Women in airports

   Since 2013, several big publications have published stories that purport or at least try to explain why so many people weep in airports. 
   Time interviewed a psychologist who talked about the accumulated stressors of getting onto a plane and the nagging fear that one will never see one's loved ones again.
   Dubbing the phenomenon “the Mile Cry Club,” The Telegraph cited a study by Virgin Atlantic suggesting tear ducts are more sensitive in the air than on the ground.
   In a better written essay, for The Atlantic in 2013, Elijah Wolfson cites several studies to support a theory that after we endure a stressful situation and sit down finally, alone and with no distractions, the parasympathetic nervous system kicks in at the moment of transition, allowing us to shed stress hormones by weeping. Being alone is crucial to this scenario, and also could explain why grieving people are inclined to weep while driving. 
   Being inside an airplane feels like being alone, Wolfson writes:

Alone in a closed metal tube, 40,000 feet above land and miles from anyone you know. Surrounded by people who share your fate, but who do not acknowledge you. They, like you, sit facing forward in rows, focusing on their own discrete box of space. The cabin is dim and it hums; you look down at your folded hands in your lap, lit by a pool of light from above. There’s nothing to do: no email to check, no messages to send out, and minimal distraction. If you felt a gaping hollow open up inside, if you thought you were not going to make it, you would have no way to reach out to your loved ones.
Is it such a stretch to imagine a commercial plane as one of the loneliest places in the modern world?
   Somewhere among John Updike’s umpteen dozen essays there’s a poem or a paragraph that notices red-eyed women in airports. He concludes — sensibly, I believe — that women weep in airports because they are on their way to funerals or deathbeds. He doesn’t mention men weeping in airports. 
   I never have wept on an airplane. But twice since Michael died, as I’ve walked out of the concourse at Bill and Hillary Clinton and toward the staircases, and toward the spot where he used to stand, waiting for me, always, every flight for most of my adult life, I've been mugged by his absence. 
   The first time it caught me unaware. My nose flamed up and I was weeping before I realized what had happened. It was a struggle to compose my face on the stairs.
   The second time — Friday as I returned from Thanksgiving with Ben, Caroline and the babies — I was wary of that bad place, the place without him. I would walk past it too quickly to think about my loss. I speed-walked that concourse with so much determination that I turned the wrong direction out of the gate and found myself increasingly uncertain and then dismayed as the wrong end of the concourse swept toward me.
   But I turned around and rushed the opposite way, and soon enough I was past the empty place, down those stairs and out in the chilly fog and rain, headed across surprisingly deep puddles to long-term surface parking and my good old car. 
   But the place without him jumped me anyway, an hour later, as I stood on the porch of Marie’s house and foolishly mentioned having missed him there.
   I could make myself weep again, now, by envisioning that stretch of airport carpet. 

Ollie in the AM

   The cats and I are gradually creating our new routine. But the house is full of Michael’s scents. I know they are waiting to find him.
   They were with him when he died. Nobody else was. When I hurried home from Marie’s to make sure he’d eaten supper, and I found his corpse, they were huddled apart from one another on the carpet near his chair. 
   Thinking back to that moment of my protest, my disbelief and pleading, I see their tense bodies. I feel their uncertain eyes on me. They didn’t know what to do anymore than I did.
   
   These mornings I wake about 4:30, as I have for years, stirred by Michael’s super careful attempts to get ready for work in the dark, holding a tiny flashlight in his teeth, going onto the washing machine landing to dry his hair with the blow dryer, all his clothing set out the night before in the living room, so he wouldn’t bother my sleep. And yet always I woke up. Always I sensed his going.
   I go on waking up. We must have cemented a habit, he trying to keep me from waking, me sensing his tiptoe movements and waking.
   These days I stagger to the bedroom door and crack it open, knowing that Ollie will soon join me. He’ll thud upon the foot of the bed and then pad quickly across the landscape of my body up to my face.  
   There he will either settle into the angle my head makes with the pillow and commence sandpapering my nose and purring like a 23-year-old Honda Passport OR he’ll purr like a Passport while settling his suffocatingly furry weight on top of my head.
   We drift off to sleep again together. It is bliss.