Emotions and Aging Bodies

A Personal Essay

Hello beloved reader,

After leaving our home in New Hampshire on Saturday February 22nd, I arrived at Sydney Airport at 6:00 a.m. on Tuesday the 25th.

Before we travel in winter, we have to blow the water out of the pipes in our log cabin so they don’t freeze and burst while we’re away. It’s a time-consuming process, and we didn’t want to do it on the morning of our flight—especially with a 1.5-hour drive to Boston ahead of us. So my sweet husband and partner-in-life took care of this work on Saturday morning. Then we parked our car in Nashua, took the bus to Boston, and spent a night at the Revolution Hotel. Sometimes I think I like to stay at the Revolution Hotel just because of its name—especially in times like these.

Jamie flew to Florida to watch our 6'7" nephew play baseball in the Yankee farm league, while I flew from Boston to Dallas, then endured the 17-hour flight to Sydney to spend time with my 87-year-old mother and my 52-year-old sister, who lives right next door. My sister built a granny flat for our mother and gives her unwavering care.

Across the road from our home in Temple, New Hampshire, is a Thai Forest Buddhist monastery, where a junior monk can take on the role of upatakh—a kind of caregiver for a senior monk. I had told my mother about this, and when she tried to remember the word upatakh, she instead called my sister an "ink pot." This still makes me chuckle.

I was incredibly grateful to have a business-class ticket from Boston to Sydney, which allowed me to stretch out on a flat bed during the long-haul flight. Being a native Aussie married to an American, I’ve traveled between our countries countless times, but the older I get, the more I appreciate being able to lie down on these marathon journeys.

Despite getting some sleep on the flight, I still felt jet-lagged when I arrived in Sydney. This time of year—depending on daylight savings—Sydney is 16 hours ahead of Boston. So 6:00 a.m. Tuesday morning in Sydney is 2:00 p.m. Monday afternoon, the day before in Boston. And you know the craziest thing? When you fly back through Los Angeles, you actually arrive in L.A. before you’ve even left Sydney. Have fun wrapping your head around that one.

At least it was much warmer in Sydney than when I left snowy Boston. But I still needed to pick up a rental car for the three-hour drive north to Bulahdelah, the country town my sister moved to last year. To do that, I had to call Bargain Car Rentals—but making an Australian call from my iPhone was a challenge in its own right.

I have an old iPhone 7 with an Australian SIM card in it, but I don’t know the Australian phone number by heart. So there I was, standing at the airport bus stop, getting an automated message that I needed to leave my name and number for the shuttle pickup. Panicked, I searched for where I’d written the phone number down in my Notes on the iPhone.

I don’t know why but sometimes this kind of thing overwhelms me. It reminded me of a time I was 12 years old at Church Point. (You can read about growing up on Pittwater in my memoir.) The tide had gone out and stranded our aluminum boat, leaving us unable to get home. My older sister and I pushed and pulled the boat to try to get it into the water but it wouldn’t budge, and I burst into tears.

Maybe I put some kind of time pressure on myself—impatient human that I am—and when things don’t go smoothly, it’s as though all the atoms in my body start colliding and I feel like I want to crawl out of my skin. It’s an intensity of feeling like I just can’t deal with what’s transpiring.

When the shuttle bus finally did arrive—after several phone calls and waiting for 50 minutes—a group of five large men saw the shuttle bus pull up a 100 yards away from where it was supposed to pull up, and they got on first. I thought I wasn’t going to be able to get on, and all of a sudden I was 12 again. That same feeling washed over me—the frustration, the helplessness, the impatience.

The bus driver was loading their bags into the back of the bus by the time I got there, and I asked him, “Do you have room for one more?”

“I’m in the middle of loading bags here,” he said.

“I’ve been flying for 24 hours, and I’ve been waiting for this bus for nearly an hour and I still have to drive three hours north.” I heard my voice crack as emotion bubbled to the surface.

A lovely young man next to me reassured me that there was room for me and he’d help with my bags. I was so relieved to get on the bus, but as I sat staring out the window, I wondered—where had all that emotion come from? No one was dying. I didn’t have any kind of time deadline. What was going on?

In retrospect, perhaps part of it was the transition from being in the cocoon of business class where I was looked after, to suddenly finding myself out in the wilderness of dealing with Bargain Car Rentals — and I write that while smiling.

Or maybe it was something deeper. Each time I visit Australia now, I’m aware this may be the last time I get to see my mother.

The last time I saw my father, in 2019, just before Covid, he was in his mid-80s. At the time when I hugged him goodbye, he said, “This may be the last time I’ll see you. You never know at this age.”

And he was right.

He died just towards the end of Covid and I wasn’t able to get here.

Now, each time I visit, I wonder—will this be the last time I get to see Mum?