it's not fair

Pa has been working for days breaking up the dense prairie sod to get the plot ready for planting. With a sense of fulfillment and excitement, Ma, Mary and Laura plant seeds — some they have carefully saved and others they have carefully saved up for so Pa could go the two days into town and purchase them. By the end of the day, their backs are aching but it is an ache that comes with such a sense of accomplishment. They sleep very well that night.

After nearly a year of doing everything the hard way, and doing without so many things, there is so much hope in those seeds. And then, the following day, Pa learns that they never should have settled in that area. That they will have to leave. Within 24 hours, they have packed up what they can and are driving away. The plow, bought so triumphantly just a few weeks earlier, sticks up from the prairie as they ride away. There is no room for it on the wagon.

“The snug log house looked just as it always had,” Laura writes. “It did not seem to know they were going away.”

*******************

Our family has been making our way ever so slowly through Laura Ingall Wilder's Little House series. Our younger daughter has just turned four so we read in short spurts that match her attention span. My mother read them to my siblings and me when we were young and I read them again for myself later on. As we come to the end of the third book, Little House on the Prairie, and they are planting their garden, I am feeling their euphoria with them. “What a beautiful way to end this book,” I’m thinking, “after all they have been through in their new home.”

And so it takes me completely off-guard when they are suddenly saying goodbye to everything. Over the years since I last read the books, I have utterly forgotten this part of the story. A knot forms in my throat and tears come to my eyes but I try to keep reading with a shaky voice. My girls are looking at me, somewhat concerned. Finally I cannot go on and have to hand the book over to my husband so he can finish for us.

There is one thought on repeat in my head. “It’s not fair!”

With a four- and five-year-old in the house, fairness — and the lack thereof — comes up a lot.

My five-year-old might head into the house in a good mood, energized by the gymnastics lesson she just finished. And then as we open the front door, we find the four-year-old watching the end of Wibbly. There is a momentary silence and then, “That’s not fair! She got to watch a show and I didn’t!”

Or perhaps as the girls are getting ready for bed, I’m pulling out clothes for school the next day. It’s that in-between weather when it feels good to have bare arms or legs, but it’s a little chilly for both.

I set out a t-shirt, leggings and skirt for one, and a long-sleeved shirt and skirt for the other. Again, a pause as they assess the selections. And then, “That’s not fair! She gets to have bare legs and I don’t!”

Depending on my mood, I ignore these statements, point out why in fact it is fair and that fair and identical are not synonyms, or — my favorite — explain that things are not always fair but sometimes they are “not fair” in their favor and I don’t hear them complaining about it then.

And yet. Despite what I might say to my girls, my inner five-year-old is often crying, “That’s not fair!”

It isn’t fair that multiple sweet boys and girls among my daughters’ friends and peers have lost fathers or mothers  — not fair that their spouses must then juggle their grief and their children’s grief while also taking on single parenthood. Not fair that my parents, who adored each other from childhood and married young, did not get to make it to their fiftieth and sixtieth anniversaries and beyond, as we all believed they would, before my father died.

It’s not fair that some people who are good at their jobs get downsized while others who are mediocre or even bad at their jobs get to keep them. Or that people who already have good jobs get promoted to even better jobs while other equally talented people face rejection after rejection during their job hunt.

It’s not fair that some couples lose their dearly loved and desperately wanted children to accident or illness even as other children are neglected, abused or abandoned.

It’s not fair that with all the food available in our world there are still people going hungry. Not fair that some people get to take long hot showers that use up untold gallons of perfect drinking water while others walk miles every day for even questionable water.

I could go on and on. There are so many things I encounter that make me want to scream, “That’s not fair!”

*******************

Ella’s childhood is idyllic. Her parents adore her and each other. They are happy and kind and beautiful. They are literally living in a fairytale. But then her mother becomes ill and dies and eventually her father decides to marry again. Then he also dies. And it turns out that the new wife is not a nice person and this wicked stepmother turns the lovely sweet Ella into Cinderella—an overworked, unloved girl sleeping in the ashes of last night’s cooking fire.

And perhaps the extreme heights of happiness experienced by Ella’s family before tragedy hit make Cinderella’s situation feel particularly unfair.

But there is another story too. Before the wicked stepmother was a wicked stepmother, it so happens that she was a happy young woman married to the love of her life, mother to two young girls whom she also adored. And then tragedy struck and she was left a widow and a single mother. And this too was not fair.

*******************

We recently took our girls to see the new live action version of Disney’s Cinderella. When I first heard about the movie, I didn’t know what to expect. I thought it could be an irreverent retelling with something to prove or a bland, saccharine bit of fluff and I wasn’t sure which would make me cringe more. It was neither. And it was very good.

