Taking My 70-Year-Old Mother on Her First Flight Ever

“I don’t think I can do this.”

She said it quietly, more to herself than to me, somewhere between the gate and the jet bridge, the kind of sentence that isn’t really asking for a response, just needing to be said out loud before the next thing happens anyway.

By takeoff, both her hands were locked around the armrest, knuckles gone pale, gripping the way you grip something when the fear has to go somewhere and there’s nowhere else to put it. I watched her more than I watched anything out the window. It occurred to me, properly, for maybe the first time, what it had actually taken for her to say yes to this, not just the flight, but the leaving. She had never been outside her own province before. She had never flown before, not once, in seventy years. And here she was anyway, strapped into a seat going somewhere she couldn’t see, because she’d agreed to.

I don’t know exactly what convinced her to come. I don’t know if it took much persuading or very little. What I know is that agreeing to this trip was already the hard part, long before the plane left the ground, the actual flight was just the part where that courage had to hold.

The grip didn’t let go all at once. It eased the way tension usually does, without announcing itself; I noticed before she seemed to, her hands slowly resting back into her lap instead of locked around the armrest. She had turned toward the window by then, properly looking instead of bracing.

Outside there was nothing but clouds, flat and endless and lit from somewhere above in a way nothing on the ground ever quite manages. She didn’t say anything for a while. I didn’t either. There’s a particular kind of quiet that happens when someone is seeing something for the first time at seventy years old, and I didn’t want to be the one to interrupt it.

Then, without turning from the window, she said it, quietly, almost like she was telling the glass instead of me, that she wished my father could see this.

I didn’t know what to say back. I’m still not sure there was anything to say. Whatever that sentence was carrying- a memory, a person, a version of the two of them that existed somewhere outside this flight- it wasn’t mine to carry for her, and I didn’t try to. I just let it sit in the row between us, the way she’d let the fear sit there earlier, until it had said everything it needed to say on its own.

She didn’t grip the armrest again for the rest of the flight. I don’t know if that was the clouds, or the window, or simply that whatever she’d been afraid of had already happened and turned out to be survivable. Either way, by the time we landed, something in her had changed, not loudly, not in a way she announced, but in the quiet, settled way a person changes once they’ve done the thing they weren’t sure they could do.

She’d spent seventy years in one province. It took one flight and one sentence about my father for me to understand exactly what it had cost her to leave.