Free Some Things About Flying by Joan Barfoot

of her thirty-fifth birthday, Nell and Patsy took her to a restaurant to celebrate. He was at the next table with friends, or more likely colleagues. There was much laughter and drinking of champagne, and the two tables ended up together. Geoff sent her a half dozen white roses the next morning—“A day late, but it should never be too late” the card said, somewhat cryptically, somewhat enticingly.
    â€œI’ve had some awkward moments,” he confided a few nights later over dinner, “since my divorce. Sometimes I’ve learned that a woman has gone out with me because of my work. I mean, because I’m fairly well known, I guess.”
    â€œYes,” Lila agreed, “I expect that can be a hazard.”
    Down the road there were further words, in other tones. “For god’s sake, Lila, you knew from the start how busy I am.” Quite true. He went to some pains to tell her his marriage, for one thing, had failed precisely because he was a busy man, and not only that, busy in such a virtuous and necessary way that there was no point in merely personal complaints.
    Who would, could, reasonably expect his presence when on the other side of the scale a life was in the balance? Geoff’s skilful, pudgy fingers were needed, absolutely needed, to dig beyond flesh into organs and arteries, pulling them out, turning them over, replacing them, sewing bodies together maybe moments from death.
    A woman could hardly say to such a man, “Yes, I know the guy has only one kidney and it’s disintegrating as we speak, but I’ve had a really bad week and I’d like to rest on your shoulder, if you wouldn’t mind.” On the other hand, who unfailingly agreed that, always, it would be more urgent to give pleading speeches to Rotarians than to comfort someone who’d had a bad week?
    â€œI have to,” he said. “It’s important.”
    â€œSo are some other things. You should know that. I hope you do.”
    He said he didn’t like her tone; that it sounded threatening. “Up to you”—she shrugged—“what you hear.”
    She read accounts of his speeches in the newspaper (how well publicized, for one reason and another, some of her lovers have been). “It’s difficult,” he told audiences wherever he could grab them, “for a physician to ask a grieving family to make such a wrenching decision. But to offer a chance of life—as physicians we must give families that opportunity. It’s a greater memorial to the values and spirits of loved ones than the grandest gravestone, or the most eloquent epitaph.” Didn’t he sound fine! Didn’t he give the most eloquent speeches, himself!
    There will be no salvageable organs if this plane goes down, nothing useful for surgeons to “harvest,” as Geoff used to put it. Lila found the expression chilling; but it was nothing compared with this bone-clattering cold.
    â€œI’m sorry, sweetheart,” Geoff said when Lila’s mother died, folding large, pink, freckled arms around her. “I wish I could be with you.” A keynote speech he was giving, at a national conference. He had to fly west, she had to drive east. “I’ll call you when we both get where we’re going.”
    Lila’s mother died, climbing into bed for the night, from a ferocious attack from her heart. She was only sixty-four, so it came as a shock. Like Aunt June, she lay dying and dead for more than a day before she was found by a neighbour. The despair, picturing those last hours—Lila surprised herself with sounds she’d never heard herself make before.
    But Geoff, with his higher purposes, flew off; and Lila, not unreasonably, began developing a horror of dying alone and going undiscovered.
    It appears she may have frightened herself with the wrong pictures entirely. She may die in quite the opposite fashion: in a great crowd, very publicly.
    Several times