You Are Braver Than You Think

JASON WRAPS HIS LEAN BODY AROUND ME AND SQUEEZES me tightly. It is July 8, 2010, the first night of our honeymoon. Some might mistake our embrace for passion, but mostly we are just cold on the floor of the Lima international airport, huddled together for warmth.

“Great honeymoon, sweetie,” Jason says through clenched teeth. His dark hair is rumpled, and his jawline is rough with stubble. Black-framed glasses sit askew on his face, one side of which rests against a sweatshirt turned pillow.

He’s joking. But I do wonder how great this honeymoon will be, knowing we’re about to split up.

Technically this trip to Peru is our first romantic getaway as a married couple. But it is also the launch of my yearlong trip around the world, an idea that took root as my mother entered the final stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

I hatched the plan in 2009, ten years into my career in daily newspapers. Ten years of work and accolades—my desk was a mountain of notebooks and files, along with plaques for best reporter, best features writer, best column writing of the company—but ten years of telling other people’s stories, not my own.

Even though the job brought me to Palm Springs, California, where I met interesting people, it felt like my world had telescoped into something small, insignificant. I couldn’t envision much beyond the nubby carpet walls of my newsroom cubicle. And travel? I barely made enough to cover rent in Southern California. How far could I get during my allotted two weeks of vacation?

So the idea seemed wild at first: what if I quit my job and spent a year traveling the world to complete the journey my mother never had a chance to make?

But as it began to marinate, the idea seemed less than wild. It felt necessary. My mom had a lot of goals, and she put them off to raise a family. To raise my sister, my brother, and me. Then she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2001, before she ever accomplished any of the things she wanted to do. By confining my life to my cubicle, wasn’t I making the same mistake my mother made? Why was I lingering when I could be living—the very thing my mom wanted most?

Three yard sales, several plane reservations, and one resignation letter later, here I am.

Even though my mom never created a formal bucket list, I’ve brainstormed nine things around the world that she wanted to do but didn’t. The plan is for Jason to spend three weeks with me in Peru, then return to California. After he is gone, I will continue on my own through South America, then Africa and Asia, checking things off my list for Mom and achieving a few of my personal goals too.

I’ve never heard of anyone else leaving a marriage like this. Not on purpose, while it is still new and good and fresh. I am grateful Jason loves me enough to let me leave, but I know it’s a risk. This year of monogamous separation will either make us stronger or wrench us apart for good. It will prove that I can make one revolution of the planet and find my way home again.

Or that I can’t.

This part about sleeping at the airport was my idea to maximize time and money. We had been in motion all day long, driving from my friend’s house in Moreno Valley to the Los Angeles airport, then flying to Panama City, and then to Lima. Our flight arrived past midnight, and our next flight—a quick, one-hour hop to Cusco, Peru—is scheduled to board at 4 a.m. Since there are few budget accommodations within forty miles of the Lima airport, it only made sense to sleep in the airport for a few hours.

“So when I vowed to be with you for better or worse … ?” Jason says.

“Yeah, this is the ‘worse’ part.”

Our sleeping situation appears to be common at this airport, where many international flights arrive late and the domestic flights begin early. The floor smells septic and is littered with the bodies of fallen travelers. The tired and weary are flopped across every possible surface, from the nicotine-stained couches in the smoking lounge to the air-conditioned corners of the food court. My attempt to find a quiet hallway was foiled by a few dozen snoring missionaries in matching red T-shirts.

Jason and I finally found a spot on the floor near the glass wall of an internet café, a place remote enough to not have heavy airport traffic but not remote enough to put us at risk for a mugging.

It turns out crashing on the floor of an airport is one of those things that seems reasonable enough until you actually do it. It’s not so great when your cheek is pressed against the tile, watching tumbleweeds of hair and trash roll toward your face.

The floor is as frigid and hard as a slab at the morgue. As people walk past with rolling luggage, I can feel their footsteps in my bones. Every time my eyes close, a scratchy voice comes over the PA system to announce the next international flight or beckon tardy travelers.

Jason and I attempt to sleep, but between us, we have just one sleeping bag. (He planned to rent a sleeping bag in Cusco, so he didn’t bother to bring one along.) We unzip my one-person bag and curl together underneath it. I am also clinging to my fifty-pound blue backpack, filled with all my clothes, supplies, and gear for the next year. I am literally sandwiched between everything I love and everything I need.

