Tomorrow, I am flying across the continent of North America to attend my mother’s memorial service.
Please direct your condolences, if any, toward my having to get on a plane, not my mother’s death. Not only am I morally and ethically opposed to the whole idea of air transport (I refer the mystified to Greta Thunberg), but the experience is 100% traumatic for me.
I am not afraid of flying, in the conventional “I might fall out of the sky” sense. This is a very slight possibility against the certainty of being trapped in a room with hundred of strangers, no possible exit, breathing disgusting sparse air inside a roaring noise with nothing outside but vague clouds, squashed into a tiny seat. For many hours. Only to be spit out into a maelstrom of rushing people, ambient noise, flashing lights and colors, more bad air, layered under a constant need to scan for and locate that next directional sign, which will eventually allow you to be spit out of that nightmare into a third one: driving a rental car straight into eight lane traffic at seventy miles an hour with more directional signs and disappearing lanes and deadly consequences if you hesitate for one second.
I am unusual in that I physically unable to dim my senses to these things. Most people can; it isn’t that they find it pleasant, they just calmly endure and get through it and move on. I don’t. I get physically ill. My stomach begins to eat through its lining. My head throbs, my hands shake, my legs become so weak I stagger. I fight back dissolving into hysterical sobbing. When I finally reach my private lair it will take me a very long time to recover.
I am putting myself through this ordeal because of the social obligation to show up, not because I have any ritual mourning to do there. My mother loathed me from as far back as my earliest memories (age two or so), and I cannot recall one single gesture of affection from her in my entire life. I have nothing to mourn.
Not only that! If I do mention any difficulty I might be under to my family, they try to hold back their sneers of disbelief while pretending to care. I am the Identified Patient of the family, who in the family mythology makes up all her problems for the purpose of destroying everyone else’s good time. So I must keep as silent as possible. Not my strong suit. Obviously.
Meanwhile I am leaving my supportive husband, my dearly beloved farm and my animals, the short New England summer, and all for doing something at great cost to me and no prospect of pleasure, except for visiting the few friends I will be able to shoehorn into my tight schedule.
Oh, I forgot! I hate California, too. Not the state itself, just what humans have done to it. I got my sour misanthropic environmentalism growing up in a place where ripped-down dead orchards, new freeways and subdivisions where pastures and vineyards used to be, lovely little streams now dewatered garbage-strewn ravines, were an everyday sight. The village of 2000 or so people I was born in now has over 70,000 people living in it. Even trying to get out “into nature” is an exercise in traversing eroded overused paths in patches of saved ‘wilderness’. I can’t express my relief in finally leaving it. I feel great pain seeing it, always have. I’m a walking grief puppet for state of the world.
Okay, quitting right there! Sorry for sharing!
The virtue of the written word is that it can be skimmed and dismissed. At least in this case.