Flying away with Liz

Flying home with Liz

‘Are you going on a plane?’ she said slowly, and with an animation that suggested she thought my friend might need some extra enthusiasm and widely unnecessary annunciation, to understand her. She didn’t really wait for an answer but looked at me instead and asked, ‘is this your mother?’ I looked at the woman beside me, she had put together a killer outfit. All white with a beret that sat slightly off-piste. My friend was clutching my arm with one hand and held a cane in the other. Perhaps that was why the woman asking the question spoke to her as if she were a child. ‘No, no, she’s, my friend. We’re travelling for work.’ At that, I could feel a slightly stronger clutch of my arm. She liked the idea that we were heading away for work, and not some mother/daughter getaway. My friend looked at this ridiculous woman and said politely, ‘we’re making a speech.’ The woman was surprised, forcibly smiled a Broadway-esque smile and exaggerated her profoundly annoying lips into clear words, making them almost unrecognisable, ‘Oh, that sounds lovely. Good luck with your speech.’

We exited the lift, and I looked at my friend, who may have easily come off a catwalk in Paris, ‘do people always speak to you like that?’ She nodded, ‘oh yes, they think we’re stupid.’

Travelling with a woman of 95 was eye-opening. I understood the issues that elders faced with getting around this world but making a flight together to Sydney to make a speech about the value of ageing for a corporate, gave me a whole new respect. She was an oddity. A delightful one, but an oddity non-the-less. She required assistance to get to and from the plane, something she abhorred for how obvious it made her. And when the wheelchair arrived with a flashing light atop, she looked at me and smiled, resigned to the fact that the ‘old lady’ was going to be a spectacle.

I walked ahead, managing our bags, while a hostess held her hands and walked her down the aisle of the plane. The hostess was a tiny human with a high ponytail and was facing my friend, walking backwards, ‘Is she your daughter?’ she asked, smiling at this adorable old woman, referring to me, ‘No,’ she answered without moving her face much, ‘she’s my lover.’ I cleared up her story when they both had caught up to me, but she continued discussing the issue with this young woman, ‘I’ve never tried it you know. Being with a woman.’ The hostess leant in and whispered conspiratorially, ‘neither have I.’

‘I feel like I’ve broken out of jail,’ she said as we lifted off. Not that she lived in the types of jails that some elders did. She was independent and lived in a village, but the chance to get out of town, get on a plane Thelma and Louise style, was something she hadn’t done for a while. When we had found our way to the hotel in Sydney, she had remarked at the fancy lifts that were moving at speed up and down the skeleton of the building, ‘they’re beautiful,’ she said wistfully and then after a beat, ‘this little window of the world has opened. It will close again soon, but when it closes, I will still have it all in my mind.’

But this window didn’t open to a world that was easy. Everything was an obstacle we had to negotiate. It took longer to do everything. Steps were in the way of arthritic knees that could no longer climb. Escalators were too fast for bodies unbalanced. The floor in the hotel room was slippery and might spell the end. But, regardless of the obstacles, she had travelled with me to advocate for the world that lived inside her.

‘I don’t know why, I’m the way I am,’ she said over a large bowl of pho. I didn’t know how to answer that either. Why do any of us do what we do, the way we do it? Her question was about the way she had aged. She was not going quietly, and she had recently been wondering ‘why?’ Likely, it was her charismatic father, she thought.

When we had done with our speech, she looked wild with it, ‘It was the first time I realised I had power. Shit, I can motivate these people,’ she thrilled. And then an hour later, the same thing that lurks in me, found its way to the surface in her, ‘but should I have enjoyed it so much? Am I too much

,’ she begged me to answer. This question is one women have been conditioned to ask, conditioned so to ensure we modify any overt, ugly behaviour. It’s shame job.

It broke my heart in the way it has always broken my heart. Women have been told that we should feel shame if we seek the light and lift ourselves above the parapet. And here was a woman, in the fullness of her power at 95, asking the questions that sat wordless inside us as girls. Here she was, teaching us to resist the pressure to conform, and still, there were questions about her legitimacy to do so.

And as we flew home, she recited a piece she had written. I sat in the middle of her and an anxious man who opened and closed his laptop too man times, and I closed my eyes, hearing her words, feeling us transit between each other in time and space. We were gals on a work trip. She is my friend wearing an off-piste beret and the most spectacular all-white outfit. We were heading home.