Nashville via Denver

I stood in front of the gate, but the Delta screen didn’t make any sense. Why wouldn’t the airline have cleared out the Denver flight if the Nashville flight was due to board in the next 10 minutes? I looked for any indication that the departure gate had been changed; I found none. And then slowly, slowly, quickly, the way gentle dusk transforms into darkened night, I looked at the boarding pass on my phone, looked at the flight number on the screen, and realized that I had made a huge mistake when booking the flight. The mistake was one thing; what the mistake represented was another.

When did it start with my mother—when did that singular moment present itself but I didn’t see it for what it was? Did it start with the isolation of Covid, when her communications became so sparse and erratic, when she seemed to lose all sense of how to interact with others, when every call was so strange, causing me to take the phone from my ear and look at it, wondering if I had dialed the right number?

I think it was before that.

Was it the day I brought lunch to her apartment and we sat on the balcony and she was almost fully reclined and propped her lunch on her belly and ate in that position and I asked her, Mom, don’t you want to sit up? But she was so deep in her story about her brother and how he had been killed in WWII—the story I had already heard so many times—that she didn’t answer me, maybe didn’t even hear me.

I think it was before that.

Was it when her only friend Jean was moved from her apartment into assisted living—Jean’s son had been threatening this for some time—while Mom was away rehabbing from hip surgery, and she never heard from Jean again? Or, more importantly, when Mom never tried to find out why or what happened? And, after months of no communication, when Jean was very probably dead, when Mom just stopped talking about her and rebuffed any questions or suggestions about reaching out, about getting answers. Why didn’t she want to know?

I think it was before that.

It’s an exercise in futility, really, trying to find the moment. Because regardless, here we are.

I go to all appointments with her, and my purpose is twofold. She is no longer capable of processing the information accurately, of asking questions, of remembering answers, so I stand in her place as the information processor and the question asker and the answer provider later, hours after we have left the clinic. But beyond that, I feel like her protector, wearing the near-impenetrable daughter shield. When she answers a question strangely and I reframe her response for the doctor, or when she repeats herself, repeats herself, repeats herself and I steer her in another direction, or when she can’t remember even the biggest things, major surgery she has had recently or medical history or medication names and I fill in the blanks before eyebrows are raised or solemn, compassionate looks are sent sideways, towards me, not her, because this is how it goes. She doesn’t know what she doesn’t know. She can’t remember what she doesn’t remember. It’s me who is left to witness the decline, to see her dignity erode, to watch her fade from colors—muted pastels, yes, but still color—to this beige version of herself.

It was her birthday recently--her 87th—and when I went to pick her up, I found her pushing her walker around the back of her apartment building. I pulled over, rolled down the window, “Mom?”

I have been waiting for you since 9 am, she snapped, or, not really snapped because nothing about her is that distinct anymore, but...well, shared, I guess. And I, knowing better, but incapable of not, asked, “Why? I told you I’d pick you up for lunch at 12:30.” She wanted no part of that conversation, that confrontation, that curiosity. The “write it down, Mom, 12:30” and the “yes, yes, I will” and yet the fear that she had been forgotten, and on her birthday, no less conversation.

In the car, she asked me to just drop it.

And then, at birthday lunch, she hardly spoke. I asked her about a favorite birthday memory, mining for explosives, probably, because really...what was I thinking? In answer to my question, she reminded us that her dad had died when she was 10, leaving us to connect the dots.

My trip to Nashville to visit my son didn’t happen that day. When I realized my mistake there were no more flights out to Nashville and I had to reschedule for another day. I hadn’t seen my son in 10 months, but the delay was probably for the best, because even before that day in the airport, all I could do was cry when I thought about seeing him. He’d been working out of the country for seven months in a dangerous job, one where his safety was always at risk, and I needed to get my arms around him, to see for myself that he was safe, even though I already knew that he was, for now, anyway.

But beyond that, for days before the ill-fated trip, I felt strangely compelled to tell him with great specificity his birth story, the details that I hadn’t kept secret, but didn’t offer up freely, either. Although he is 31, I wanted him to know how tenuous that night felt, how I frantically feared losing him, how alone in the world I felt when they whisked him away and his dad and I had no answers for hours, for days, and later, how his birth injury changed everything, how the moment we learned what had happened and why was probably the pivotal moment in the eventual decline and ending of my marriage, despite the 12 years and another baby, his sister, that would follow; his dad and I simply dealt with it differently. And then later, I recall us telling our son about the imminent divorce and how he wanted to escape but we made him sit with us, held between us on the living room couch. How we assured him it would be okay—and it was, sort of, but it wasn’t, because dissolving a family is never okay. And now, how his fierce independence in adulthood frightened me because all I’d wanted was a closeknit family because I hadn’t come from one, and I worried that I’d done it wrong, parented wrong, because he wanted space, his own life. But maybe that meant I’d done it right?

And without my knowing it, everything collided together in my head as I booked the flight to see him (in the wrong city, the one he had lived in years ago), everything culminating in the fact that I needed to sit with him and have him to myself for a bit because I was scared of what was next, for him, and for me, and what could happen to him and also who would take care of me if I became what my mother had become, that maybe I was already becoming, because I made a reservation and drove three hours to the nearest airport and confidently strode through security to my gate for a day trip to see my oldest child, the one I least understood and yet most understood and so desperately needed to put my arms around...only to discover that I had scheduled a trip to Denver instead of Nashville.

I think the mistake emerged from a sense of overwhelm. I’m pretty sure it was nothing more than that. I think I needed to feel so much that I hadn’t let myself feel—how becoming a parent was inextricably tied to being a daughter, how fear of the unknown has dominated how I feel about my son, both then and now. It dominates how I currently experience life as my mother’s caretaker. And it dominates my own future, and all of the what ifs.

That afternoon at the Delta counter a ticket agent generously made me feel as if this sort of mix-up happens all the time. She re-booked a flight to Nashville for the following week. And then, after I exhausted my tears in the airport, I drove to a park on a beautiful afternoon and walked and walked and walked, ending at a waterfall that roared with abandon from source to destination, carrying me back to the present, to the blue blue blue sky, to the now, to the only moment in which any of us can exist.

-Pam Anderson

After 30 years of helping young people with their writing as a high school English teacher, Pam Anderson retired and decided to dedicate energy to her own work. She completed her MFA in creative nonfiction at Sierra Nevada University. Her essays, interviews, and criticisms have appeared in HEAL, Manifest-Station, a Tolsun anthology: The Book of Life After Death, Bookends Review, Chicago Review of Books, and others.