As we were driving home, one of our girls asked, “Why was the stepmother so mean?” We talked about how she had not always been mean, but had allowed the sadnesses and unfairnesses in her life to eventually shape her into the wicked stepmother.

And then we talked about how Cinderella’s life had also been full of sadnesses and unfairnesses and yet she continued to choose kindness. About how all of us will continually face things in our life that feel so completely unfair — that are so completely unfair — and while we can’t control them, we can control our response to them. (And you thought Disney movies were all fluff and rainbows and butterflies!)

And as I talked to my girls, I realized I was really talking to myself too. Reminding myself that choosing kindness or courage or joy does not mean pretending there is no sadness or unfairness or unkindness. That so much of life is not “either-or” but is “both-and.” That sometimes we are allowed to scream, “That’s not fair!”

But then it is up to us to decide if we’re going to let the unfairness eat away at us until we become a Wicked Stepmother caricature of ourselves. Or will we choose kindness like Cinderella did, even before she knew she would in fact get to live happily ever after? Or courage like Ma and Pa did, climbing into their wagon and saying, “Well, that didn’t work out, but let’s try again somewhere else”? Or perhaps, sometimes, to not just rail against the unfairness, but to see if we can do anything to change it.

*******************

Maybe, just maybe, the next time my girls cry, “That’s not fair!” I will choose a different response.

a little poetry

Some moments beg to be distilled down into a poem.

Five Years Old

And then suddenly one day, your baby girl is running upstairs
to fetch your slippers
or your book
or her daddy.

She is helping her little sister get a drink of water
and pulling plates and cups out of cupboards to lay the table for dinner.
She is running and swinging and flipping and scooting —
long arms and legs flexing strong, beautiful lean muscles.

Before your eyes, you see her mind
turning the garbles of letters on paper
into words and thoughts and sentences.
“Hey, that says ‘love’!” and “Why does it say ‘you’ right there?”
And she is correcting her sister’s grammar.
And your grammar.

She is lying beside you on the bed, chin propped on hands,
wide eyes and expressive face,
asking questions and telling stories
and waxing philosophical and silly by turns.

Suddenly she has become a helper and a thinker and a most 
engaging companion.

And you don’t remember exactly when it happened,
but you know it’s just the beginning.

And that is both exciting and heartbreaking. 

Running

The sun is shining but there is still

Snow on the mountains

And in the shady places along the path

And there are little old ladies in baseball caps

With a spring in their step

And a cheerful "Good morning"

And teenage boys too cool to admit 

The euphoria they feel as their long legs

Cover the miles quickly

And bearded men with dogs who give

A quiet smile just in case you smile back but

Small enough they won't feel rejected if you don't

And mothers with babies in carriers and strollers

Crunching along the gravel with determination

And cowboys on bicycles who give a polite nod

So you can almost hear their unsaid "Howdy, ma'am"

And a favorite song in your ears with quiet notes

And nuances you only hear when you listen this way

And suddenly something catches your eye

And you turn to see a bird flying over the creek below

So you are almost at eye level 

And for just a moment 

You forget your heavy legs and sore muscles

As you soar together side by side

And then he is on his way again

And you return to earth

 

"that's when you sing out loud..."

I’m in the kitchen trying to figure out what my girls and I will eat for lunch when a text comes in from a close friend. “Are you home right now?” I usually am not on a Wednesday morning, but due to schedule changes I am indeed home with my younger daughter. When I tell her yes, she responds, “I’ll be there in five minutes.”

Shortly, she arrives with a beautiful bouquet of daffodils and tulips, along with a bottle of wine and some dark chocolate. She knows me well. She is there long enough for hugs and a few minutes of conversation and then she is on her way again.

It is that time of year in Colorado when we are longing for spring. We have gorgeous days of sunshine and warm temperatures interspersed with days of biting winter cold. And even as the snow melts from our last storm, we know that we likely have a few more snowstorms to get through before spring will really arrive. We are at once delighted and worried when tulip or crocus leaves start to poke through the soil. Will they bloom or will they shrivel up in a hard freeze before the flowers can appear?

So every time I walk past these gorgeous spring flowers from my friend, they give me just a little spark of hope.

*********************

Last week was not good. Early in the week something happened that was like a fast and hard punch in the gut that has left me breathless and hurting. The word that has kept coming to my mind to describe the event is betrayal. I know that the other entities involved would balk at that word and explain why that response is a melodramatic overreaction, why it shows a complete lack of perspective on my part.
 

 *********************

Joe and I are picking the music for our wedding. We have settled on a somewhat somber but gorgeous instrumental Ray LaMontagne song, “Truly, Madly, Deeply,” for the processional. It seems like just the thing to bring a touch of beautiful gravity to this moment that will be set against the backdrop of the stunning Teton Mountains. Now we are trying to decide about the recessional.

