Braver Than You Think Read online

  Braver Than You Think

  BRAVER THAN YOU THINK

  Copyright © 2020 by Maggie Downs

  First hardcover edition: 2020

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Braver Than You Think is a work of nonfiction. Events have been reconstructed from notes, blog posts, personal journal entries, and my own subjective memory. Some names and other identifying characteristics have been changed to protect privacy. In some instances, I compressed time, removed people, and skipped over locations. (For the latter, I apologize to the entire country of Laos. I was very happy there.)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Downs, Maggie, author.

  Title: Braver than you think : around the world on the trip of my (mother’s) lifetime / Maggie Downs.

  Description: First hardcover edition. | Berkeley, California : Counterpoint, 2020.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019030639 | ISBN 9781640092921 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781640092938 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Downs, Maggie—Travel. | Downs, Maggie—Family. | Voyages around the world. | Backpacking. | Alzheimer’s disease—Patients—Family relationships. | Terminally ill parents—United States. | Mothers and daughters—United States. | Parent and adult child—United States. | Women authors— Biography. | Authors, American—21st century—Biography.

  Classification: LCC G440.D74 A3 2020 | DDC 910.4/1092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019030639

  Jacket design by Sarah Brody

  Book design by Jordan Koluch

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Mutti. You were with me even when you weren’t.

  No one expected me. Everything awaited me.

  —PATTI SMITH

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  LOVE

  DEATH

  LIFE

  Epilogue

  Braver Than You Think

  Prologue

  THE AIRPLANE BEGINS ITS DESCENT INTO CAIRO, BUT I don’t even look out the window. I’ve had the shade drawn the whole twelve hours, all the way from the United States, a time in which I didn’t sleep but was not awake either.

  Sorrow does that.

  I shuffle off the plane in what has become my standard uniform: navy flip-flops and hiking pants that unzip just above the knee to convert into shorts. The hood of my sweatshirt is pulled over my head, my long, unruly curls tucked inside the fabric. If anyone bothered to look at me, they’d see red, gutted eyes and a clenched jaw, not the kind of person they’d want to make conversation with anyway.

  The last time I landed in Cairo, it was a different story. I had a window seat then too, and I didn’t close the shade at all. I pressed my face to the smudgy plastic, watched the green band of Nile slice through the billowy, beige fabric of the country. As the aircraft descended, the land appeared to breathe—the mountains, the dunes, the shifting sands. It was like a golden exhale. Even closer to the ground, the light of the city shifted with glass and metal, glowing like a tiger’s-eye stone. My cheeks flushed with warmth; my eyes felt clear and open. I chattered with strangers at baggage claim. I made conversation with the taxi driver.

  That was almost a month ago. Before my mother died of Alzheimer’s disease. Before I traveled home to Ohio for a funeral, buried my mom on a snowy day, and flew back to a desert, shrouded in grief and fleece. Before.

  But now something else is off, too. At the airport I try calling home from one of the pay phones, just to let my family know that I made it to my destination, but the line is dead. I try each phone. None of them work.

  The airport internet café is closed. When I ask how I can get online or make a call, I am met with shrugs. That’s when I notice the men in uniforms, standing in the airport windows.

  My eyes are wild now, scanning the crowd. There are businesspeople in suits, women in head scarves, men in galabias that drag along the ground. Children and teenagers, suitcases and strollers. Nobody else seems panicked. But now I pick out soldiers, armed and walking among the travelers. They carry themselves with the unmistakable air of authority, their footfalls purposeful and strong. Though the security is impressively tight at the Cairo airport, I don’t remember such a strong military presence before.

  My eye finally lands on a TV, where a crowd is gathering to watch BBC News. The footage shows tanks and rioters, piles of people throwing stones and wrestling each other to the ground. The background of the footage begins to take shape and look familiar. It’s Tahrir Square, just a block from the hostel where I intended to stay.

  A red graphic with bold letters flashes across the screen: “Egypt in crisis!” My face blooms hot and red. My eyes water. A tremor quakes through my entire body, and I force myself to remain standing. It is January 25, 2011, the day of rage, the day the Arab Spring ignites.

  My mom is dead. I am alone, far from home. And a revolution has begun.

  LOVE

  Has it ever struck you that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going?

  —TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

  You Are Braver Than You Think

  JASON WRAPS HIS LEAN BODY AROUND ME AND SQUEEZES me tightly. It is July 8, 2010, the first night of our honeymoon. Some might mistake our embrace for passion, but mostly we are just cold on the floor of the Lima international airport, huddled together for warmth.

  “Great honeymoon, sweetie,” Jason says through clenched teeth. His dark hair is rumpled, and his jawline is rough with stubble. Black-framed glasses sit askew on his face, one side of which rests against a sweatshirt turned pillow.

  He’s joking. But I do wonder how great this honeymoon will be, knowing we’re about to split up.

