Holy Ground on the Tarmac

A short story by Sheri Herndon

(Note:  A small short story about my beloved Dad.  Writing this has been a sacred sense-making process and it's just touching the surface, but the process has been healing and cleansing and truly not easy but through it all a profound blessing.)

The plane landed in Seattle and I felt this great excitement after a week in Austin at one of those events that can only be described as a soul reunion.  I felt there was a new kind of destiny awaiting me after so many powerful, aligned and inspiring connections.  I sat there in my narrow seat feeling there was something emerging and a readiness in the air that had been a long time coming.  The cherry on top, the one that went the deepest, was the sweet conversation I had with my Dad the day before I left.  

My relationship with my Dad had never been easy.  He had been in the military for the first years of my life and he was a fighter pilot and his intensity was passed on to me somehow landing in my nervous system to this day.  One year some family friends gave me a t-shirt for Christmas that read “It’s not my fault” and on the back “I’m the daughter of a fighter pilot.”  It became a family joke.  I was the one who had words for everything and my Dad was a man of few words.  His postcards from all his trips around the world with my Mom would read “Here in Stockholm. Beautiful city. Love Dad” written in sharp printed letters, kind of like him, angular, Scorpio, blunt, intense.  When he’d be waterskiing or airchairing and I’d be watching him from the boat, I always felt like he looked like a hawk!

There were so many things I never knew about him.  Mostly, for my entire life I knew him as a pilot.  He told a story once from back before 9/11, before FAA restrictions were put in place and back when pilots had more freedom to do things.   He had purchased a gorilla suit somewhere in lower Manhattan where he liked to go on what he called garage hunting trips and he’d find the wildest things.  Back in those golden days of flying, they had cameras in the cockpit so you could watch the plane taking off with a view from the captain’s chair right over the throttle lever which they push to accelerate the airplane for take-off.  He would wear the gorilla arm and shock the passengers in the back, but of course they loved it.  I remember thinking, where does that side of you go when you are with me as an adult?

Often it seemed he was more comfortable when he was judging me or letting me know where I was failing, not just in life, but with him.   Going deeper with his daughter was just not in his vocabulary.  That was why this call felt so meaningful.  We had been slowly building to this point over the past few years developing a relationship that was more authentic.   It was still so fresh for me.  Perhaps it was his health and his sense of mortality that was softening him, and all those sharp edges of his life that had poked and punctured me in so many little ways, even with all the love and the many great memories and blessings.  We could never really meet in the ways I always longed for, in the ways I imagined as a nourishing relationship between a father and daughter.  That call had perhaps been the best call of our lives.  It certainly was the longest and for a man of few words, that was on the edge of the miraculous.  He seemed to not want to get off the phone.  I sensed a renewal in our relationship.  He had asked lots of questions about my life, and he had shared more details about what the medical specialists believed was wrong with his heart. 

We were similar and were as different as night and day.  I was wild and loved the God who filled the world all around me and made me a universalist, and my Dad was constrained and loved God as if through a narrow band of life, as if sipping God through a straw.  He was an evangelical fundamentalist who lived inside the paradigm of discipline and punishment.  This gap was a chasm.  For the sake of ease and peace, I had chosen to give up my being able to communicate the full truth of my life, the space was never available to share fully because he literally could not hear me - we would be talking between worlds and most was lost in the gap between worldviews and beliefs.  So we agreed without any real discussion over the years, to avoid the deeper more meaningful topics of life - religion and politics and how we made sense of life - we only touched on these like small hints of what could be.  Now maybe this could change. 

The plane began to taxi.  I felt excited to call him soon.  I would see how his health was doing, and ask about his upcoming procedure, and I would tell him about Austin, or what he was open to hearing.  For all my seeming profound thoughts of life and relationships and beauty, the people around me on this airplane seemed uninterested, wrapped in their own personal worlds.  It felt like we were all just in our separate silos.  Each just doing our own thing, eager to get our seat belts unbuckled as we began to taxi on the tarmac toward our gate after a somewhat bumpy landing.  I was on a plane of perfect strangers, each in their own world.  

The plane was full to the brim, everyone crammed into their seats with the overhead compartments seeming to be ready to burst open and now we were all eager to get off.  You can feel how these planes get so crammed with humans and luggage and stories, it amazes me that we don’t all have a touch of claustrophobia.  I wanted to get my bags and race to catch the ferry.  If I missed it, I would have to wait an hour. I was aware that I wanted to call my Dad.  I had been too busy all week to call and I felt a tiny pang of guilt that I had been away when he was not doing well.  

