The Man in the Airport

Brendan Menapace
Nov 4 · 5 min read

“I need help.”

The voice repeated itself in the stale airport terminal, almost lost in the stew of 15 year old pop songs, crying children and overlapping gate announcements no one can actually understand.

I glanced up from the exhaustive discussion over the Phillies’ new manager I was reading on my phone to see it came from an elderly Korean man sitting across from me.

“I need help,” he said again, and then cracked a bright smile surrounded by white facial hair.

He couldn’t get the airport WiFi to load, and he was trying to look up the SEPTA schedule to get a train from the airport when and if we ever made it to Philadelphia. The Spirit Airlines flight scheduled for 2:37 was now scheduled for 6:16, getting us in around 10:30 p.m.

“Yeah, the airport WiFi is pretty shitty,” I told him. “You might just be better off giving up on that and using your cellular data.”

He smiled, thanked me, and found the schedule. I decided to eat up the next hour or so at the Mexican bar next to the terminal, which for some reason sold T-shirts.

I came back to the same terminal seat, now full of a couple of overpriced beers and in need of a phone charger.

Again, I slumped in the chair in silence, reading something that felt consequential on my phone. It probably wasn’t. I riffed with my friends in a group chat, I kept my girlfriend up to date on my now very late flight after about a week away, and I counted down the minutes until I could get on the plane.

I don’t remember how the guy struck up conversation with me again, but we both lamented the poor scheduling. In a tone as matter-of-fact as telling me the time, he told me how he needs to get to Philadelphia today.

“My wife might pass away.”

I thought it was his accent tricking me, and that I misheard him.

“She’s in a nursing home, and she fell,” he said. “My daughter says that there are 11 signs that someone is dying, and she was showing 10 of them.”

His wife, in her nursing home, had gotten up to go to the bathroom — something, based on what he said about her condition at 87, she should not be doing by herself. She fell, fracturing her tailbone.

“She laid there all night. They found her at 8 a.m. She never hit the button. We’re from Korea, and she still has those Asian characteristics in her. She says she didn’t want to bother anyone. She said the nurses were sleeping, and she didn’t want to bother them.”

He told me this with almost a level of disconnect from the story, as if he were recounting something on the news about some unfortunate stranger. I later learned that he was a doctor, which explains his blunt explanation of her accident, her condition, the gruesome details of how she’s, uh, going to the bathroom again. (My words, not his. He used gestures, too.)

But he then started telling me about their life together. She stopped school after high school, and pushed him to pursue education, which he did — two doctorate degrees’ worth. They raised four children (one of whom is married to a not-so-famous actor whom you’ve definitely seen, and he swears I look just like him. I disagree.)

He told me he was gone for a conference in Texas for a little while, and he’s going back to take care of her himself finally, fed up with the brutally expensive nursing home that has neglected his wife so much.

“She left her room to go to the bathroom over 100 times, but only got caught four times, the last time when she fell!” he told me. “Then she was in the wheelchair. She wouldn’t move. She stopped eating. She stopped everything.”

They all braced for the end, but he assured me, “She’s coming back now.”

He reached into the duffel bag next to him on the seat, shifted over a first aid kit and a box of acupuncture needles, and pulled out three 8.5x11” photos in plastic sleeves.

In the first, there were two much younger people smiling at the camera, surrounded by four children. Another was just those smiling kids, and the third was just that younger couple.

You see so many family pictures from the 70s or 80s where families are straining so hard to look happy. They’re all pissed off about being in whatever bullshit department store they got dragged to on that Saturday afternoon. They didn’t want to take the stupid picture anyway. They thought the store was charging too much.

This was not one of those pictures. This was a family that, at least in that brief snapshot from decades ago, was happy.

While I looked at the picture I realized something. He took these with him on a trip to a conference — full sized, laminated photos of his family.

“She pushed me to my education,” he said. “I got two doctorate degrees. We had four children together. I owe her a lot.”

For the first time during our talk he broke eye contact with me to repeat that, equally to himself as it was to me, as he leaned back into the chair.

“I owe her a lot.”

“You’re there for her now,” I told him, leaning forward a little to try to convey concern. “You’re going back to help.”

I hated how uncomfortable I felt trying to find something comforting to say to a guy who had been so open with me, a complete stranger. He smiled again, and I felt relieved that he seemed satisfied with that answer.

When I stood up to finally board, I was sort of in a haze thinking about him — about how I wish I would’ve said more to him. Mostly I was just touched by how much he loved the woman who “might pass away” a time zone away while he waits for a budget airline to get its shit together.

I sat, watching the people stream onto the plane, waiting for him so I could at least give him a smile while he squeezed through the aisle.

He walked onto the plane, already smiling at everyone like he was walking into a room full of friends he’s known forever, but he was traveling to see his partner in life die.

The man is a doctor. He knows that while it might not be today, it would likely be sooner rather than later.

And here he was on a flight four hours late that he paid 200 dollars more than he should have to get home “faster,” acting like he was getting on the plane for the vacation he won in a sweepstakes.

I couldn’t believe how content, even outright happy, he seemed. And during the flight, two phrases still rattled around in my head.

The first was his echoed statement of, “I owe her a lot.”

And the other gained more significance the more it rooted itself in the context of the story.

“I need help.”

That’s the phrase his wife felt she couldn’t say when she fell on the bathroom floor in the middle of the night, breaking her tailbone, potentially fatally injuring herself. But he looked at me, a stranger, when he couldn’t get the train schedule to load.

“I need help.”

Maybe it wasn’t entirely about the train schedule.

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