We have a song that we keep coming back to. A song called “Dream Big,” by Ryan Shupe and the Rubberband. We both love this song, and think the chorus is perfect as we get married and prepare to head back to Rwanda together:

When you dream, dream big
As big as the ocean blue
'Cause when you dream it might come true
So when you dream, dream big

But we are discussing how people might respond to it because of the lyrics of the first verse.

When you cry, be sure to dry your eyes
'Cause better days are sure to come.
And when you smile, be sure to smile wide
And don't let them know that they have won
And when you walk, walk with pride
Don't show the hurt inside
Because the pain will soon be gone

We wonder, will people think it is funny for us to be talking about tears and pain and hard days seconds after we’ve said I do? Remembering that our vows do talk about better or worse, sickness and health, we decide to go for it. 

There is no way we can know that there will be a time in the not-too-distant future when we will desperately need these words on an almost daily basis. As we walk through my father’s death, and all the hurdles and hiccups of a transcontinental move, and Joe trying to finish his master’s degree in the midst of it all, and navigating a new job for me just weeks after having a baby, and a seemingly endless job search for Joe once his degree is completed — this song becomes a sort of mantra for me.

Again last week, I needed this song, and other songs. I think music, like poetry and written prayers, provides us with the words we can’t quite find during big or hard or beautiful moments. Another song I had on repeat this past week was “Shine Like Lightning” by Drew Holcomb.

Even when the rain pours down
Even when the light seems like it's fading
Even when your heart aches, feels like it's gonna break
That's when you sing out loud

I mentioned recently how often I have felt like I was completely without perspective in the last four years. That big terrible things and small annoyances can often elicit the same response from me. I have felt like this lack of perspective was a weakness, a problem that I needed to fix. I think I even thought I needed songs like these because they were about having perspective. “Hey, your problems are momentary. It’s not always going to be like this. It will get better.” And maybe that is part of it.

But this past week, I heard something different. Somehow last week those songs felt like the very opposite of having perspective. We often want — need — to dream and sing out loud not because we’ve got everything in perspective but in spite of our perspective or lack thereof. And maybe especially because of our lack thereof.

So I’m going to allow myself to stop worrying about regaining perspective for the moment. I’m going to allow myself to use words like betrayal.

But. And?

I’m also going to keep dreaming. I’m going to sing out loud.

*********************

One night last week, I lay reading in bed until I could barely keep my eyes open, hoping to keep my brain distracted right up until the point I drifted off to sleep. I turned off my lamp and closed my eyes. But then in spite of myself I started replaying the past few days and I felt my heart rate quickening and my blood pressure rising and the hope of sleep slipping away.

And then suddenly it is the next morning. Evidently sleep did eventually come. It is time to get up but I am so tired. At lunchtime, I decide to go for a long run. As I run, my mind turns again to the events of the week. And then suddenly I hear the lyrics of yet another song playing in my earphones. It is Mumford and Sons’ “Winter Winds.”

But if your strife strikes at your sleep
Remember spring swaps snow for leaves
You'll be happy and wholesome again
When the city clears and sun ascends

And I think of the sleep that wouldn’t come last night. But as I run past patches of snow that are stubbornly lingering even in the warmer temperatures, I also remember the beautiful spring flowers from my friend. 

"so how did the two of you meet?"

Groggy from the overnight flight, I climb off the plane and enter the Brussels airport. I’m four months into a new job and two months from relocating to Kigali, Rwanda. I’ve spent the last several days looking for housing, attending meetings and getting to know my new team a little more. I will become very familiar with this route, this airport, over the next three years, but this is my first experience with it. 

As I wander the no-man’s-land of the nondescript transit hallways, I feel perplexed. There are stairs and escalators and doors at various intervals, but nothing seems to be labeled. Finally I just choose one at random and am relieved to find myself in a terminal with actual signs and flight monitors. I locate the gate number I’m looking for and head that direction. 

Along the way, I find a restroom where I brush my teeth, wash my face and try to make my hair look halfway presentable. And I put on a dash of mascara. Because I’m not just headed to my next flight. First I am headed to a gate where I will meet up with the man I love. Joe and I are just a few weeks from celebrating one year of dating, and this is the fifth country where we have met up.

I order a coffee and find a seat with a good view of his gate. Sleeplessness, caffeine and excitement all do their part to make my heart race. 

Young and in love!

******************

So many hours of my adult life have been spent in airports. Working an international job for the eight years before I got married, I seemed to always be headed to or from an airport.  When I got married and then we had children the internationality of our life did not stop, and so airports became a family affair. I have often said that my older daughter is more at home in airports than almost anywhere else. In the chaos of a busy airport she relaxes. My younger daughter too has an affinity for airports. “I love you to the airport and back,” she sometimes says as she is going to bed.