  Technically this trip to Peru is our first romantic getaway as a married couple. But it is also the launch of my yearlong trip around the world, an idea that took root as my mother entered the final stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

  I hatched the plan in 2009, ten years into my career in daily newspapers. Ten years of work and accolades—my desk was a mountain of notebooks and files, along with plaques for best reporter, best features writer, best column writing of the company—but ten years of telling other people’s stories, not my own.

  Even though the job brought me to Palm Springs, California, where I met interesting people, it felt like my world had telescoped into something small, insignificant. I couldn’t envision much beyond the nubby carpet walls of my newsroom cubicle. And travel? I barely made enough to cover rent in Southern California. How far could I get during my allotted two weeks of vacation?

  So the idea seemed wild at first: what if I quit my job and spent a year traveling the world to complete the journey my mother never had a chance to make?

  But as it began to marinate, the idea seemed less than wild. It felt necessary. My mom had a lot of goals, and she put them off to raise a family. To raise my sister, my brother, and me. Then she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2001, before she ever accomplished any of the things she wanted to do. By confining my life to my cubicle, wasn’t I making the same mistake my mother made? Why was I lingering when I could be living—the very thing my mom wanted most?

  Three yard sales, several plane reservations, and one resignation let
ter later, here I am.

  Even though my mom never created a formal bucket list, I’ve brainstormed nine things around the world that she wanted to do but didn’t. The plan is for Jason to spend three weeks with me in Peru, then return to California. After he is gone, I will continue on my own through South America, then Africa and Asia, checking things off my list for Mom and achieving a few of my personal goals too.

  I’ve never heard of anyone else leaving a marriage like this. Not on purpose, while it is still new and good and fresh. I am grateful Jason loves me enough to let me leave, but I know it’s a risk. This year of monogamous separation will either make us stronger or wrench us apart for good. It will prove that I can make one revolution of the planet and find my way home again.

  Or that I can’t.

  This part about sleeping at the airport was my idea to maximize time and money. We had been in motion all day long, driving from my friend’s house in Moreno Valley to the Los Angeles airport, then flying to Panama City, and then to Lima. Our flight arrived past midnight, and our next flight—a quick, one-hour hop to Cusco, Peru—is scheduled to board at 4 a.m. Since there are few budget accommodations within forty miles of the Lima airport, it only made sense to sleep in the airport for a few hours.

  “So when I vowed to be with you for better or worse … ?” Jason says.

  “Yeah, this is the ‘worse’ part.”

  Our sleeping situation appears to be common at this airport, where many international flights arrive late and the domestic flights begin early. The floor smells septic and is littered with the bodies of fallen travelers. The tired and weary are flopped across every possible surface, from the nicotine-stained couches in the smoking lounge to the air-conditioned corners of the food court. My attempt to find a quiet hallway was foiled by a few dozen snoring missionaries in matching red T-shirts.

  Jason and I finally found a spot on the floor near the glass wall of an internet café, a place remote enough to not have heavy airport traffic but not remote enough to put us at risk for a mugging.

  It turns out crashing on the floor of an airport is one of those things that seems reasonable enough until you actually do it. It’s not so great when your cheek is pressed against the tile, watching tumbleweeds of hair and trash roll toward your face.

  The floor is as frigid and hard as a slab at the morgue. As people walk past with rolling luggage, I can feel their footsteps in my bones. Every time my eyes close, a scratchy voice comes over the PA system to announce the next international flight or beckon tardy travelers.

  Jason and I attempt to sleep, but between us, we have just one sleeping bag. (He planned to rent a sleeping bag in Cusco, so he didn’t bother to bring one along.) We unzip my one-person bag and curl together underneath it. I am also clinging to my fifty-pound blue backpack, filled with all my clothes, supplies, and gear for the next year. I am literally sandwiched between everything I love and everything I need.

  “You know, other couples stay in four-star hotels for their honeymoons,” Jason says. But we aren’t like other couples, something I knew from the day we met.

  FIRST I SHOULD TELL YOU ABOUT THE DISEASE, BECAUSE that’s what set everything in motion.

  In the year 2000, I was working my first newspaper job out of college, living in Zanesville, a scruffy river town in Southeast Ohio, about two hours away from where my mom and dad lived in a suburb of Dayton. I returned home on the weekends for laundry and meatloaf, frequently enough to notice when my mom stopped wearing her trademark Revlon poppysilk red lipstick. She stopped cooking meals that resembled food. She was scattered and anxious. There was a neighbor’s red truck parked down the street, and Mom was convinced someone was spying on her.

  Then came the diagnosis that changed everything in her world and in mine. My vibrant, sixty-year-old mom’s life began to look like a scrapbook lived in reverse—fragments of memories and snapshots of people plucked away, the stretch of blank pages growing longer, more stark, empty.

  Over the next couple of years, my mom had a rapid acceleration of Alzheimer’s symptoms. The more she forgot, the more I wanted to gather memories while I still could, to make my time count, to fill the pages of my life. I made lists of what I wanted to accomplish, and I furiously tried to tick off all the to-dos. I moved to a city, got a job as a columnist and reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer, bought wine that came in bottles instead of boxes.