“You know, other couples stay in four-star hotels for their honeymoons,” Jason says. But we aren’t like other couples, something I knew from the day we met.

FIRST I SHOULD TELL YOU ABOUT THE DISEASE, BECAUSE that’s what set everything in motion.

In the year 2000, I was working my first newspaper job out of college, living in Zanesville, a scruffy river town in Southeast Ohio, about two hours away from where my mom and dad lived in a suburb of Dayton. I returned home on the weekends for laundry and meatloaf, frequently enough to notice when my mom stopped wearing her trademark Revlon poppysilk red lipstick. She stopped cooking meals that resembled food. She was scattered and anxious. There was a neighbor’s red truck parked down the street, and Mom was convinced someone was spying on her.

Then came the diagnosis that changed everything in her world and in mine. My vibrant, sixty-year-old mom’s life began to look like a scrapbook lived in reverse—fragments of memories and snapshots of people plucked away, the stretch of blank pages growing longer, more stark, empty.

Over the next couple of years, my mom had a rapid acceleration of Alzheimer’s symptoms. The more she forgot, the more I wanted to gather memories while I still could, to make my time count, to fill the pages of my life. I made lists of what I wanted to accomplish, and I furiously tried to tick off all the to-dos. I moved to a city, got a job as a columnist and reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer, bought wine that came in bottles instead of boxes.

Wait. Scratch that, because that makes it sound like I was doing something nobler than I actually was, which was avoiding the reality of my mom’s disease. I did whatever I could to dull the stupid, achy, hot hurt inside, a restless pain that was almost too unbearable to carry. I couldn’t face losing my mom piece by piece, so for the most part, I didn’t face it.

Even though Cincinnati was just an hour away from my parents, I stopped visiting home unless it was necessary. I went out most nights and knew where to go for the after-parties after the after-parties. I dated people, but the wrong ones. And though I often felt bad, I relished feeling something.

That is the context for what happened next: one morning I drove from Cincinnati to an airport hangar in rural Indiana and plunked down the money for my first skydive. I was scared, and I didn’t know what to do with my fear except hold it in my body and let it guide me out of an airplane.

There are studies that suggest Alzheimer’s is inherited through the mother, and that terrified me far more than any skydive. The woman I loved most in this world, the woman who adored me more than anything in the world, might have already handed off the genetic mutation that will someday kill me.

Who knows how long my own mind will last? I figured. Why not jump?

My skydive was an accelerated free fall (or AFF) jump, which meant two instructors would exit the aircraft with me, one on each side of my body. They act as human training wheels, hanging on to my jumpsuit to offer stability and keep me from cartwheeling across the sky. Then, at 5,000 feet, I was supposed to deploy my own parachute and pilot it to the ground. The entirety of this routine, from exit to landing, was practiced during six hours of ground school, which is mandatory before an AFF skydive.

For my jump, I requested that I be paired with anyone but “That Guy”—a shaggy-haired skydiver, ropy and energetic, who looked fresh off the set of a Mountain Dew commercial. He wore mirrored sunglasses, a grass-stained jumpsuit, and a dented helmet, which didn’t inspire confidence in his skydiving abilities. He didn’t say much, only shouted “Woo!”

“That Guy looks crazy,” I said. As I gestured to him, That Guy made eye contact. He stuck out his tongue, winked, and made the hand gesture for “Hang loose!” I disliked him immediately.

When the load manifested, I was assigned my two instructors—Bud, a compact, no-nonsense teacher, and That Guy, whose real name was Jason. My stomach lurched, knowing I was in the hands of this walking, talking sugar high. I didn’t want to go anywhere with him, least of all tumbling through the sky at 120 miles per hour.

Jason high-fived me. I pulled my hand away quickly, crossing my arms in front of my chest.

“Are you ready?” It was a question, but it came out like a pep-squad cheer.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m ready to jump out of a perfectly good airplane.”

“Well, the plane’s not that good.” He smiled.

Jason told the truth. There are no seats inside a skydiving aircraft. Seats waste space and add weight, plus pose a safety risk with all the handles and cords that hang from the rigs. So about fifteen of us sardined together on the floor, leaning against each other with legs splayed. I was positioned in Jason’s lap, his arms around me. Bud sat on my feet, which quickly grew numb. I looked around and saw the interior of the plane had been gutted, revealing patches of rust and exposed wires.

It was so cold on the way to altitude that my fingers stiffened and my lips trembled. After practicing a round of hand signals, Jason leaned forward and whispered in my ear.

