By Jennifer Howard

The summer my mother crossed out of our lives, my son and I hit the road. It was 2021, a year of absences, the pandemic eating through routines and plans. My daughter, my oldest child, had left for college and some semblance of dorm life the fall before, though her classes were mostly remote. My son, my youngest, was about to start his senior year of high school.

Every day should have been a rehearsal for bigger departures to come. But instead of hanging out with friends at school, they’d been stuck at home, heads aching from all-day Zoom classes, missing the rituals that were supposed to signal arrival at the border crossing where childhood meets young adulthood.

Still, there were compensations in waiting: hot lunches together, jigsaw puzzles, movie nights, the adoption of a pandemic pup, an unruly, good-hearted lab/beagle mix from North Carolina with a questionable past that might or might not have involved cannibalism. We discovered uses for every square foot of our smallish DC rowhouse. It all might have been idyllic if it hadn’t felt like house arrest. I felt almost guilty about how much I loved the unexpected time with my soon-to-fly children.

By spring 2021, the sense of being stuck began to ease. College life for my daughter took on a social shape I recognized. Classes at my son’s school resumed in person. Time together, stretched to seeming infinity while COVID raged, snapped back into place. Soon, with a little luck, my son too would find his way out of the departure lounge.

Through all of it—the pandemic, and the 2020 election, and the Jan. 6 insurrection in our backyard—he’d kept on as steady a course as he could. He did the things high-school juniors do if they plan to head to college. He worked on his Common App essay. He built a list of schools, looking north and west.

By “west” he meant California, a place he’d never been. An East Coast kid who’d never seen the other side of the Rockies, he somehow felt the pull of that other coast. I didn’t know exactly what version of California had taken hold in his mind—something to do with warm weather and sunshine and a sense that it would be easier to think and to learn outside the contentious type-A atmosphere of Washington, D.C.

We needed to go and find out. We needed a road trip.

I hadn’t been west in years. My memories were hazy, which felt appropriate, given the news and social media. The Golden State seemed to be continually ablaze. Some days, smoke from the megafires of the West obscured the skies over Washington. At home we feared insurrections; out there they battled conflagrations. What kind of future could my son locate in a state on fire?

To let a child move out into the world, you make space for the knowledge that you can’t protect them. Disaster—megafires, insurrections—can overtake anyone, at home or a continent or world away. Planning our westward jaunt, I kept this to myself, trusting that the young tend not to think this way. If they did, they might never leave.

