Put your own mask on first

“I cannot live without my life!” –  Emily Brontë

I fly a lot. And even so, it’s a lot less than I used to fly.

Me and my Delta -Ultra -Flying -Too -Much -Not -Living -The -Life -on -the -Ground Super Platinum Card, that sad testament to life way too far above terra firma, see a lot of action in any given year. I pray to the gods of upgrades on a weekly basis, hunkered down over delta.com in vain hopes that the almost-full-adult-sized seat in the front with my name on it will become available. It’s as close to compulsive gambling as I’ve ever come, except for that sweet moment one evening in 1995 with my Kiwi friend Richard at a casino in Melbourne, but I was younger then.

I’ve grown so accustomed to the drone of the flight attendants telling me how to save my life in the case of a death spiral from 37,000 feet that I hardly listen anymore: honestly, isn’t what they tell you just to keep you occupied while going down? Would that flotation device really matter if we hit the water at 500 miles an hour, a last hobby? Could those little life vests with the fakey blow up whistles and flashing lights really help if we ditched in shark infested waters? And, by the way, do flight attendants monitor the alcohol consumption of people seated in exit rows, just in case? No, I thought not, given my Recent Encounter with Heavy Drinker Man in 18A, just one large inebriated human between me and that 40 pound pull down door.

Flying weeks after 9/11 (accomplished only with the help of Xanax) began a long internal dialogue for me: is it worth it? I’ve had problems with the idea of flying before: no, it’s not natural for so many people to be so far above the earth winging their way from New York to Bombay in a lighted metal tube with microwave ovens, small bottles of alcohol, and gale force toilet suction. And the counterarguments always rang false: “But you’re not in control, the pilot is!” people would say to me cheerfully, as if that would make me more comfortable about the prospect. “Exxxxactly,” I’d counter. “That’s my problem with it. I want to be in control if I’m going to be perched on the precipice between cloud and sod.” Hence my dear husband’s recent birthday gift to me: flying lessons.

As my friend Rosemary wrote after learning of this genius gift: “Ye who has more fear of flying than anyone I know, taking flying lessons? Ye whose deepest fear is being sucked out of an airplane at 30,000 feet? Ye who carries a coke-can size breathing apparatus so you won’t suffocate evacuating the burning plane. What in the world?  Are you facing your fears? Trying to harness the ultimate control over them? I see you now, wrestling the wheel from the pilot in an emergency.” Yes, she knew immediately that the flying lessons were intended to empower me to save a Boeing 777 from going into a death spiral when the pilot has a massive heart attack or aneurysm or allergic reaction to those damned peanuts and is slumped over the controls unconscious. No, I don’t have any control issues, but thanks for asking.

The flight that slammed into the Pentagon on 9/11 was my flight, the flight I always take when going to Los Angeles to see my friends, the Gubes. Since then, I have put myself onto that doomed flight many times, a bare split second away from actually being there in my mind’s eye, imagining my last moments, that surreal realization of ending, so quickly, so fruitlessly, so horribly, knowing and being unable to change the course of events, luck and good living run out— it would have been a real shock not only that I was dying but that I had finally met my match. Surprise at the lucklessness of it, impossibly surprised, and quickly so, those regrets, that incomprehension, unbearable to imagine, the horror of what I would leave behind, a legacy of pain for my family, those motherless girls, big ineffable gaps of ache, irreplaceable anguish, all in one moment’s time.

And a lesser but still vivid horror of extended and violent turbulence on the way from Atlanta to Asheville late one night, the kind in which no one can speak, where you grasp onto the arm rest to stay in your chair, too shocked to wildly attempt a goodbye note on an air sick bag, to mentally calculate in small and frantic and not altogether straight mathematical columns how little you’re getting paid per hour to risk your life if you count in all the dry cleaning and child care that makes it possible to go on the road. And, of course, that near death crash-landing from 37,000 feet when the hydraulic system failed on the plane. I’ll save that happy story for a future 37days entitled “Choose your seatmates carefully.”

But it was during a flight with my older daughter, Emma, that I felt compelled as a Parental Unit to pretend that the safety instruction was Important and Vital Information (which it is, I know, yes, even in my heart of denial) and in that vein, I followed her lead as she reached for the laminated emergency procedure placard in the seat pocket in front of us to follow along, as the nice woman suggested.

Emma was struck by the drawing of people jumping out of the plane onto the emergency chute: “I guess you can’t touch the chute,” she said, quizzically, and—knowing her—worriedly wondering how she could achieve this feat. “What do you mean?” I responded, half listening and half focused on finding the audio channel for “Stuck on You,” our happy and mindless in-flight movie. “Well, there are all these people jumping out of the plane, but none of them is touching the chute.”

Indeed, all those small business people without shoes were levitating in a nicely proper seated position over the bright orange slide that was stuck at a wild angle out of the plane door, as if they were all allergic to latex. No wonder she was worried—how do they stay in that position a good three feet above the slide? And where are their shoes and all that junk they lug onto planes and hit me with as they go down the aisles? Is it possible his precious laptop with those chunky Powerpoint slides about market share would be left behind by that the loud-talking businessman in 17E (whose cell phone conversation provided me not only with his birth date and Social Security number, but his recent health history, marital status, cell phone number, immunization records, and future plans for international travel)? I think not. And it all looks so orderly on the laminated card—somehow I doubt that the death slide would be so, having watched a group of people try to get into a Jethro Tull concert in my earlier days when only music and not life was at stake.

What I did hear clearly for the first time on that flight with Emma was the following instruction: “in case the oxygen mask falls from the compartment above your head, put your own oxygen mask on first and then help others around you.”

Put your own mask on first.

It was as if I had never heard that instruction before.

Because if you don’t, you’ll be of no use to others around you who might need your help. There are only 17 seconds of consciousness when the oxygen fails on a plane. Seventeen seconds and then you’re of no use to anyone.

Perhaps it is advice as helpful at ground zero as it is that far up above the clouds. Indeed.

How often we ignore that wisdom. Immersed in a life happily spent taking care of others – in one form or another—either as a parent or a child or a lover or a partner or a teacher—we forget sometimes to take care of our own needs, and don’t put ourselves first for fear of being called selfish. Not to our face, of course, but in those quiet moments when people make infallible pronouncements about others, the kind that allow for no ambiguity: he’s selfish, she’s self-centered, using interpretive words to measure someone else’s outside from our own inside, tinged perhaps with our own longing, our own set of insecurities or inadequacies, knowledge of our own faults and idiosyncrasies, our own fears.

Sometimes I wonder if taking care of others—saving others—saving the plane from its death spiral—is simply a diversion from saving ourselves. If I focus on you, I don’t have to focus on myself. And maybe saving others deprives them of their own agency, their own humanity. Does repeatedly picking up a friend from the police station after they’ve been arrested for Driving Under the Influence really save them or does it merely reinforce your own self-image as Savior? As Anne Lamott said in Bird by Bird, when a wife tells of picking up her husband from the front yard so the neighbors won’t see him passed out there, drunk, a woman tells her, “honey, just leave him there where Jesus flang him.”

Nurturing my own self first in order to be healthy and better able to help others. What would that look like? It would probably look a lot like scheduling time at the gym just like I schedule taking kids to tuba lessons and birthday parties. It might resemble even a solitary trip to the library or a lunch with adults or a bubble bath without animals or children as rambunctious witnesses. Imagine.

~*~ 37 Days: Do it Now Challenge ~*~

If you’re constantly saving other people, slow down long enough to put your own oxygen mask on first. If you lose consciousness, you won’t be any help to them. Breathe deeply first. Be selfish in order to be selfless.