Liminal Father
Lara Lillibridge
Northeast Ohio Writer
Airports are a liminal space, between leaving and arriving. Before planes had WiFi we were unreachable when we flew, detached from real life far below.
I had received the call that my father was in organ failure. Call is now a euphemism for any digital communication. In actuality it was a text, or an email. He was breathing but no longer conscious, and had not been for several days. I had refused to see my father for the last five years, but now I was overcome with the desire to kiss his forehead before he died. I knew it wasn’t rational and that he wouldn’t even know I was there, but still I bought a ticket and drove to the airport at 4:00AM for my 5:25 flight. My waiting had begun.
First the flight was delayed, then there was a nationwide ground stop. The FAA’s computer system (well, part of it, anyway) had crashed. I was surprised that I didn’t feel impatient. I mean, my father could die at any moment. If ever there was a time to dramatically wring my hands, this was it. But the whine of engines and smell of jet fuel had already transported me into the between-time of the airport that bookended every trip to see my father.
Dad had moved to Anchorage, Alaska, when I was three, leaving my brother and I behind in Rochester, New York with our mother. Twice a year we inhabited the pause between destinations and parents for the eleven-hour trip north. This state of waiting was therefore familiar. To sit and wait and be let down and alone exemplified everything about my relationship with my father.
I arrived five hours late, but Dad was still alive. He looked hard and stiff, as if there were no tissue or fluids beneath his skin. His breath sounded like boiling water, his forehead was wet and clammy. He did not react when I kissed his forehead. It was too late for that. But I thought it would soften something in me to do it. I thought it would mean something—trigger love or forgiveness or at least empathy. I kissed his head, but I couldn’t stand to look at him like that. Everything in my sympathetic nervous system told me to get the fuck out. After sitting and waiting in the airport, then the plane, then another airport, another plane and an hour’s drive in a rental car, I only lasted a few minutes next to his dying body.
My stepsister played him songs off Spotify and sat with him for hours, but I couldn’t. He had already entered the liminal space, the transition from leaving to arriving, not firmly in one or the other. Schrodinger’s father, and I wasn’t the one to observe him and make that final distinction.
I went into his room a few times, for a few minutes, and then I went back to my hotel and slept until my stepsister called to say the box had been opened, his breath released without return.
At 9:50AM I boarded a plane home. Alaska Airlines. I had the row to myself and an audiobook set in Alaska and a glass of vodka. And WiFi made that space connected—distant, but not liminal, and I sobbed and texted and drank and listened to words of someone else’s childhood in Alaska, not dissimilar from my own summers with Dad. That flight was not stepping back into my childhood, but retracing it, and the tinny hiss of the pressurized cabin brought me closer to my father than seeing him in person ever could.
We were always defined by the space between.
I had received the call that my father was in organ failure. Call is now a euphemism for any digital communication. In actuality it was a text, or an email. He was breathing but no longer conscious, and had not been for several days. I had refused to see my father for the last five years, but now I was overcome with the desire to kiss his forehead before he died. I knew it wasn’t rational and that he wouldn’t even know I was there, but still I bought a ticket and drove to the airport at 4:00AM for my 5:25 flight. My waiting had begun.
First the flight was delayed, then there was a nationwide ground stop. The FAA’s computer system (well, part of it, anyway) had crashed. I was surprised that I didn’t feel impatient. I mean, my father could die at any moment. If ever there was a time to dramatically wring my hands, this was it. But the whine of engines and smell of jet fuel had already transported me into the between-time of the airport that bookended every trip to see my father.
Dad had moved to Anchorage, Alaska, when I was three, leaving my brother and I behind in Rochester, New York with our mother. Twice a year we inhabited the pause between destinations and parents for the eleven-hour trip north. This state of waiting was therefore familiar. To sit and wait and be let down and alone exemplified everything about my relationship with my father.
I arrived five hours late, but Dad was still alive. He looked hard and stiff, as if there were no tissue or fluids beneath his skin. His breath sounded like boiling water, his forehead was wet and clammy. He did not react when I kissed his forehead. It was too late for that. But I thought it would soften something in me to do it. I thought it would mean something—trigger love or forgiveness or at least empathy. I kissed his head, but I couldn’t stand to look at him like that. Everything in my sympathetic nervous system told me to get the fuck out. After sitting and waiting in the airport, then the plane, then another airport, another plane and an hour’s drive in a rental car, I only lasted a few minutes next to his dying body.
My stepsister played him songs off Spotify and sat with him for hours, but I couldn’t. He had already entered the liminal space, the transition from leaving to arriving, not firmly in one or the other. Schrodinger’s father, and I wasn’t the one to observe him and make that final distinction.
I went into his room a few times, for a few minutes, and then I went back to my hotel and slept until my stepsister called to say the box had been opened, his breath released without return.
At 9:50AM I boarded a plane home. Alaska Airlines. I had the row to myself and an audiobook set in Alaska and a glass of vodka. And WiFi made that space connected—distant, but not liminal, and I sobbed and texted and drank and listened to words of someone else’s childhood in Alaska, not dissimilar from my own summers with Dad. That flight was not stepping back into my childhood, but retracing it, and the tinny hiss of the pressurized cabin brought me closer to my father than seeing him in person ever could.
We were always defined by the space between.
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Lara Lillibridge (she/they) is the author of The Truth About Unringing Phones (2024), Mama, Mama, Only Mama (2019), Girlish: Growing Up in a Lesbian Home (2018), and co-editor of the anthology Feminine Rising: Voices of Power and Invisibility. Lara is the interviews editor for Hippocampus Magazine and holds an MFA from West Virginia Wesleyan College.
Social Media Instagram: @LaraLillibridge Twitter: @Only_Mama Facebook: Lara Beth Lillibridge |
Photo Credit: Adrianne Mathiowetz
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