Arrivals and Departures

by Bo Smolka

Feeling cooped up two weeks into Maryland’s stay-at-home order in April 2020, my daughter and I had rolled our camper out of the garage and prepared for a fun “Camp Corona” weekend getaway in our driveway.

Then the call came from Arizona.

“Mom wants to talk to you,” my sister said. “She’s ready to say good-bye.”

Mom had been diagnosed with end-stage pancreatic cancer a month earlier and had badly weakened over the previous forty-eight hours. As I listened, Mom spoke in a frail voice of a life well-lived, but for the first time, the optimism that had threaded through her DNA for eighty-nine years, that had carried her through one major medical trauma after another, seemed to have vanished, consumed by the voracious cancer cells.

Coronavirus or not, I knew I had to make a cross-country trip to see her one last time.

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Travel has been a steady companion in my life, and Mom was always an active participant or a steadfast supporter. At first, that meant short hops from my Washington, D.C., childhood home—camping trips to Delaware or station-wagon excursions to Cleveland to see grandparents. Later, more grand adventures unfolded—a summer in Ghana, a family wedding in Slovakia, Christmas in the Dominican Republic.

Raising six children hadn’t left Mom a whole lot of time to travel. While others soared, she was the air traffic controller, keeping schedules in sync and organizing arrivals and departures. For years, that involved just getting all the kids out the door to school on time after making a slew of brown-bag lunches, balogna sandwiches lining the kitchen counter like suitcases on a conveyor belt. Mom lived vicariously through—and, truth be told, sometimes envious of—the trips of others. My father, a political science professor and expert on voting procedures, was invited to monitor elections in nascent democracies around the world. He would return, and Mom would listen with the rest of us as Dad recounted experiences in Ukraine or Poland or The Philippines. I sometimes sensed, after a particularly chaotic week as she was serving browned potatoes and gravy onto seven plates at a crowded dinner table, that she was in no mood to hear Dad talk about the beauty of Prague. If she voiced any frustration about that, she kept it away from the children.

Once all the kids were grown, though, she marveled at her good fortune to travel.

By then she had one son in the Foreign Service and one in the Peace Corps, and Dad, in his last semester before retirement, ran American University’s World Capitals Program in Budapest. They moved to Hungary for four months.

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A couple of years ago, Mom had a huge map of the world mounted on a wall in her Arizona home to document the family’s travels, and she had a custom frame built around it. A seamstress by training, Mom’s creative spirit threaded through every project she undertook, whether that was sewing her sister’s or her daughter’s wedding dresses or creating this wall-sized map of the family’s travels. Above the map, on a piece of wood mounted to the frame, she placed roughly two dozen miniature national flags of countries around the world. Then she had special flag pins made for each of her six children and sixteen grandchildren to plant in places they had visited, color-coded by family. To the right of the map, she mounted a scoreboard of sorts, tracking the number of states and countries each had visited.

Over a laughter-filled afternoon around Christmas in 2018, the family gathered at that map and the pins rose like crops across six continents, dense in some unlikely places (Slovakia), sparse in others (South America). Children, in-laws, and grandchildren took turns placing pins in the map and recounting stories of magnificent views and lost luggage. 

“I mean, look at this!” Mom had exclaimed, pointing to her turquoise pins in more than a dozen countries, including Honduras and the Czech Republic. “I didn’t even have a passport until I was fifty!”

Now, to see Mom in her final hours, travel would involve a trip through the teeth of a global pandemic.

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When mom’s father, Michael Farrell, was a teenager in Ballaghadereen, Ireland, both his parents died of the Spanish flu. An uncle in Ohio arranged to take in Michael and his younger brother, James, so in 1920, the two orphan boys, ages seventeen and eleven, boarded a ship in the southern Irish port city of Queenstown for a trans-Atlantic voyage. Around their necks the boys carried small pouches filled with what little money the local nuns could scrape up among the villagers.