  Wait. Scratch that, because that makes it sound like I was doing something nobler than I actually was, which was avoiding the reality of my mom’s disease. I did whatever I could to dull the stupid, achy, hot hurt inside, a restless pain that was almost too unbearable to carry. I couldn’t face losing my mom piece by piece, so for the most part, I didn’t face it.

  Even though Cincinnati was just an hour away from my parents, I stopped visiting home unless it was necessary. I went out most nights and knew where to go for the after-parties after the after-parties. I dated people, but the wrong ones. And though I often felt bad, I relished feeling something.

  That is the context for what happened next: one morning I drove from Cincinnati to an airport hangar in rural Indiana and plunked down the money for my first skydive. I was scared, and I didn’t know what to do with my fear except hold it in my body and let it guide me out of an airplane.

  There are studies that suggest Alzheimer’s is inherited through the mother, and that terrified me far more than any skydive. The woman I loved most in this world, the woman who adored me more than anything in the world, might have already handed off the genetic mutation that will someday kill me.

  Who knows how long my own mind will last? I figured. Why not jump?

  My skydive was an accelerated free fall (or AFF) jump, which meant two instructors would exit the aircraft with me, one on each side of my body. They act as human training wheels, hanging on to my jumpsuit to offer stability and keep me from cartwheeling across the sky. Then, at 5,000 feet, I was supposed to deploy my own parachute and pilot it to the ground. The entirety of this routine, from exit to landing, was practiced during six hours of ground school, which is mandatory before an AFF skydive.

  For my jump, I requested that I be paired with anyone but “That Guy”—a shaggy-haired skydiver, ropy and energetic, who looked fresh off the set of a Mountain Dew commercial. He wore mirrored sunglasses, a grass-stained jumpsuit, and a dented helmet, which didn’t inspire confidence in his skydiving abilities. He didn’t say much, only shouted “Woo!”

  “That Guy looks crazy,” I said. As I gestured to him, That Guy made eye contact. He stuck out his tongue, winked, and made the hand gesture for “Hang loose!” I disliked him immediately.

  When the load manifested, I was assigned my two instructors—Bud, a compact, no-nonsense teacher, and That Guy, whose real name was Jason. My stomach lurched, knowing I was in the hands of this walking, talking sugar high. I didn’t want to go anywhere with him, least of all tumbling through the sky at 120 miles per hour.

  Jason high-fived me. I pulled my hand away quickly, crossing my arms in front of my chest.

  “Are you ready?” It was a question, but it came out like a pep-squad cheer.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I’m ready to jump out of a perfectly good airplane.”

  “Well, the plane’s not that good.” He smiled.

  Jason told the truth. There are no seats inside a skydiving aircraft. Seats waste space and add weight, plus pose a safety risk with all the handles and cords that hang from the rigs. So about fifteen of us sardined together on the floor, leaning against each other with legs splayed. I was positioned in Jason’s lap, his arms around me. Bud sat on my feet, which quickly grew numb. I looked around and saw the interior of the plane had been gutted, revealing patches of rust and exposed wires.

  It was so cold on the way to altitude that my fingers stiffened and my lips trembled. After practicing a round of hand signals, Jason leaned forward and whispered in my ear.

  “Are you okay?” he said.

  “Fine.”


  “Your face is gray,” he said.

  “I’m fine,” I snapped. “My face always looks that way.”

  At 13,000 feet we were at jump run, when the plane slows for jumpers to exit. One of the skydivers opened the door and leaned his head into the sky. He caught the wind in his mouth, lips flaring to expose his teeth and gums, something out of a horror movie. When he parted his teeth, his fat tongue thwacked against his cheek.

  The air that rushed into the plane sucked my breath away. My eyes widened, dry with panic.

  “Hey, this is your skydive,” Jason said softly. “It’s all about what makes you comfortable. If you don’t want to do this …”

  “I do.”

  The experienced skydivers sang, joyfully launching into the Johnny Cash classic “Ring of Fire.” Each time they sang the word “down,” my heart lurched a little more. Nervous, I leaned back on Jason for support. I trembled in his arms. He remained steady.

  “Hey, if you don’t want to jump, I’ll ride the plane down with you,” he said. “You don’t have to do this. Either way, it’s okay. Just relax.”

  He held his right arm in front of my face and made the skydiving hand signal for “relax.” It was a loose shaking motion, as if he’d just washed his hands and couldn’t find a paper towel.

  The plane circled the drop zone, where overlapping runways carved a large, definitive X into the landscape. One by one, the other jumpers waddled to the plane’s Narnia door and abruptly vanished, spirited away into another world. The suddenness and completeness of each disappearance made me gasp out loud. They were there. And then they were gone. Irretrievably gone.

  I thought about my mom and how she would never see the world from a plane window again. All the goals we chattered about, all the plans we made during late-night conversations, would forever be left unaccomplished, her dreams of travel unreached. She would die, certainly, though a significant part of her was already gone.