I couldn’t control outcomes, but I could plan itineraries, though that involved a skill set atrophied by months of pandemic house arrest. I trawled travel sites for decent airfares and hotel rates. I plotted driving distances on Google Maps. I wrangled a rental-car reservation that cost more than the plane tickets. It seemed that in the second summer of the pandemic, vaccinated and tired of being cooped up, anybody with time and money wanted to get the hell out of town. Tickets, reservations, and vaccinations acquired, we were set to go.

~~~~~

No amount of planning prepares you for every departure. In mid-June, less than a month before my son and I were supposed to fly west, my mother died. She’d been disappearing into dementia for a decade but had weathered the storm of COVID safely enough in her assisted-living facility. She hadn’t been well—that word no longer applied—but she was stable, or so we thought.

The end snuck up on us like an ambush. My mother’s heart, the one thing I’d never worried about, gave out. Any possible future she might have had, even the most limited, blinked out almost overnight. She’d felt poorly over the weekend, though nobody at her assisted-living facility alerted us. By the time they called an ambulance for her on Monday, she’d already crossed beyond the doctors’ reach. On Wednesday, the hospital sent her back to the facility for hospice care.

That last evening, as my mother reached the end of her time, I hit a limit of my own. Everybody else, her parents and siblings and her third and last husband, was years gone. As her only child, I’d taken care of her life for almost seven years. I’d sorted out her finances, her medical needs, the stuff that filled every room in her house. I’d cleaned out the clutter, sold the house, used the proceeds to pay for the full-time care she required. I’d met with GPs and neurologists and physical therapists and nursing-care providers, ordered incontinence supplies, brought her the coffee and pastries she still loved, and tried, mostly without success, to coax memories out of her before they slipped away for good, month after month after month, stretching into years.

If she was ready to depart, I was ready to let her go.

She left for good in the small hours of Thursday. The hospice nurse told us that she looked peaceful after she passed. Not everyone does, she said. It helped to hear, but it surprised me. “Peaceful” was never a word I associated with my mother.

I spent the next 72 hours after my mother passed in a flurry of final arrangements. So many decisions to make, none of which I was prepared for, though the practicalities—talking to the funeral director, arranging for cremation, cleaning out her last apartment—were oddly steadying in those first days.

Peaceful or not, though, when a parent exits the scene, it unsettles the emotional landscape. Familiar terrain turns treacherous. Three days after my mother died, I missed a step and sprained my ankle as I carried a double load of laundry down the stairs.

The pain, tearing and sudden, literally floored me. I couldn’t stand on the ankle at all. My husband and the kids and I were supposed to get on the road that morning for a beach trip planned long before Mom died. But bodies, dead or living, don’t care about itineraries. The doctor at urgent care wrapped up the sprained joint and sent me off with crutches. I got through the 8-hour drive to North Carolina with my ankle propped on the dashboard of the car, kids and dogs packed into the back seat.

Friends talked about proprioception, the sense of where your body is in space, and how a shock can knock you off kilter in the most literal ways. I hobbled around on crutches and worried about what would happen next, college possibilities feeling more like impossibilities now. I’d done everything I had to do for my mother, but the California trip was only a couple of weeks away. Even if I could get myself onto a plane, would I be able to drive on the other end of the flight? What if my son and I made it out to the West Coast only to be stranded, not by wildfire but by my inability to do something I’d done almost every day for most of my adult life?

Some decisions feel life-or-death: Will I survive this? Others turn on simple tests: Can I do this? Two days before our scheduled departure, I went to the orthopedist. He gave me a walking boot that looked like surplus Stormtrooper gear. If I could work a brake without it, he said, I could drive.

I could work a brake. The trip was on. We flew on the Fourth of July, putting 3,000 miles between ourselves and home.

On the plane ride out, I made space for my injured ankle, Velcroed into its plastic boot, and wrote my mother’s obituary. The further we got from DC, the more comfortable I felt writing about her. What else did I have to do, strapped into an airplane seat, surrounded by masked strangers, breathing recycled air?

Post-pandemic travel turned out to be a masked-up, more anxious version of pre-pandemic travel, stretches of claustrophobic boredom punctuated by discomfort and catastrophizing. Grounded by COVID, I’d forgotten how air travel breaks down into a series of transitions, a sequence of familiar actions repeated in unfamiliar places. Board, wait, fly, deplane, follow signs, wait some more, claim bags, follow more signs, find the exit. We deplaned at LAX and found the rental-agency shuttle and picked up the car. We got the GPS working and made for the exit.

Rental cars, their controls always in unfamiliar places, make me anxious until I find my way around them. Freed of the Stormtrooper boot, I did better behind the wheel than I expected to. I was grateful for once in my stickshift-driving life to have a car with an automatic transmission and brakes that brought the vehicle to a stop with a single tap. It felt easy, a relief after all the hard things back home.

The unfamiliarity of Los Angeles felt like a relief too. The city had never been one of my mother’s haunts, and I knew I would not find the ghost of her lying in wait for me there. But I hadn’t anticipated how getting away from the things and places associated with her would bring her closer to mind. The farther away I got from home, the more sharply I could see her as she used to be, the good and the bad, before dementia blurred her edges, before she’d let herself get buried in stuff and I’d had to dig her out from under it.

On the drive from the airport to the hotel, I focused on the traffic and tried not to read too much into the landscape, the alien intensity of the sun, the smoke-smudged sky overhead. My son and I looked for the Hollywood sign and cheered when we spotted it through the haze.

It was Independence Day, and it was getting dark. At home that meant fireworks. We usually avoided the big display on the National Mall, spectacular but always mobbed. What did people in LA do on the Fourth? Where did they go? I hadn’t thought much about it in the flurry of departure, but now that we were here, I wanted to find some patriotic display, a shared American ritual on this other coast. The last time I’d heard explosions was on Jan. 6^th.

We drove around until we saw people gathered on a median strip—it was San Vicente Boulevard—and found a spot to pull over. We made space for ourselves, shoulder to shoulder with locals who’d already staked out viewing spots. Where they launched the fireworks I couldn’t tell, but LA put on a good show.

Over the next couple of days, the car and I got used to each other while my son and I got acquainted with the city. We browsed the vinyl selection at Amoeba Records and rolled our eyes at the excesses of Rodeo Drive. We ate the best tacos we’d ever had at a joint in Silver Lake.

My son was good company, game to play tourist as well as prospective student. I could tell he was auditioning the place as much as exploring it. What would it be like to plant himself here, in this other place, under this sun, these skies?

Maybe it was in search of an answer that we gravitated uphill, searching for high places with a view. We drove up to the Griffith Observatory near sunset and looked out over Los Angeles, its horizontal scale upending East Coast expectations of cities. We urged the car up the steep hairpin turns of the Hollywood Hills, the underpowered engine whining with the climb, and pulled off at a lookout spot with a guardrail too low to do more than signal a dangerous drop. But the views, oh, the views went on forever, in spite of the haze.