The brothers reached Ellis Island and made their way to Cleveland, where my grandfather was raised by his uncle, became a grocer, married and raised seven children with his Irish wife.

Mom ultimately settled in Washington, D.C., after marrying a fellow Cleveland native and American University professor, and for the next three decades, Mom stayed rooted there. She briefly taught grade school before giving up that pursuit to raise a six-pack of kids, whom she later encouraged to branch out far and wide. In high school, I badly wanted to be one of the two students chosen for my school’s semester exchange program in Belgium. I worked hard to earn the grades, I took part in extracurricular activities and I steered clear of trouble. Mom and I spoke of what a semester in Belgium would be like. She wanted me to dream big. Then one day from a school pay phone, I fought back tears as I called home to tell Mom that I had ranked third. I would be going nowhere.

Not so fast, Mom thought. Because of her father’s journey from Ireland at seventeen, Mom relished the idea of independent travel at that age. A couple of days after the Belgium heartbreak, Mom sat me down and asked, instead of Belgium, what about Ghana? My brother Dan was finishing his service as a Peace Corps volunteer in that West African country, and Mom said I could spend the summer with him there. Because I didn’t have my driver’s license yet, Mom dutifully drove me around Washington to various embassies to get the visas I might need—Ghana, Togo, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso)—and to the international health clinic for necessary shots.

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After hurriedly packing a bag to see Mom one last time, I pulled into the offsite parking lot at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport. Where cars usually shoehorned into every available space, a pasture of empty asphalt spread out before me. A few cars dotted the barren landscape like bored, metallic cattle. A shuttle driver quickly pulled up and I climbed into his otherwise empty van. Behind masks, we eyed each other cautiously, and I took a seat near the back, far from him. Was he carrying COVID? Was I? Would travel be this guarded, anxious dance from now on? The driver whisked me to the front door of the terminal, and we might as well have had a police motorcade for all the traffic we encountered. No minivans swerved into precious curbside spots to drop off passengers. No cars waited with hazard lights flashing. No one rushed to catch a flight. No hustle. No bustle. No people. On a sunny spring afternoon, the five-lane road in front of the airport was as wide-open as a runway.

The pandemic had decreased American air travel by ninety-five percent, according to figures released by the Transportation Security Administration, and as I stepped out of the van, it seemed closer to one hundred percent.

Inside the terminal, the sound of silence carried across polished floors, past shuttered storefronts, to a food court where a few idle workers waited for customers who never came. One lonely pilot, his captain’s shoulder boards atop his pressed white shirt, sat like a buoy amid a sea of empty tables. 

I headed for the security checkpoint and quickly snaked through a lane that was completely empty. A half-dozen TSA agents in their royal-blue shirts, all wearing masks, greeted me as a curiosity, a welcome break from the monotony. There was no clatter of security bins being stacked, no barked directives about shoes and belts. The X-ray machine conveyor belt lay as quiet as a sleeping dog.

In the gate area, afternoon light streamed down through floor-to-ceiling windows onto row after row of empty seats. Wearing gloves and a mask, I cautiously wiped down the armrests of my chair. Then again, had anyone even been here in the past few days?

A Southwest gate agent approached me across this ocean of emptiness. She kindly informed me that there would be no queue of passengers, no rush for overhead bin space. I was free to board whenever I wanted because, she said, there would be only one other passenger. Upon boarding, I settled into my seat—I managed to score a window seat in Row 4—and carefully wiped down the armrests. My fellow passenger took his seat about twenty rows back. On a Boeing 737-800 designed to seat 175, I had half the plane to myself.

“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen,” the flight attendant said as he began his preflight address. “Well, I guess I can just say ‘gentlemen’ since there are only two of you.” 

“I’d say this isn’t normal,” he continued, “but I don’t know what is normal anymore.”

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For Mom, travel was less about seeing sights and more about generational connection. The famous art gallery or gilded castle never appealed to her. She would much rather be parasailing with a niece in the Caribbean—which she did at age seventy-five—or going to the horse races with her sons in Kenya.

