Thanksgiving in DC: Traveling After Loss
We went to DC for Thanksgiving this year to see my mom. It was the first time in about 7 years that we took Nash, and obviously it was Beckham’s first time out there.
If you read my post on grief, you know that we’ve made a point to grab life by the horns and start living again. That was our intention with this trip, and there’s more to come along that vein as well. But this was the first big thing we did. And it felt like it.
Travel was possible with Declan. It just required so much planning, risk, and energy that we had to choose carefully.
For the first time since Nash and Declan were born, we traveled without medical gear and the complexities that came with that. We still had a toddler.... And it felt like a breeze.
When we traveled with Declan, the planning that went into it was intense. I had to:
Get a travel oxygen concentrator from the supply company
Pre-register the oxygen with the airline and get approval
Print doctor’s notes
Make sure the oxygen batteries were charged
Ship supplies in advance
Pack monstrous amounts of supplies to bring with us (only so much could be sent in advance).
For shipping, we would label each box as 1, 2, or 3, and keep a list of what was in each box so that if one got lost, we knew what supplies we’d have to add to our list to bring with us. For the day of, we had another list. I would check that list 100 times against his medical supply order forms and what was in his closet to make sure we weren’t forgetting something. After all, if we forgot something, we were screwed. There are no stores that carry these things.
Then traveling itself felt like moving mountains. Even with shipping boxes in advance, the sheer amount of STUFF that we had to drag through the airport was obscene. We used a wagon when we went. There was no other way to haul it all.
I was recently talking about traveling with disabled children with someone on the Moebius Foundation Leadership team, and had to correct her when she said “well I assume it’s just getting to the check in counter that’s really hard, right? You can check most of those things, right?”
I chuckled, because that assumption makes sense if you haven’t lived it.
“No,” I said, “It’s not about if they let you check it. It’s what you do if they lose it. You can’t gamble on that stuff. At least, I couldn’t.” For us, the safest option was that it all came with us.
This time? I started packing the day before we left.
We knew we could go to the store if we did forget something, so the anxiety around leaving something critical behind was gone. We checked most of our bags.
We showed up an hour and forty-five minutes before the flight, instead of three hours.
We didn’t have to go to the check-in counter because of the oxygen concentrator.
The hardest thing about that trip was keeping a toddler entertained so that he didn’t scream bloody murder the entire way there.
It was surreal, navigating the airport like everyone else.
It was strange being back in DC. I got to see a friend that I met through the Moebius community - another mom of a medically complex kiddo. I saw family friends that I haven’t seen since 2018. I saw all of the work my mom has done to her house, and how much has changed in her neighborhood. It was both wonderful to be there and sad that it had been so long.
It was also freeing and painful at the same time to take a trip we just didn’t take when Declan was alive. Because the truth is we couldn’t. Not with a toddler and Declan and Nash. Not without bringing a nurse, and turning travel into a military operation with life-or-death consequences.
So we are learning to do things again. Ordinary things. Big things. Not as a victory lap. Not as proof that we’re okay. But as a way to keep going. And I know that the weird mix of relief, guilt, gratitude, grief, sadness, and joy is ok. We aren’t doing it wrong. We don’t love him any less. We’re just human.