Having just landed, I thought back to a moment years ago, when I was a young woman. Back then my dad would take me flying for the thrill.  He loved flying above the earth.  We took off from Victoria one time in his fancy Aerostar jet and I was in the seat next to him with all the navigation maps, oohing and ahhing as I’d gaze in wonder at the beauty all around me.  Then he flew straight into the clouds that were all hovering over the Olympic mountains around 5,000 feet.  He said the cloud formation was perfect.  He flew straight in and all of a sudden my world changed and I was immersed in a magical realm of whites and wild formations.  All the shapes and cloudscapes and beauty.  I was in awe.  He just looked at me and smiled.  I realized then, this is how my Dad gets high, and he had just introduced me to his secret, to his private sacred place.  We didn’t talk about it, we just held the shared joy together. He started flying at eighteen and he flew until he was in his 80s.  He always aimed for clouds and for the majesty of life. 

My phone suddenly rang causing me to jump as the volume was up so high.  It was my brother, who without any preamble said, “Sheri, Dad died an hour ago, I’ve been trying to reach you.”  Everything stopped.  It felt unreal.  No, this can’t be.  He was doing better.  He was going to have the treatment in two weeks.  No. No. No.  I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t even get a sound out of my mouth.  I thought with a strange detachment that it was quite fitting that I was in a plane cruising along at 35,000 feet when my beloved Dad left this earth, how fitting and yet could he really be gone I thought somewhere deep inside.  Now he was on his way to Heaven to be reunited with my Mom after thirteen years.  I was in shock and I looked up in disbelief feeling my body crunch in on itself at right angles.  Everything felt blurry and timeless.  I felt this inner collapse as if the normal physics of life were no more.  I could imagine the suitcases suddenly dropping out of the overhead bins and just floating and everyone was suddenly perfectly still.  I was in the eye of the storm.

The beautiful spaciousness disappeared. I was a star going through a collapse, heading toward the initiation of a lifetime.  I saw myself as a little girl with my Dad holding my hand.  I thought, who am I without my Dad alive on planet earth?  My Dad, who I felt I never really really knew. My Air Force fighter pilot “Top Gun”, American Airlines captain for thirty years, owner of a red Aerostar jet with a gold dragon on the side, Dad.  How could he be gone before I had a chance to understand him, and learn his biggest dreams for me and his biggest dreams for his life?

“Welcome to Seattle,” the captain said over the speaker. 

A wall of grief poured out of me, as I began sobbing and crying and gulping in air to keep up with the energy flowing out of me.  I didn’t know how to contain it.  This was a lifetime of grief; this was immense grief and sadness for the last thirteen years without Mom, without a mother, and my father’s second marriage to the woman who never cared for me or my brother; grief I didn’t know I had, and grief at the mystery of death that I will never understand. It was an existential grief for what could have been between a father and his daughter and what now would never be.

Here I was on an airplane on the tarmac with two hundred other people I didn’t know and my soul was ripping out of my eyes with a cascade of tears.  I wanted to be hugged and held and comforted like a small child.  Words could do nothing, only allowing a pent up gush of grief to flow out of me.  My father was gone, the man who sent me postcards with only a handful of words, the jokester I never really got to know.  

Why now?  Why on this airplane with all these people?  

I had been with my Mom when she breathed her last breath.  I had been there together with my dad hospicing her over those last six months.  That was precious, we had been sharing with each other her readiness to go to Heaven.  When I asked the hospice women why her wrinkles were disappearing, they told me that they see this with people who are totally at peace with their death.  These were my Mother’s last days.  There were angels visiting her in the bedroom.  You could feel the holiness of the room everytime you walked into it.  Something sacred was happening and we were all a part of it.  I felt I had been kept from sharing this with my Father and now I was with people I didn’t know.  Somehow that’s what it’s supposed to be like, being together, not separate.  

Through a waterfall of tears and loud sobs, I blinked my way into the plane again. I didn’t even remember at first that I was surrounded by strangers and they were all right there, literally inches away.  I could hear them breathing.  I wondered how many of the people surrounding me had lost a loved one, a family member or friend.  

By the time I looked up for a moment and finally exhaled this long pent up inhale, I saw that everyone was looking at me.  We were no longer just on an airplane heading to the gate, we were all inside this grief together like a story we had entered together without invitation.  All the eyes on me, all kind eyes.  All of a sudden I felt someone touch me on my shoulder, and I turned to see an older woman looking at me as she stood in the aisle.  “Dear, here’s a tissue.  Are you okay?”  

I couldn’t answer. I just felt this wave upon me again and I let the tears fall and the wailing pour out of me.  Grief kept coming, scouring my mind and heart and body clean. 

When I could finally breathe and notice people around me, I heard an older woman’s voice as if from far away, saying in a kind tone again, “Are you alright my dear?”  She was standing nearby in the aisle and all these other people standing there looking at me, and I knew that they were all sharing in my grief through some miracle of being in this plane at this moment. Out of my mouth came these gulping words, “My Dad just died.”  Others around me heard and as I started to get my bearings and look around, people were looking at me, not with the look of being annoyed by my unbridled and uncontrolled weeping, but the look of kindness and compassion.  There was this gentleness I could feel from everyone around me.  Now I understood the expression, “The kindness of strangers.”  We were no longer separate people who had no connection.  All these strangers had now somehow miraculously become kin.  You could feel it in the air, like the plane had become a church.  It was timeless and eternal and I could just grieve my father as if we were all at his grave with our family surrounding him. 