“How did the two of you meet?” It is a question that comes up almost anytime Joe and I meet someone new. What they are often really asking is, “How did this American woman and British man end up together?” So this is part of that story, and it is a fun story to tell. But of course this story, like all our stories, was not a stand-alone incident. It happened right in the middle of everything else.

***********************

Groggy from the overnight flight, I climb off the plane and enter London’s Heathrow airport. I’m three years into a job taking groups of people all over the world to see the work my organization does. For three years I have visited eight to 12 countries a year, with 20 to 40 people in tow each time. At home in Colorado, my friends start their voicemail messages to me with, “Hey Phoebe. I don’t know if you’re in the country or not right now but…”

I am tired. Not the jetlag kind of tired but the feel-it-in-my-bones-and-in-my-heart kind of tired. I am contemplating resigning from my job and am hoping this trip will help me make a decision. “Let this trip help me fall in love with my work again,” is my recurring prayer, “or make it clear that I should get out.”

After a day to wander the streets of London by myself before putting my tour leader hat back on, I board a flight to Uganda with 42 people in my group. We arrive in Kampala the next morning and make it through a day of light activity to keep ourselves awake until we can reasonably fall into our beds. I am just turning out the light when there’s a knock on my door.

A tour member has fallen and broken her arm. Badly. There is a bumpy ride to the hospital, and a night of trying to help this woman make decisions about the best course of treatment, and being her back rest and holding her still while the doctor sets her arm, and phone calls to her husband to explain the situation. Back at the hotel I get a couple hours sleep before I must jump back in to the day’s activities.

At 10PM, I am turning off my light. My phone rings. “I think I have malaria,” says the voice on the line. Of course he does not have malaria. But the next few hours consist of multiple phone calls, assurances, negotiations and finally, my being asked to come look at his vomit to help him determine whether he might have food poisoning instead of malaria.

I have barely slept in four days, we are only two days into our nine-day trip, and I am equal parts laughing and crying as I think, “Okay! I will resign!! I just need to get everyone home in one piece.” There are many confirmations of this decision over the course of the next seven days but thankfully there are no more broken bones, no more vomit.

I get home and take a day to recover before returning to work. When I return to the office I hand in my notice.

*******************

Groggy from the overnight flight, I climb off the plane and enter London’s Heathrow airport. Again. But this time I am alone. I resigned from my job five weeks ago and I’m on my way back to Uganda. I have agreed to meet up at Heathrow later today with a couple who is getting married in two months. After a few hours wandering around London, I head back to the airport and find them outside a coffee shop. I am a little acquainted with the bride through mutual friends. After some discussion, they ask if I will consider taking their wedding photos on my way back through London. I usually say no to weddings, but one month into a new freelance photography and writing business, I say yes.

Two incredible months go by in rural Uganda while I work at Aidchild, an amazing pediatric AIDS home. (Many of the stories from that time I recounted in this very space in 2006.) And then I head back to London yet again. It is a beautiful wedding. June in the English countryside. My American accent causes a little stir as I try to wrangle all the wedding guests into a group photo. “You must be very good for them to hire you all the way from America!” I just smile.

At the reception, held in a large marquis in the midst of a field of wild flowers, I have just about finished up my work. I walk toward my friend, Tim, who, with his wife, had recommended me for this job. I just have a quick question. A few meters away from where he is standing, I pause. Tim is in a conversation with a very attractive man who looks very good in his suit. Do I interrupt? Will it look like I am trying to force an introduction? As I stand there undecided, the handsome man looks up and sees me. He smiles. I am found out, so I may as well proceed.

His name is Joe. He and Tim were friends as boys. The three of us chat together for several minutes. At some point, Tim extricates himself from the conversation. As the sun sets and the air cools, we start walking to keep warm. We wind our way through the amazing field of wild flowers.

After a bit I need to actually get back to work as the Ceilidh (Scottish country) dancing begins. But when I can next take a break from my photo-taking, Joe appears again. And so there is dancing and laughter and my new shoes rub blisters on my feet. Later still, after I have captured the bride and groom’s getaway, there is an invitation to go to the beach the next morning. But I cannot go and with that we say goodbye.

Two days later, I return home. Two months later, there is an email. It is the bride. “My friend Joe asked for your email address and I gave it to him,” she writes. “I hope that’s okay.”

The next day, a note from Joe himself. “I hope this email is not too weird,” he writes. “I didn’t really know what to write or particularly why I was writing it. I guess, sometimes, there are people who appear in life who are just really natural to talk to and be around, and trying to keep in touch with those people can’t be a bad thing.”

