Three Years Long

It’s been three years since I penned my last piece and I sit here and question why the flow left my fingers?

I blame British Airways. Every time I felt ready to open my laptop again, another call came from the UK and British Airways opened its doors and gave me a seat back to the motherland. 

Those trips sucked the joy out of travel. It was bad enough traveling with the restrictions and rules that covid imposed; the masks, the tests and the fear of being refused onto the flight. But the purpose of my trip weighed heavier. Ailing parents needing help I could no longer offer. Sister needing support that 5000 miles kept undermining. And a child trying to adult on another continent without a homebase to rely on. 

I’ve lost count of the number of flights in the last three years back to the UK. They were a hard punctuation mark in the middle of my life paragraph. Period. Full stop. Return to Go. Do not collect $200.

I was on LinkedIn the other day for the first time in a long while. I reviewed my profile and stopped and stared. Seriously - three years without an update? What actually happened?

Guilt. Loss. Sadness.

That’s what happened.

We finally lost our father on Christmas Day 2023. It was as good a finale as we could have hoped for - quick and painless for him. Less so for the rest of us. 

So the start of 2024 abruptly brought more flights. Two of them carried my sadness and closure; surreal journeys that I’d been imagining more than I realized. I didn’t get my first text from dad as soon as I switched on data at Heathrow. It hit me right then that he’d gone. Losing a parent is confounding especially after struggling for years with ill health. There is a relief at the end of the drama that gets crippled by the pain of never speaking again. The well documented roller coaster of grief is every bit as raw as the experts write about. But you survive to be able to refind the joy in the good memories, the ones that push the bad ones to the bottom of the pile. They no longer matter. 

The other two flights were happy ones, despite being tinged with sadness that dad wasn’t part of the trip. I cherished a proud mum moment at my son’s final degree showcase. Standing in the art gallery reviewing his work, here the lost three years felt like they’d had purpose. A sense of achievement greater than I’d ever felt for myself. And yet this was about me. It was the culmination of 21 years of nurturing to help my son find the beginning of his life’s solo path. It was breathtaking in the enormity of the job I’d done. The biggest, the best, the most enduring job, superseding any of those bullet points on my Linkedin profile.

Graduation Day two months later was magnificent, glorious and magical. A wedding day fiesta of Sunday Best and smiles to drown in. I loved every minute, basking in the halo of my son’s glory. 

Now autumn is starting to show its colors, only very slightly in the Southern California late summer days. I’m heading briskly into the twilight of a tumultuous year, yet it’s not with a heavy heart. Rather, more with pride in a job well done. Of three years of trying to be there for others. And I was there. Not in the ways I would have been if I’d still been living in the UK. But I was, like everyone that lives a double life in two different continents, there. 

So on reflection, I say thank you British Airways. You helped me get to the other side. And that side is starting to gain the glorious, warm turquoise hue of a San Diego sky.