With a son in Iowa, a daughter in Massachusetts, a full-time job in Aruba, and seasonal employments in Mongolia and London, our family’s travel plans can defy the most careful budgeting. Add parents and siblings scattered from Vermont to Seattle, and you can understand why we typically purchase nonrefundable fares—often one-way, on different airlines—to get around.
Last November, Sarah and I flew to New England for a long weekend, intending to return home on separate flights. But on the Friday after Thanksgiving, everything went sideways.
The day began at the hospital—not unusual for us. Over the five years since relocating to the Caribbean, we’ve frequently combined holiday visits with routine appointments. This time, however, a mammogram discovered lesions “highly suggestive of malignancy.”
As you can imagine, our first thoughts were not about travel. But in the ongoing world, we’d promised to return a rental car to Boston, spend Monday night in an airport hotel, and depart Tuesday for Aruba. Unwilling to forfeit all possibility of refund through inaction, we picked up our phones.
Dealing with the car was easy. I’d booked online, and a phone agent agreed to extend the discounted rate for another week. Sarah’s initial request for hotel cancellation, however, was denied. We’d both been crying, and I heard the catch in her voice as she restated the facts of her case. The customer-service rep eventually allowed that if the hotel manager would agree to a refund, then he would too.
So far so good, we thought. But when we began calling the airlines, our experiences diverged. Although the official cancellation policy on Sarah’s flight called for fees up to $150, she convinced the agent to grant full credit.
Trying to duplicate that feat, I heard only that the penalty was unavoidable, though I would not be charged until making a new reservation. Continued appeals were met with the same boilerplate pronouncement: the airline does not waive fare rules for illness. I gave up temporarily, wondering if some inside knowledge had influenced the outcome of Sarah’s call. (Twenty-five years ago, she’d managed an Australian travel agency.)
During our years of living and working overseas, we’ve rarely bought refundable tickets. Not because we enjoy the risk of losing money, but because we always go. For us, buying a ticket is its own commitment. If we feel strongly enough to deploy the credit card, then there’s no backing out. During a general strike in Kathmandu, we pushed our children to the airport in pedi-cabs.
But the more aggressive forms of breast cancer are not so easily evaded. Over the next few days, we would spend many, many hours at the hospital. As more tests were added to our itinerary, we realized that we wouldn’t be going home anytime soon. Three months after diagnosis, Sarah had yet to return to Aruba. I went back just long enough to gather our tax papers—and our Labrador retriever.
In the end, after modifying six separate reservations on four different airlines, we remain in negotiation over only one fee: a $200 charge on our son’s January ticket. At first, the airline requested a letter from Sarah’s physician. A refund was promised in March, allowing “7 business days” for processing. In June, after several unanswered emails, I phoned the refund department. The operator suggested that I request a call-back (by email, no less). Six months later, we’re still waiting for that call.
Soldiering on in a military-oncology complex that defines the struggle for health as war, Sarah and I prefer the role of noncombatants. To our minds, cancer is neither enemy nor adversary, but a condition to be survived, more like an airport lounge than a theater of conflict. And perhaps the same will be true of the refund department.
In any case, I don’t want to make light of the situation. Say what you will about cancer, it can’t help but bring new possibilities into your life: unexpected prospects for pain, undeniable opportunities for gratitude.
Although it might seem as if the whole point of our lives has been motion, Sarah and I know that the journey stops somewhere. The fixed unknowability of that point—and its inexorable gravitational pull—is the dark matter of our lives: immeasurable in the aggregate, terrifying in the individual.
Perhaps it’s precisely that fear which drives some to avoid travel’s uncertainties—and others to embrace them. I sometimes wonder which is the wiser choice, but not often. In May, Sarah completed a second course of chemotherapy; in August, we celebrated her last dose of radiation. On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, a year since diagnosis, her doctors reported no sign of recurrence.
No doubt we will continue to purchase airline tickets in our familiar fashion: last-minute, one-way, nonrefundable. It would feel too risky to stop now.
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