No. Not a bad thing at all.

on kindness

I am about four miles into a five-mile run. The path is narrow, with a hedge to one side and wet grass and melting snow to the other. A woman stands ahead of me in the path while her dog sniffs around in the hedge. She starts to move to one side to let me pass when her (large, unleashed) dog suddenly hears me and starts charging toward me, barking. While I know that most likely the dog is friendly, I take no chances. Heart pounding, I make a very fast and very wide arc out into the muddy grass while the woman tries to grab her dog’s collar. 

Though individual dogs along the way have won my affection, I am not what one would call a dog person. And during my middle school days delivering newspapers, I had more than one unpleasant run-in with a dog. So I am not happy.

As the woman successfully catches her dog, various comments run through my mind. I am on the verge of yelling, “That is NOT okay!!” when I catch a glimpse of the woman’s embarrassed face, hear that embarrassment mirrored in her voice as she chides the dog.  

“Always be kinder than necessary, darn it,” I mutter to myself and continue on my way, swallowing everything else I want to say.  

**************************

For this past Christmas my mother gave my family a fun chalkboard with a bright red border. We found just the spot for it in our kitchen. I had been collecting quotes on a Pinterest board for months and scrolled through to choose what should be the first thing I wrote up there. It was an easy decision. “Always be a little kinder than necessary.”

When I first saw this quote I did a little research and learned that it is a paraphrase of a line from J. M. Barrie’s book, The Little White Bird. The original line reads, “Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight: always to try to be a little kinder than necessary?” I loved it.

Honestly, “kind” is not a word I would use to describe the me of the past four years. I recently wrote that one of the biggest surprises after my father’s death was how everything changed but nothing changed. Another big surprise for me was to find out that everything I had always heard and believed about how life-changing situations help us gain perspective was, for me at least, hogwash. 

I had lived my entire life believing that significant or serious or big things help us realize what is really important. Let go of pettiness. Choose the significant things. Stop making mountains out of mole hills. In short, help our perspective. And yet in the months after Dad died, the grief I felt over that loss, and the panic I felt when my newborn baby wouldn’t stop screaming in her car seat as we sat at a stoplight, and the frustration I felt when they didn’t have my kind of peanut butter at the supermarket — they all felt the same. Rather than gaining perspective from my experience, I seemed to have lost all perspective. And it certainly didn't leave me feeling kind. A sweet friend eventually helped me find a word that did describe me: raw. I was raw.

In this raw state, this suggestion to “always be a little kinder than necessary” spoke to me. Sounded like a salve to my rawness. Kindness. Calm, peaceful, gentle kindness. Yes. So up on the new chalkboard it went. 

 

The chalkboard, and the quote that just won't leave me alone.

**********************

With that quote staring my family in the face for the next little while, it begins to seep into my consciousness. I bite my tongue, change my response, reevaluate my position on various things as this statement plays on repeat in my brain. Over the next several days I am, frankly, embarrassed to realize how petty and mean and unkind I can be about other people in my internal dialogue.

Into the midst of this come the woman and her dog.
 

A couple days later, my five-year-old daughter and I are driving home from gymnastics lessons. She is feeling very tender on this day and thinks that several little girls did not treat her very kindly during various moments of the lesson. She is in tears as we drive home.

We talk through the distress, the unkindnesses. After a few minutes I ask her, “Do you think you always treat those girls kindly?”

She lets out a big sigh.

“Mama, it is so hard to always be kind to everyone,” she confesses. “Besides, not being kind is really my one sin. And if I have no sins at all that will be like I am trying to be God.”

I spend the rest of the drive home holding back laughter as I assure her that she is not in fact in danger of becoming God. But as I think back over the episode I am more and more undone by her honesty.

Because it is so hard to be kind to everyone. Some people, sure. Sometimes, no problem. But always be a little kinder than necessary? Kindness might be, as I romanticized it, calm and peaceful and gentle when one is on the receiving end, but on the being end it is hard.

And yet oddly alluring. 

everything and nothing

This is part three of a story. If you’d like to start from the beginning, you can do that here. If you missed part two, you can find it here. 

We do finally make it to Colorado. It involves another canceled flight in Dallas, and another bus taking us to another airport hotel. Then there is fog in Colorado Springs so we are diverted to Denver. And finally there is a rental car, and meeting up with friends who have been waiting for us at the Colorado Springs airport.

And then through the front door of my parents’ home at last and into the arms of my smiling father. We are four and a half days late, but we make it.

Thirty-four hours later he is gone.

**********************

Before Dad’s death, I had ideas of what life might be like for people who have lost parents, children, siblings, spouses. I couldn’t fathom how we would do it. In the final weeks of Dad’s life I remember feeling like I needed to prepare myself but I had absolutely no idea how to go about it. Maybe the biggest surprise since losing Dad has been how everything changes and yet nothing changes. Reading back on old blog posts from my time in Uganda and Rwanda before Dad’s death, I think by turns, “Who is this enthusiastic adventurous woman?” and, “Oh, so I have always struggled with this or that thing.” Death, too, comes right in the middle of everything.

