At an early age, award-winning travel writer, Mark Chesnut, learned to dodge discomfort by jumping on the nearest plane, bus or car. That tactic proved especially useful when his single mother made it clear that there was no room for discussion about his gay identity.
Mark, overwhelmed with wanderlust, shoplifts in airports, avoids Southern Baptist salvation, acts like Hillary Clinton in a nursing home, and dresses in drag with his grandfather. He even creates an imaginary airline and flies away.
Now, as 89-year-old Eunice Chesnut moves to a New York City nursing home to be near her son, Mark's obsession with travel takes a backseat as he embarks on the most emotional journey of all.
More than an end-of-life memoir, more than a collection of childhood memories and travel stories, Prepare for Departure showcases what happens when a permissive mother and a mistfit son face death while revisiting life. Buckle your seatbelts for a witty, touching and darkly humorous trip - through time, loss, forgiveness and acceptance.
Excerpt
Flushing Out the Truth
New York City, January 2016
Why do the most pressing phone calls always come when you’re trying to sleep? One morning just before the sun rose, my cell started clanging just as I was dreaming about missing a flight connection in some random airport.
“Your mother has fallen,” the nurse said. “We think she was reaching for something on the floor during breakfast, but she lost her balance and hit her head on the table as she fell. She seems to be OK now, but she bled quite a bit. We need to know if you’d like her to go to the emergency room, just to make sure that she’s alright.”
What was I going to say, no?
I didn’t have time to shower. I threw on a pair of old, ripped jeans and the T-shirt I’d been planning to wear to the gym and rushed over.
A bloody bandage covered my mother’s forehead. She was sitting up in bed, straighter than usual, smiling and perky. She somehow seemed more alert, more energetic.
I gave her the customary hug and kiss hello.
“Tell me what happened, Momma!”
“Well, I don't know.” She was still smiling, as if we were joking about having lost her car keys.
“Did you fall?”
“I don’t remember falling.”
“Can you feel that bandage on your forehead? The nurse said she thinks you were reaching for something on the floor in the dining room, and then you fell and bumped your head on the table.”
She touched the bandage and smiled again. “Well, if that’s the case, I hope I was reaching for something good, so it was worth the fall!”
Medics appeared a few minutes later and bundled my mother onto a stretcher for our ambulance ride to a nearby medical center. We spent most of the day waiting in a bustling emergency room filled with distant conversations, high-tech beeps and clanging metal. Every now and then, a white-garbed staff member would appear to ask questions, take a reading of my mother’s vital signs and then disappear. I sat down next to her wheeled bed, rested my head on the safety bar and briefly fell asleep. She seemed to stay awake, because when I opened my eyes again she was still sitting up, calmly observing the nonstop activity around us.
Finally, an aide grabbed the bed and rolled my mother into an examination room to investigate the injury. By now, her forehead was sporting a sizeable bump. After the scan, we were shuffled back to the emergency room to await the results.
Nearly an hour later, a long-faced doctor in a long lab coat appeared. “Would you mind stepping away to give me a few minutes to speak with your mother?” he asked.
He closed the curtains around her bed as I walked away.
After a few minutes, the doctor emerged. “Could you come with me?” He asked. “I’d like to find a place where we can speak privately.”
I followed him into the hall, where he pulled over a chair and asked me to sit down.
“I needed to speak with your mother first, to ask her permission to talk to you about this. The test came back.” He paused. “It shows that your mother has a rather sizeable tumor.”
I stared blankly. “Oh … well … is this something different from the tumor that they found in July?”
The doctor’s eyebrows raised. “She has already received this diagnosis?”
“Yes, we already knew about the tumor. And my mother didn’t want any treatment for it. She was mentally aware when the diagnosis was made, and she said she’s too old to undergo treatment.”
“Oh. Well,” he shifted in his seat and adjusted his collar. “We didn’t receive any records from the nursing home, so we didn’t know. We’ll continue to review the results of the most recent tests to see if there’s anything new.”
I walked back to the curtained area where my mother was lying. She smiled.
“What did the doctor say to you?” she asked as I took her hand.
“What did he tell you?” I asked, not wanting to remind her unnecessarily about her condition. She hadn’t mentioned the tumor a single time since arriving in New York City. She’d most likely forgotten about it and I didn’t see a reason to remind her if she didn’t remember what the doctor had just told her today.
“He said they found a brain tumor.”
“That’s what he told me too,” I said, “but you know that’s something that we found out about last year, so there’s nothing new that we have to worry about.”
“Well,” my mother paused and squeezed my hand. “If the brain tumor does me in that’s OK, because I’ve had a very long and happy life.”
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