“Are you okay?” he said.

“Fine.”

“Your face is gray,” he said.

“I’m fine,” I snapped. “My face always looks that way.”

At 13,000 feet we were at jump run, when the plane slows for jumpers to exit. One of the skydivers opened the door and leaned his head into the sky. He caught the wind in his mouth, lips flaring to expose his teeth and gums, something out of a horror movie. When he parted his teeth, his fat tongue thwacked against his cheek.

The air that rushed into the plane sucked my breath away. My eyes widened, dry with panic.

“Hey, this is your skydive,” Jason said softly. “It’s all about what makes you comfortable. If you don’t want to do this …”

“I do.”

The experienced skydivers sang, joyfully launching into the Johnny Cash classic “Ring of Fire.” Each time they sang the word “down,” my heart lurched a little more. Nervous, I leaned back on Jason for support. I trembled in his arms. He remained steady.

“Hey, if you don’t want to jump, I’ll ride the plane down with you,” he said. “You don’t have to do this. Either way, it’s okay. Just relax.”

He held his right arm in front of my face and made the skydiving hand signal for “relax.” It was a loose shaking motion, as if he’d just washed his hands and couldn’t find a paper towel.

The plane circled the drop zone, where overlapping runways carved a large, definitive X into the landscape. One by one, the other jumpers waddled to the plane’s Narnia door and abruptly vanished, spirited away into another world. The suddenness and completeness of each disappearance made me gasp out loud. They were there. And then they were gone. Irretrievably gone.

I thought about my mom and how she would never see the world from a plane window again. All the goals we chattered about, all the plans we made during late-night conversations, would forever be left unaccomplished, her dreams of travel unreached. She would die, certainly, though a significant part of her was already gone.

For as long as I can remember, my family had a subscription to National Geographic magazine, every issue kept on a bookshelf that took up almost one whole wall. Just row after row of mustard-yellow spines. Every month, when a new issue arrived, my mom and I sat at the kitchen table and let the words and images transport us all over the world, from the pyramids in Egypt to the ruins of Machu Picchu, on safari, atop mountains, inside golden temples, through the pink canyons of Petra. These exotic-to-us places could not have been more unreachable from our modest home in Ohio, but there was a kind of magic when Mom and I hatched plans for the future together. They almost seemed possible.

Then my mom took this mental list of adventures and carefully tucked it away, setting her own desires aside to care for our family.

“Someday,” she said. “There’ll be plenty of time later.”

But she was wrong. My mom crept toward death, not one passport stamp closer to her dreams. The woman she wanted to be was just as irretrievable as the skydivers who whooshed out the door.

I looked over my shoulder at Jason and shouted to be heard over the rushing wind.

“I don’t know about this,” I screamed. And even though I wasn’t sure if he could hear me, I continued, “This isn’t me. I kind of like the road that is more traveled, you know? I’m a beaten-path kind of person.”

“Where you’re going, there is no path!” he replied with a wink.

The plane was almost empty. Only the pilot and my group remained. Bud crouched in the exit position at the door, just like we rehearsed. He motioned to me.

“You have to make a choice,” Jason said. “Now.”

He was right. This was my choice. Maybe I wasn’t born to be the kind of audacious woman who soaks her weekends in adrenaline. But maybe, just for a little while, I could choose to be. There was an urgency that underscored every moment, knowing life—and the disease—might eventually leave me with no choice at all.

I lined my feet up with the edge of the door, right foot in front of the left, and took my position in a half squat, right hand pressed on the inside of the plane, left hand on the outside. The routine I practiced took over my body.

“Check in,” I said, and I made eye contact with Bud.

“Check out,” I said, and I looked to my left, where Jason hung from the outside of the Caravan with one hand.

“Prop,” I said, and I stared ahead at the spinning propeller with laser-beam focus. The vibration of the airplane thrummed in my stomach. The propeller appeared to slow down.

On a count of “up, down, arch,” we were out. My spine stiffened and my mind zeroed in on all the wrong things. My shoelace came untied—the plastic tabs on the laces slapped against my ankle—and I wondered if my shoe would get sucked off my foot. Even worse, what if I hit a bird while I was in free fall? My goggles cut into my face. The ground seemed big, a green maw waiting to swallow me whole.

Then I looked to my left, where Jason held my harness, helping me fall sure and true. He cut a handsome figure, hovering there in the pale blue sky, steady by my side. He thrust his hand in front of my face and shook it.