I remember studying Robert Frost’s poem, “Out, Out—” about a boy who dies suddenly from a chainsaw accident. The poem ends:
 
     No one believed. They listened at his heart.
     Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.
     No more to build on there. And they, since they
     Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.
 
This ending horrified me as a young student. I didn't know whether to be more upset at the family for being so heartless or irritated at Frost’s low expectations about the love of a family for a lost son. Even now I find this poem very difficult. But I am a little less hard on both the family and Mr. Frost. Perhaps they did not “turn to their affairs” so much from heartlessness as from necessity. Because when we lose someone, everything changes and yet nothing changes. Our world has turned upside down and yet life keeps coming and we try to meet it.

My sister said the other day that she was glad I was writing all this down because she “just wants to hear people talk about Dad.” Yes. About nine months after Dad died, a close friend shared a funny memory of Dad from those final days. As my husband and daughter and I sat in limbo in Paris, friends and family gathered around my dad. While my friend was there one day, my brother mentioned reading that the singer Lady Gaga had to cancel some European shows because of the snow. Dad (decidedly not a fan) was finding it increasingly difficult to speak, but haltingly he said, “Maybe Phoebe will think it was worth it.” My friend, who had always appreciated Dad’s understated sense of humor, asked, “You mean she’ll think it was worth it to be stuck in Paris if it means Lady Gaga has also been stopped?” Dad just smiled.

I have memories of Dad that I come back to often. Some memories are 30 years old, like sitting on the sofa enraptured as he read the Chronicles of Narnia to my siblings and me. Or running around in the rain of a massive thunderstorm shrieking, exhilarated and frightened — with our Dad standing on the porch, laughing, egging us on. Other memories are much more recent, such as the one I shared of my dad and my little girl snuggled up together in his hospital bed. I think I needed to pause and put that there in the middle of this hard story to be reminded again of how life is a messy mix of beautiful and hard.

I think I will end this story with one final quiet, ordinary moment in the middle of everything. It is December 23 when I finally arrive in Colorado. The previous day, a kind family friend dropped by with an entire Christmas dinner already prepared for us. Ham, stuffing, sweet potatoes, pies. The works. So that when Christmas comes, we can have a “real” Christmas dinner without the need to think about it beyond warming things up. There are so many ways people can love us.

Christmas Eve is difficult. Dad dies just after midnight as Christmas arrives. At some point in the middle of the night, we all go to bed for a few hours. We wake late the next morning with Christmas Day stretching in front of us. What does one do with the first day after Dad has died?
 
It has been days since everyone sat down to a meal at the same time. As lunchtime approaches, my mother announces, “We are going to sit down and have Christmas dinner together.” She gets out a tablecloth. We lay the table with nice dishes, silverware, goblets. And we eat Christmas dinner.

a quiet moment -- and the journey continues

This is part two of this story. If you want to read part one, you can do that here. 

There is another image I cannot get out of my head. A moment six weeks before Paris.

Dad has recently found out that despite continuing treatments, his tumors are growing. He is actually feeling pretty good, considering. But he and my mother know there are very few options left. When I find this out, I know in my gut I need to get from Rwanda to San Diego where Dad and Mom are living, just to be there with them. Joe agrees with me.

I tell my parents my plan, which includes taking my little girl with me. I can hear in Mom’s voice that she wants me to come if possible. My dad, the consummate pragmatist, tries to talk me out of it. “You are pregnant ... That is a lot of traveling by yourself with a baby ... It’s a lot of money ... Don’t overreact.” My father has talked me out of various things over the years with his logical, pragmatic approach to life. Many times I could see later that it was a good thing I had listened to him. But I am not listening this time.

It is an enchanted journey. Flight attendants take pity on me and offer every hour or so to watch my little girl so I can stretch my legs, use the facilities. They bring her little things to eat, to play with. On the final leg, a tired young businessman ends up next to us. I can see that he is ready to sleep. My daughter decides he is her friend and wants to play with him. He graciously complies. “Thank you,” I say. “I’m sure this wasn’t your plan.” He smiles. “It’s good for me. My wife is expecting our first. I need the practice.”

We arrive into the beautiful November weather of San Diego. My little one has just had her first birthday and her Nonna and Papa get to give their gifts in person rather than shipping them to her. Dad’s most recent chemo cycle is finished and that means the side effects that accompany it are going away. It is a good week.

Together during our San Diego visit.

He has begun to struggle with too much calcium in his bloodstream and is going into the hospital every so often for IV treatments to combat this. He finds out while we are there that his levels are not good and he needs to go into the hospital overnight for one such treatment. He is not pleased. He may not have completely approved of my coming, but now that we are here he does not want any of his time with his daughter and granddaughter stolen from him.