~~~~~

To take a kid to look at colleges means searching for a glimpse of possible futures, only some of them terrifying. It’s a declaration of belief that there will be a future beyond pandemics and insurrections and wildfires.  

That trip to the West Coast, after a winter and spring of quarantine and turmoil back east, felt like a good-vibrations tour as much as a fact-finding mission, a chance to imagine sunny futures in which good things could still happen. I wanted evidence that my son—the history buff, the anime fan, the up-and-coming journalist, the lover of classic vinyl and old movies, the loyal friend with a slyly wicked sense of humor—would find a place where he could flourish. Maybe he was right that California would be as good a place as any.

At UCLA, which hadn’t resumed in-person tours yet, I parked the rental car in an off-limits central-campus space, figuring nobody would care on a summer Sunday. My son set off to investigate the campus while I stumped off on my own. Wherever I am, I find the library if there is one. I rolled along in my plastic boot until I located the Powell Library, a Romanesque Revival vision that, as such buildings do, made me wish I were back in school myself.

I didn’t go in. With the virus still raging, outside visitors were still not encouraged. I stood under the intense California sun, so different from home that it felt like another star altogether, and watched the cliff swallows swoop in and out of the mud nests they’d built in the window casements, expert and graceful, sure of their direction.

Birds found us everywhere we went on that trip. The swallows and the hummingbirds made it look easy, all this coming and going among lovely places, in looping migrations as easy as breathing. The possibilities felt endless. It would be a few months still before we’d have to confront the “Hunger Games” realities of college admissions.

After UCLA we pushed on, working eastward, further from the coast. Near USC, a hummingbird investigated a flowering jacaranda tree nearby while we ate ramen and sushi burrito rolls at an outdoor table. At Occidental College, the dry heat, contrary to what people like to say, sucked the energy out of me. I parked myself and my aching ankle on a garden bench in the shade and watched hummingbirds investigate the flowers. After Occidental, we drove north into the too-dry reaches of LA County and found still more hummingbirds—Anna’s, I think, though I remain an uncertain birder after all these years—going about their business in the shade of our hotel courtyard in Claremont. At home, they were only sometime visitors, blinking out from October until March, then reappearing. Here they did not need to leave.

At every stop, my son did a sweep of the campus, trying to catch the vibes, as though he carried an invisible divining rod that told him whether he’d be happy there or not. I did it too, knowing that these vibe checks were only quick glances down possible paths that could lead almost anywhere. Was there any life in the local town? Did the tour guide, if there was one, seem happy? Did people smile back when we passed them? Surely among all these signals was the evidence he needed.

~~~~~

For a long time, I thought of home as a place that does not change. But the comings and goings of that summer reminded me that home reshapes itself into something new, over and over. Even if you never leave, it will change around you, as the people who made it familiar make their exits. My mother has left for good. My children now come and go, each return a little more fleeting than the last. I’m still here, for now.

 The summer of 2021 turned out to be a dress rehearsal for another child’s departure. It would be my daughter, an actor, who’d move to southern California in the fall of 2024, only months before the worst wildfires in the history of Los Angeles. The smoky skies my son and I had seen in 2021, the disasters I worried about on his behalf, are hers now.

In the end, my son did not head west but south, crossing into territory only a few hours’ drive from where he grew up. It’s a place where many family members have pursued their own futures, desire lines that cross and diverge in a shared space, each in their own good time. On the road that summer in California, any place seemed better than what he already knew. Now he’s figuring out how to make the familiar new again, reshaping it into something that feels almost like home.

~~~~~

Jennifer Howard is the author of Clutter: An Untidy History. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The TLS, VQR, EdSurge, the anthology D.C. Noir, and elsewhere. She lives in Washington, D.C. with her family. More information: www.jenniferhoward.com