, what was her mom like?
This was an obvious question for me to ask. I had never met this woman, and was curious.
In answering, Arna softened and eventually smiled, and even laughed. I could see the way her body changed when she was allowed to remember her mother, and share stories about her childhood, and share stories of the amazing woman she knew long before their family began on the long, arduous road of loss that is Alzheimer's. She had lost her mom some time before that day two years ago, but they had been in the midst of the battle, and now she had permission to see the totality of her mom's full life. She sounded like an incredible woman—feisty and smart and devoted to her faith as the president of her synagogue, a mother, grandmother and great-grandmother.
I learned from this experience that to celebrate life is to allow your grief to fully pass through you. To remember with fondness, with delight, with humor—is the ultimate way of honoring someone. Death is an inevitable gateway, the circumstances of which we don't often have much control over, nearly all of them painful to a certain degree. But we control how we speak about a life.
I also learned that it's possible for anyone to hold space for someone's grief, you just have to be there and if they are to share, to listen. To hold space for grief, you just have to be curious about life, and the whole spectrum of it, the shape and color of it. Because then, you really feel the depth of what's been lost, or in the case of our current challenges, what is at stake.
I think of these lessons often now, and it's where my mind tends to go when we speak of numbers or names en masse lost to this pandemic. I want to hear more life stories, rather than see names inked one after the other, somewhat anonymously. I think this is why this particular obituary of the late Randall Jacobs went viral last week. My favorite line was:
When the end drew near, he left us with a final Bunkyism: "I'm ready for the dirt nap, but you can't leave the party if you can't find the door."
With all of that said, I wanted to write out a few of the basic questions I've been looping again and again—and some alternative questions, much like the piece I shared last week.
A question:
Is it inhumane to leave the vulnerable in isolation, a fate perhaps on par with the cruelties of disease itself?
Also a question, but reframed: What are some ways that human connection can transcend the barriers of space, time, and relationship?
A question:
How will we cope if this has to go on for years?
Also a question, but reframed: What is one way I can comfort one person today?
A question:
What if my actions—taken in desire to live more freely—end up harming someone?
Also a question, but reframed: What is one way I could find freedom within myself today?
A question: What if I die before I accomplish everything I want to do?
Also a question, but reframed: How do I want to be remembered when I'm gone, and how can I live that today?
A question: What if someone I love dies?
Also a question, but reframed: What can I do to help a living thing to thrive and grow today?
Each of the first questions are fear-based, while the alternatives are life-based.
And there are probably a lot more than just these. This stuff is hard and all I know is what I've lived before, a limited experience of grief and loss. The thought has occurred to me that I'm fundamentally ill-equipped for the grief that will likely sweep upon me someday. But when I live in the questions, and when I remember how awesome life is and how unfathomably lucky we are to get to live it, I get a small dose of comfort.