“It’s okay,” my mother and I tell him. “We will stay at the hospital as long as we can. We will come back in the morning to bring you home again.” After getting him checked in at the hospital, Mom and I go to get some food for everyone. There is a pizza place nearby. My dad isn’t really a pizza guy, but it beats the hospital cafeteria.

So this is how we come to be at the hospital, talking and eating pizza with my dad who is feeling pretty good, but is dealing with nearly constant hot flashes from the cancer. He is sitting up in the hospital bed in shorts, and no shirt. It is getting close to my daughter’s bedtime so I strip her down to her diaper, getting ready to put her pajamas on.

“Bring her over here,” Dad says. “Let her sit with me.”

And so, for the next several minutes, they sit there together, my dad and my daughter. Neither is wearing a shirt. They are focused just on each other, as my little girl shows her Papa the new toy giraffe and lion she got for her birthday. Dad is rubbing the sweet skin of her back and her belly, giving her hug upon hug, placing kiss upon kiss on her gorgeous round cheeks. It is a perfect moment.

As a photographer, I momentarily regret that I have no camera with me. But after, I will always be thankful that I didn’t. I sit there and soak in this quiet, beautiful scene. To this day, I can see it — feel it — in a way no photo could have captured it.

****************

Back in Paris, I have spent a long time on the phone, trying to find out when we might leave. If we continue on to London, they tell me, it will probably be four to five days before we can get to the States. But that number might change because so many flights have not gone out, and so many more are still being cancelled. If we just fly out of Paris directly to the States, we might make it a day earlier. Nothing is confirmed or promised, but I get us on various lists and am told to check back at regular intervals.

After a few hours sleep, the bus arrives to take us back to Orly. In case by some miracle the flight can get out. At the very least we hope to get our little girl’s stroller, which had been gate-checked and we had been unable to retrieve the night before. For two more days we will do this back and forth between hotel and airport. Hoping.

We’ve arrived at Orly on Kenya Airways but Kenya Airways doesn’t actually fly to Orly. This means there is no ground crew, no one willing to open the luggage hold for any reason at all. We are never allowed to have our luggage or even our daughter’s stroller. Mercifully, we don’t know at that time that it will be 16 more days before we see any of our bags.

At some point we make it to a department store to get a change of clothes, coats. In the coming months and years so many people will say to me, “Well, if you are going to get stuck somewhere, Paris isn’t a bad place to be stuck.” It doesn’t work that way.

On the third day of our pilgrimage between hotel and airport, there is finally movement. The Kenya Airways flight has a departure time to travel to London. But we have had it reconfirmed multiple times that we will get to the States much more quickly if we stay in Paris. So we make the decision to give up our seats on the flight. Standing at the airport, just the three of us alone, having said goodbye to our fellow pilgrims and knowing all our belongings are still on that plane, we pray we have made the right decision.

With tentative seats on various flights that may or may not depart two or three days from now, we decide to move to the home of some friends Joe had grown up with, who had lived in Paris for several years now. They are much farther from the airport, but they are familiar faces and it will mean warm meals and playmates for our little girl. They greet us with open arms. After dinner that evening I call the airline yet again. A flight has opened up. If we can get ourselves to Charles du Galle Airport tomorrow, we have seats on a plane to Dallas. 

In the pre-dawn cold the next morning, we board a train to the airport, thankful for our new coats and, for the moment, grateful that we don’t have to deal with our checked luggage.




Part Three

So much depends upon...

It's mid-December. We are sitting in the airport lounge in Kigali, Rwanda, in the wee hours of the morning. We are waiting to board the short flight to Nairobi, where we’ll catch the long haul to London. My husband Joe and I have made this trek numerous times in the past three years. And even our just-turned-one-year-old is incredibly familiar with this scene. Maybe it is this familiarity that makes it possible for us to sit there so unremarkably. With a baby in my arms and another in my belly and four flights ahead of us, I think we genuinely are taking one moment at a time. No dwelling, no dreading. Just doing. 

We have a moment of mild interest as the lounge television announces that a snow storm is expected to hit Europe in the coming hours and then we climb on the plane. In Nairobi, Joe actually thinks to ask — has it started snowing in London? “We don’t know, sir, but the flight is scheduled to depart on time.” And it does. Eight of the nine hours of the flight pass uneventfully. And then, “Good evening, everyone. The good news is we are only an hour from landing. The bad news is that Heathrow is closed due to a blizzard so we are landing at Orly in Paris.” 

They go on to say that it should only be a brief delay. Heathrow is expected to reopen within the hour. And Heathrow does reopen within the hour. But the snow has continued to fall in Paris for that hour and now Orly is closed. And back and forth this goes for a couple more hours. We are parked in a far corner of the Orly tarmac when they finally decide we are going nowhere. They load us in buses to take us to the terminal. 

