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.