Then on a cruise ship with others who shared her passion for quilting—the only cruise she ever took—Mom suddenly lost vision in one eye. Once she got home, doctors told her she had temporal arteritis, and the damage was permanent.

“That’s okay,” she said, “I can still quilt with one eye.”

At age eighty-eight, she developed an infection in her foot that ultimately cost her one toe, then another.

“That’s okay,” she said, “I figure I still have two hands. I can still quilt.”

Then she lost her entire left leg below the knee. Doctors told her that at her age, she was not likely to walk again. These doctors might not have realized that for Mom, the glass was always half full, and moms that go parasailing in the Dominican Republic at age seventy-five are probably going to try to walk again.

Mom spent months learning to fit her prosthetic leg and working with physical therapists, and about a month before her eighty-ninth birthday, she took a short walk down her street. She gradually increased her distance by measuring driveways in her neighborhood.

“I walked four driveways today!”

Early in 2020, Mom started having abdominal pain that grew steadily worse, and neither optimism nor treatment could satisfy cancer’s ravenous appetite.      

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I arrived in Arizona about eighteen hours after I got the call from my sister. My nephew who picked me up at the desolate Phoenix airport explained that a priest had come, and Mom was resting and stable. The hospice nurse didn’t think it would be long now.

When I walked into her room, Mom was reclined in her bed, eyes closed, mouth open, an oxygen tube running from her nose to a machine humming in the corner. Her once-auburn hair, which she had curled in younger years, had thinned and was the color of steel wool. She was covered by a yellow blanket, and her prosthetic leg—signed by the grandchildren—rested on a nearby chair. The shades were drawn.

Hospice experts say hearing is one of the last senses to go, and with children and grandchildren gathered around her, we recalled the hot-air balloon ride she took in Kenya and the playoff baseball game she watched in a carnival-like atmosphere in the Dominican Republic. “Mom, remember that trip?” my brother asked, seated near the foot of her bed. She never reacted as we reminisced, but I like to think she heard the laughs and traveled those miles with us once again.

At one point, my youngest brother, Dewey, pulled out his guitar and began singing Irish tunes. “Danny Boy” was always among her favorites.

            O Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling

            From glen to glen and down the mountainside

            The summer’s gone and all the roses dying

            It’s you, it’s you must go and I must bide

Her own Danny boy, her eldest son, held her left hand as his wife gently blotted Mom’s dry, chapped lips with a damp cloth.

            But come ye back when summer’s in the meadow

            Or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow

            ‘Tis I’ll be here in sunshine or in shadow

            O Danny boy, O Danny boy, I love you so

With Mom resting in her bed, and the Irish music flowing, I quietly left her room and spent some time at Mom’s wall map, smiling as I slowly ran my fingers over her pins and recalled stories attached to them.

Hungary, where she felt a sense of triumph once she conquered the process of grocery shopping by herself. (“Hungarian is hard! I just smile.”) Slovakia, where, before the age of cell phones, she was briefly left behind by her travel party after a river float trip. (“I knew you’d notice sooner or later, so I just sat down and had a cup of coffee.”). Ireland, where she walked the streets of her father’s hometown on a bucket-list trip with her sister. (“We were just two old biddies having a ball!”)

I slowly walked back into her room, and I sat in an empty chair beside her. I held her right hand and I couldn’t help but notice that the blood vessels visible through her frail arm were like routes on a map. Main thoroughfares pulsing and branching off, smaller routes traveling toward the edges and branching again, roads less traveled.

In making that final call to summon me, Mom seemed to know, in the way that moms know things that are just beyond the reach of the rest of us, that I would have a nearly private flight, that I would have an airport terminal nearly all to myself, and that among all the trips over all the years, this would always rank among the most unforgettable.

She died later that day, holding on until all six of her children arrived, homing birds drawn across the miles toward her turquoise pin in Arizona.

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