“Mom, it’s beautiful!”
Her cherubic face has been glued to the window since we took
off. It’s not her first flight, but it is the first flight away from the
everyday to the exotic. Armed with new bathing suits and pretty dresses and
fancy shoes and flip flops, her toes are the color of sea glass and her
fingertips that of sand. A flower dances prettily above her ear and expectation
dances in her bright hazel eyes.
We are thousands of feet in the air, wingtips drifting
through snowy white clouds as the ocean bleeds into the bright blue sky on the
distant horizon below. The mainland left us hours ago and we are floating on
the cusp of seven days of Hawaiian bliss.
This is a moment unmatched for her, and distant memories
surface. As a small child the World War II-era DC3 was our only transportation
in and out of the remote community we lived in, a capsule of heat and
discomfort in the tundra’s 24-hour daylight and a frigid tube in the harsh
sub-zero winters that swept across the ocean ice for months on end.
My father once chartered a tiny plane to pluck me out of
obscurity. The bill was forwarded to the government and their outrage was met
with the gentle reminder that they should not leave a minor child abandoned in
the Arctic for two weeks just because a snowstorm happened to roll in. A gentle
reminder that positions of power are weak in the face of parental love.
Year after year, I traversed an entire country to land at
boarding school or to return home, plunging headfirst into my independence courtesy
of the four separate planes of varying size and speed in either direction. For
years I flew the corporate routine, hasty turnarounds to accomplish business
objectives with minimal impact to family. Half of one, plane rides were routine
and moments to catch my breath, my sanity and a chance to get caught up on
work.
When I was the only half left, they became an escape shuttle
that trapped me in mother’s guilt.
Desperate to go and terrified to leave in the windows I
heard my voice promise my children that he was out there in the clouds,
somewhere, riding the soft boulders in death like he rode the mountains and
trails in life. I was and remain ambivalent about the hereafter and so the
clouds became a comfortable place in the space between, a place where my
children took comfort and where I did not have to resolve my own unanswered
questions.
High above the pain and the self doubt, I would stare numbly
for hours and it felt as though I could simply open the window and step softly into
the rolling expanse and he would be there. To forgive me for being the one left
behind. To reassure me that I had the strength to carry them forward. To let me
go.
And then life moved on far beneath the clouds.
Staring out at the clouds, I no longer need to be forgiven
for living and I have proven that I have the strength to carry them forward in
a life filled with love and expectation and reality and adventure and joy despite
all of its sorrows. Because if he is out there, I know now that he granted my
freedom long before I accepted it myself. And if he isn’t out there in the expanse,
freedom was simply waiting for my own acceptance that it was okay.
To breathe deep. To live again. To love again.
“So this is what it looks like for Daddy. This is what
heaven looks like.”
No sweetheart. He saw heaven in you.
