Departure drama

Airports are probably the biggest containers on this planet of the extremes of human emotion. It’s right up there with hospitals where the critical and terminally ill are housed along with the newly born and the newly saved. You could say that funeral parlors fall under the same category but the singularity of feeling — grief, mostly — eliminates it from the group. There never is joy in such places. Unless there’s a resurrection, that is.

But hospitals and airports are havens for such heart-fattening expectations, what with anticipations of reunions and the promise of new life and restored health. In both places, there are designated sections for specific emotions: joy in the arrival lounge as it is in the maternity wing and the recovery room; grief in the departure lounge as it is ER and the morgue. 

I write this from the airport lounge after having just cleared immigration and witnessing long, tear-streaked and body-locked goodbyes, mainly from OFW countrymen. I am en route to Athens via Doha, the entry point, Middle East- bound OFWs — male and female — and spouses, children and girlfriends and boyfriends sent off the lot of them, with families and what seemed like entire barangays in tow.

Heart-wrenching is the first adjective that comes to mind. As the long queue to the airport entrance inched along, I became privy to emotional farewells. Conversations on young love interrupted were torture to the ears. The pain in couples’ voices was raw and real as they exchanged admonitions of love and loyalty. The married ones were mostly resigned to their fate, I guess, so dialogue was confined to promises of timely remittance and last-minute instructions. But the parting, which is premised on a mostly unspecified length of time — years, perhaps — and yet, left unspoken, was the rock that weighed everyone’s chest down.

The women were fortunate to have that emotional release valve that is the tear ducts. I mean, they flowed. Women whimpered and sobbed. They clung. Their voices croaked as their departing men hugged them with assurances of faithfulness, industriousness and hasty returns.

My heart went out to the men. I thought: S***! It sure sucks to be a man during times like this, where society dictates that they must man up and hold it all in. Where does all their grief go? What do men do with emotional pain? No, really? I’m curious. They mostly drink, I think, or maybe I’ve just been seeing too many movies.

We, women are known to eat our feelings. Those late-night ice cream binges on entire quarts of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough are real, I tell you. Some of us shop out our feelings, too — maxed-out credit cards on pairs of shoes we will never wear when the pain wears off. Others talk their pain out until their girlfriends’ ears fall off. We have talk-a-thons that last days and go through cases of wine.  We have the hair-chop move as well that magically rids us of emotional baggage. These may be quick fixes but they are releases just the same. 

And what do men do? They are cruelly socialized from childhood to never talk about it, to never cry about it. This is the reason they’re mostly emotionally constipated. And, really, it’s our fault — we mothered them and raised them to be the way they are.

I drifted back into the scenery of farewells as the line progressed and heard more of the same conversations. It was touching how husbands appeased wives and boyfriends assured their girls. But nothing moved me more than this one father conferring the responsibility of being “man of the house” to his son of 9 or 10.

This got to me, somehow. Young boys need to be young boys — carefree. Being saddled with a responsibility so large might emotionally handicap them for life. We hear of many cases where desperate mothers claim young sons as their emotional husbands in the absence of fathers, having them fill in for spousal and fathering duties, which cause personality disorders in adulthood. Parents are supposed to parent children, and children need to be what they are, essentially.

I was so tempted to butt in to a father speaking to his young son on bended knee in your typical soap opera airport scene, telling him to take care of his mother and siblings because he would now be the man of the house. “Too much to saddle him with,” I was aching to say but I didn’t fancy getting bawled out. I simply looked the other way. 

I kept close watch over that father as I was directly behind him in line, through x-ray machines all the way to the check-in counter, curious about how he would handle the heaviness of the moment. As soon as we cleared luggage check, he called his wife (who was still outside the airport waiting for his plane to depart) on the cell phone and engaged her and son in conversation until his turn came at the counter.

After securing his boarding pass he caught up with his OFW buddies who were on the same flight and chatted them up about everything other than the difficulty of the moment — no release valves for these men, I figured; it’s all a-simmer until they get a drink either on the plane or upon landing — who knows? — or maybe the promise of better pay and a better future anesthetizes them from all that. What courage.

And then I caught myself. Why was I so invested in them? Why was I intently following their goodbye saga? Didn’t I have anything better to do? It dawned on me that it is what I do every time I find myself in airports: I observe everyone else to escape my own issue, to distract from my own sadness of departing.

This “sad airport syndrome” of mine started at a very young age. I grew up in Davao and had grandparents in Manila so holidays always meant trips away from friends at first and then boyfriends. These two-hour airplane trips escalated into 13-hour flights when I left for college. So I was either leaving a “friend” abroad to come home or leaving family to get back to school. Departures were the bane of my life and only now I realize that I eased that by escaping the pain of disengagement pre-departure by occupying myself watching airport goodbye tableaus of other people and immersing myself in their pain.

This particular time isn’t any different. I shouldn’t bitch. I’m going to be reunited with my favorite places on earth but the fact that the circumstances surrounding the trip are not ideal make me pensive.  

But a trip should make anyone hopeful. Much awaits on the other side. In my case there are shoes to be bought and — hopefully — worn, plus, to borrow from Casablanca’s Humphrey Bogart, “We’ll always have Paris.”

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Thank you for your letters. You may reach me at cecilelilles@yahoo.com.