People were now standing and I knew we were beginning to deboard.  There was that pressure to get up and go, but what I felt was a kind of stillness as if space was being created for us all.  I didn’t feel that sense of rushing.  We had all slowed down.  People were making space.  Something was more important than racing off the plane.  I was toward the back of the plane so it would be a while.  I had been crying since landing in Seattle and it felt like I had been weeping forever and like no time had passed.   

The whole airplane seemed united in this shared grief.  The people around me seemed to know this in their bones.  They must have known this.  We must all know this.  We all share in this.  Somehow they were my family for a moment, tending to a loved one who needed their care.  They were ready to share the smallest of kindnesses, like a tissue or a hand on the shoulder, or a kind smile of tenderness from a small child. Be ye like little children and you shall inherit the kingdom of heaven.

I breathed my first full breath since my brother called, and I looked up and found myself looking into the eyes of a young girl a few rows ahead of me on the other side of the aisle near the window.  She was standing on the seat looking right at me, holding on to her mother.  She was probably six or seven.  I sensed that she had gotten on that seat so she could see what was happening when I started crying so loudly. She was unafraid, open, curious, and she felt so ancient.  She was the first one of all the people around me, where I could stay with her as our eyes locked without effort, and then she smiled the slightest of smiles and it was as if the sun had burst forth from her face and blessed me.  I felt this great washing from the angels.  She was an earth angel.

As I looked at this young girl, as we looked at each other, I saw my life flow by since I was her age. All the memories, singing around the campfire on Lake Candlewood, rowing with my Dad out to the boat that was moored offshore, all the houseboat adventures on Lake Powell, him waking me up before the sun to go out in the boat just the two of us, and ski on glassy water in these canyons with five hundred foot high red walls, skipping over the wake and seeing reflections, my Dad and I the only two people in the world.  Us snow skiing in special places all over the world, from Zermatt to Alta to Jackson Hole and Lake Tahoe and Austria and all the stories that made a life.  

I wanted to reach that little girl and say something to her and her mom.  She was gazing unabashedly at me with a calm presence that most adults don’t have. So much was being shared through our eyes for both of us.  She was wiser than her age and she held my eyes as I felt the grace of the innocence of a child, like she was an anchor for me on this plane, this metal tube holding me while I grieved.  It wasn’t a real church or my home, but somehow we had together all created some kind of space that was holy and full of what it means to be a true human community even if for a short time.  I felt this as I walked off the plane, down to baggage claim, into the Uber and to the ferry.  Everywhere were strangers, and everywhere I cried, people were caring.  I had never experienced anything like this.  It was a sense of the true nature of belonging.

I stood on the ferry, the final leg of the trip home. The spray of the Puget Sound caught the setting sun. The sky was full of clouds looking west.  I knew how much my Dad loved this part of the world - all the water and the boats and the marine life. I thought about that call a week ago, the last time I would ever talk to Dad. I was just arriving home and I sat in my car giving him my full attention and enjoying feeling the good news that finally they may have figured out what was wrong with his heart. As we spoke, I realized we had come to a place of greater ease.  I could feel this in him and I could feel it in me - the easing of a lifetime of a nervous system wound so tight, you didn’t realize that you hadn’t let all the light fully in. We talked about many things. It may have been more about our souls talking to each.   It was lighter, brighter, more peaceful.  “Sheri,” he asked. “Are you happy with your new place? Is it going to be good for you?”  Yes, I assured him, telling him all the news.  He wanted to make sure my life was good. 

Growing up, and on road trips to some national park, he would always point out to us something beautiful he saw.  “Look,” he’d say to my Mom and to my brother and I. “Look at that sunset, look at the colors, look at that cloud.”  He wanted us to see the beauty that he saw.  My Mom would look up, usually from her book or bible and say, “Oh that’s nice.” He’d say, “Kay, you didn’t really look.” We’d all laugh.  It was part of our family’s love language.

I watched the sun setting over the Olympics. I felt the ocean’s spray and the wind as it kissed my face. I gazed at those beautiful clouds and thought, I’m looking, Dad. I really am. Thank you. 

(Closing Note: This story was only supposed to be 3k words and it was up towards 7k and so the edit was quite a process of refinement and loss and a great practice. This is going to be an ongoing process for me. My father passed 4/7/23 so it’s been a year of initiations.

I hope the story captures something of the sacredness of my relationship with my Dad, the inexpressible grief at not being able to fully fulfill the potential of a father-daughter relationship, and a peek into the mystery of death. Thanks for reading and being with me in this. I am grateful for the opportunity to work with David Alder & Parables of Change during this creative writing process!)