If all goes according to plan, on April 8, our 75-year-old mother, Nancy, will be settled into a lawn chair in Waco, Texas — some 1,300 miles from her recliner in Las Vegas — and joining a great many other Americans as they put on solar eclipse glasses, tilt their heads up and try to make sense of what’s happening in the heavens.
None of this was a given. Fiercely independent and more than a little skeptical of hype, fads and feverish mass events, our mother is not what you’d call a joiner. Like many of her generation, she has seen a lot in life; she knows what it’s like to have high expectations and be let down. But she also knows the coming eclipse is neither trend nor fad. Planning to see it has united our family in a desire to participate in a mass event that is a wonder of the world.
Part of the drive to take our mother to Waco is the hard truth of time. Partial eclipses come and go, but the next awe-inspiring and captivating total eclipse will not be seen again in the contiguous United States until 2044. Our mother is in variable health and disabled. Absent good luck and medical advancements, odds are heavily stacked against her living to see another one.
Retirement for our mom came with familiar features — more time for her hobbies, rooting for her favorite teams and vacations that cater to disabled individuals. But this planned excursion is different. A cruise can bill itself as a “once-in-a-lifetime adventure” and then offer many dates on the calendar for the same adventure. No matter how many exhilarating experiences a person has collected in 75 years, this one will stand apart.
Her body may be broken, but our mother is still the experience-seeker she has always been. She left home at 18 for a college a thousand miles away, traveled alone to the Middle East and never met a boat, big or small, she didn’t love.
These days, our mom can barely walk. She moves around via a scooter. Her back is so damaged from osteoporosis and an unsuccessful surgery that she cannot sleep, stand or sit without pain. Still, she remains the same stubborn and determined person she has always been. Years ago, this meant going to law school at the age of 40, traveling the world as a divorced single woman and starting her own business just shy of her 50th birthday. Now it means bristling when we mentioned that we are coming from our homes in Massachusetts and California to “take” her to see the eclipse.
“I decided I was going, so I am going,” she told us. “Compliant” and “rule-following” are words not generally used to describe our mom. It wasn’t true when she was a girl at Catholic school, and it certainly isn’t true now with her adult children.
As for us, we don’t always feel like dutiful children. Sure, we send flowers for Mother’s Day and her birthday. We try to speak at least weekly with our mother, but we also frequently end up in yelling matches over politics. In those moments, we tell her she has lost her mind, and she wonders aloud where she went wrong in raising us. Although we visit every Thanksgiving and Christmas, we have never vacationed together as adults. The daily demands of work and our own children long ago got in the way, and those yelling matches are wearying. It’s easy to end a phone call. It’s much harder to stop an uncomfortable conversation at the dinner table.
Despite all that, we have spent more than a year making the arrangements to escort her to this phenomenon of nature. Flights, rental cars and a wheelchair-friendly rental house have been booked since last spring. Most important, we identified an eclipse event at Baylor University in Waco that could handle my mom’s needs while giving us the best chance to view the eclipse under clear skies. We asked the organizers so many questions about walkways, bathrooms, seating and parking that a representative replied via email, “I can see you are putting a lot of thought into making this happen for your mom.” It is a lot of planning, but then my mom (and dad) did the same for four children. Our childhood was filled with trips to see the birthplaces of presidents, Thomas Edison’s workshop, Civil War battlefields, the U.S. Mint and more. Now, like many people in their 40s and 50s, we’ve reversed our roles.
Our mother stayed home when two of her children viewed the solar eclipse in 2017 in Jackson Hole, Wyo. They came back with tales of an event so transformational, she knew she wanted to witness the next one for herself.
People who have never seen a total eclipse are often befuddled by all the hoopla. They most likely recall a partial solar eclipse from childhood — a vague memory of seeing a strange, shadowy impression of the sun through cheap paper sunglasses. But a total solar eclipse is a singularly spectacular phenomenon. The sky darkens, the temperatures drop, and birds fall silent. Viewers can stare directly in the direction of the sun without any eye protection for the minutes of “totality,” when the moon completely covers the sun. Indeed, the only time a human being can see the entire daytime sky is during a total solar eclipse. As Dr. David Grinspoon, now senior scientist for Astrobiology Strategy at NASA, explained to a reporter in 2017, “It’s like the veil comes off the heavens for a minute.” A total eclipse is so outside the realm of normal human experience that in the minutes of totality in 2017, we shouted out in delight and spontaneously hugged each other. Many of us that day had not fully understood that the universe could put on such a wondrous display.
Knowing all that, our mother is saving her strength. She booked a business class flight to Texas to ease her pain, and she is sitting out most of Waco’s pre-eclipse weekend festivities. She will skip the planned science talks. Instead, she will rest for most of the morning and plan to arrive on Baylor’s campus just in time to see the start of the eclipse.
We inherited the desire to explore our world from our mother. The need to care for her now is just as deeply woven into our psyche. Over the past year of planning, the eclipse became less about science for us and more about ensuring that our mother finally has this experience of a lifetime.
The post Our Mom Is 75. We’re Moving Heaven and Earth for This Eclipse. appeared first on New York Times.