Joe’s brother and his family are waiting at Heathrow with our winter coats in hand (we don’t exactly need them in Rwanda), planning to take us to Joe’s parents’ house, to a warm dinner and soft beds before we continue the journey tomorrow. Our coats are in London but we are in Paris. And it is snowing hard. I wrap my little girl in a light scarf I have with me and try to dash off the plane and onto the bus as quickly as possible. 

Inside the terminal, dozens of cancelled flights mean thousands of people. They begin distributing emergency rations since many of us have been sitting without food and water on grounded planes for several hours. Being Paris, these rations include wine, two types of paté and chocolate mousse. Even in the stress of the moment we find this funny. 

Everyone in the airport seems to be fighting to get to a handful of counters to be given rooms for the night. Joe and another man with an eight-months pregnant wife and an 18-month-old son struggle to reach the counter. It is almost midnight. “We have pregnant wives and babies,” they explain. “Is there any way we can be given priority for hotel rooms?” Thankfully the answer is yes. Which means we only wait at the airport another couple of hours. I don’t even want to think about how long some of these people will wait for a bed. 

Finally tucked up in our hotel room, we call our families. Joe’s brother’s family has given up waiting for us at Heathrow several hours earlier and gone home again. We will let them know if our revised travel plans are still going to include London. I call my mother. She sounds worried — when do I think we will get out? How soon can we get to the States? Can they prioritize us? Do they realize our situation? I feel helpless. Because the answer to all the questions is simply “I don’t know.” We have no idea what is going to happen. We aren’t even supposed to be in Paris. We are supposed to be in London. 

The emotional phone call ends with my mother saying, “He’s waiting for you.” 

She is talking about my father. My wonderful Dad. As we sit in Paris, he has been fighting non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma for about four years. The percentage of patients who get a remission with this kind of cancer is in the high nineties. But my dad never experiences remission through years of chemo and even a stem cell transplant. (And this permanently changes the way I hear statistics. Because if the percentage isn’t 100, that means someone has to be in the four percent, the five percent.) Dad has entered hospice care.

We are headed home to say goodbye. 

*******************

Wow, Phoebe. After years away from writing, this is really where you begin? Interestingly, this is not what I sat down to write. But it is what has come out. When people hear bits of my life like how I met my husband, or that we lived in Rwanda, the response is often, “That sounds like a storybook!” or, “You should write all this down!” And I want to tell all the parts of the story. About how ten days before the above story began, we were sitting on the beach in beautiful Mombasa, Kenya. About how two and a half years earlier my parents were walking me down the aisle, straight toward the incredible Teton Mountains and toward the charming British man I was about to begin the rest of my life with. About how three and a half months after this Paris story we would be welcoming another beautiful baby girl into the world.

 

My father performing our wedding ceremony.

William Carlos Williams wrote the famous poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow:”

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

Had he written something similar for me at this moment, it might read:

so much depends
upon

a white air
plane

covered with heavy
snow

beside the Paris
tarmac

My whole life I’ve been told that I’m a talker. I’ll be honest — this never sounds like a compliment. Some people say instead that I’m a storyteller. This one I am more willing to admit to. I have begun to realize only in recent years that when people ask a question like, “Where did you and your husband meet?” often all they want to hear is, “At a wedding in London.” And then they want to move on. Or when they ask, “How did you end up living in Africa for three years?” I can save us both a lot of grief by just saying, “I was there with my job."

So when an unsuspecting soul gets a “how I met my husband” story that starts with my studies in England in 1996 and then moves through a trip to Bolivia in 2002 and goes on to why I resigned from my job in 2006 and volunteered in Africa before finally getting to the wedding outside London where I did meet my husband, they think that I chased bunny trails and got distracted and forgot what the question was. But I didn’t. In my head, all that is a direct answer to how I met my husband. And that Africa question? Well, you see, I think it all starts back in the 1950s when my parents’ families moved to South America. If I’m making “a long story short,” I let the story start when I was five and I visited South America myself for the first time.

All this is not actually because I just like to hear myself talk (though I know there are times that I do), but because I think it’s amazing how our long winding roads are in fact going a very distinct direction. How seemingly unconnected things so often are connected. Because to fully understand the nuance of the moment when my second baby girl is born three months later, you also need to know about that jam-packed airport in Paris.

As I sit in Paris, my father’s four-year battle with cancer is coming to an end. And the beginning of life without Dad is just around the corner. 

This past December marked four years since Dad died. Stranded in Paris, we were halfway between our home in Rwanda and my family home in Colorado, halfway through these past eight years that have proved so pivotal in my life and worldview. There, somewhere in the middle, seems as good a place as any to start.





You can continue to part two here.