“Relax,” he mouthed. And I did. I exhaled. I could do this.

During free fall I had to demonstrate what’s called “a circle of awareness”—assess my heading, look to the altimeter on my wrist and call out my altitude, make eye contact with each instructor, and fake deploy three times in a row before the final wave-off.

At 5,000 feet I deployed the parachute for real, and then I drifted gently in the pastel blue expanse. After the speed of free fall, being under canopy felt like drifting through glue. Around me, clouds looked like giant handfuls of puffed dough. The air smelled thin, clean, iridescent. Below my feet, the emerald Indiana farmland was studded with houses that almost looked jeweled. The scene was a painting, a postcard, something grand and insignificant all at once. From the sky, nothing looked weary or ill. From the sky, there was only potential. I gazed at the highway and tiny toy cars and all the people who didn’t know how unlucky they were to be attached to the ground. My face felt bright, lit up like a light bulb. My cheeks hurt from smiling.

Afterward, I continued to show up at the drop zone every weekend. I practiced my skills until I received my solo license, and I made a few hundred more skydives, many of them with Jason. I also figured if I could trust That Guy with my life, we could at least go out on a date. We’ve been jumping into things together ever since.

THE DECISION TO LIVE WHILE MY MOTHER DIES HAS brought me to the dirty floor of an airport, muddy hiking boots and suitcase wheels near my face. Once Jason leaves, I will be roaming this world alone.

I hug my backpack and wonder if I will be safe, if I will make friends, if I will ever find what my dying mother’s restless heart desired. I wonder if this trip will honor my mom or if I am going to rip my family apart. I wonder if I will scurry back to California in just a few weeks or if I will have the resilience to push through when things get tough. My goal is to make it as far as Ha Long Bay, Vietnam—one of the places on my personal bucket list, my measure of success for this journey.

I don’t have a lot of money, and my family isn’t one of means. I grew up in a small Ohio town, with two significantly older siblings who left home when I was seven. My dad worked his way through the ranks in the air force, and my mom attended job fairs at hotel ballrooms to pick up part-time work whenever things were tight. She took whatever job hired her: she tugged flowers apart at the root and replanted them into plastic flats for nurseries, she ushered people into changing rooms at discount clothing stores, she butchered birds at a turkey farm and came home with spent muscles and rough, cracked fingers.

When I was young, I didn’t know we were broke; I thought juice came from cans in the freezer and all toilet paper had only one ply. Later, after my family had moved from working class to solidly middle class, my parents were comfortable enough to help put me through Ohio University with assistance from loans, and the juice in our fridge came from cartons. There wasn’t much extra money, though. In college I sold my plasma weekly to afford the luxury of fast food and draft beer, and occasionally I sold chaps and jackets at biker shows for a man named Johnny Marathon, who paid me in cash or leather, my choice. Often I chose wrong.

I worked hard to get things. And now, for this trip, I have sold most everything, including my car and all that old leather. I have a total of $10,000 in the bank and a handshake agreement to write one paid freelance article per month for the newspaper I just left.

Jason is no longer a skydiving instructor; he’s a public school teacher, a career change that occurred after we moved to California in 2006. When he returned to college, I said, “At least you’ll always have job security. The world always needs teachers,” words that have haunted me since the recession in 2008, as Jason has struggled to find a foothold in the system.

A newer teacher, Jason has been laid off every year, then called back as a long-term substitute without benefits and eventually brought back full-time, months into the school year. In 2010, the pink slip came one week before our wedding, when my trip has already been decided. Money is tight enough that we are conscious of every dollar, and there’s nothing else to replenish my checking account when the funds are gone.

My international travel experience is limited, and I don’t speak any languages beyond English, other than a few sentences from high school French. So if Claude isn’t buying socks or headed to the discotheque, I can’t help you.

I have no savings, no safety net, and no skills. It’s humbling. It’s daunting.

I scan the airport and see travelers who look more accomplished, people who wear their courage like a patch across their rugged backpacks. I am not like them. But I close my eyes and remember the words my mother said each day before she sent me off to elementary school: “You are braver than you think.”

Back then I was just a girl with long pigtails and a small green backpack, nervous about walking two miles to school on my own. But I wonder if my mom could already look into my brown eyes and see the woman I would become, determined to set off and see the world.

Above us, a speaker crackles and the PA system comes to life. Our plane to Cusco is ready to board.