Finding Addie

This is a story of how I met my second mother, Addie Purnell, in a night that changed my life

My second mother, Addie Purnell

Last week we entertained a beloved friend and her children for the weekend. She is our kids’ “aunt” not by blood or marriage, but by an intense bond of friendship that has become like family. Our 8-year-old asked, after she left, if her son of the same age is really his cousin, if she is really his Aunt. It was a great opportunity to talk about the Conti-Browns’ broad sense of “family,” which includes brothers and sisters by blood and marriage and remarriage and adoption and bonds of lifelong friendship.

It reminded me of a defining experience of my life. Almost ten years ago, my children gained another grandmother and I gained another mother. Today’s personal essay is about the swirls of fate that allowed me to find her.

I thought initially about writing about the election. I have been thinking of little else since Tuesday. But I am so weary of the topic, which will dominate my thinking for a long time to come.  Instead I want to write about one of the great beauties and bounties of our world: finding family in unexpected places. This is the story of Addie Purnell, how I became her sixth child and she my second mother, and what that has meant to both of us.

Addie and Harris

Addie’s story (which I share with her permission) begins for our purposes in 1958, when Addie met her husband Harris near Salisbury, Maryland.  Much to her father’s regret, they immediately fell in love and dated on the sly until they could marry three years later. This was the south during the height of the Civil Rights Movement; for an African-American couple like Addie and Harris, it was a reality of law and practice that their efforts to improve their lives would confront huge barriers. Despite these harsh conditions, Addie and Harris went to college, started their lives, and started a family. Harris eventually took a job in customer service at the Salisbury, Maryland Airport. Harris was a jack of all trades at the airport, working in time for an airline and, with Addie, starting a side business ferrying out-of-towners to and from Ocean City. With his jaunty cap and unusual wit, Harris was a fixture. “How are you, Harris?” came the usual question. “Same old soup, just warmed up,” came one common answer.

They were pillars of their community. Everyone knew them and their growing family of three sons and two daughters, their children, and their children’s children, almost all of whom live within 20 minutes of Salisbury.

In January 2015, Addie and Harris took their first vacation in a dozen years, to visit Harris’s brother in California. They had a wonderful week, and on February 1, they started their journey home, by way of Phoenix and Philadelphia.

The middle seat out of Phoenix

That weekend, I was in Utah for a quick visit to my brother and his family for my niece’s baptism. It was a stressful time for me. I was a practicing lawyer and working on a PhD. What’s more, my wife and I were in the midst of an intense two-career coordination, with my wife applying to graduate schools while I applied for law and business professorships at the same universities. It wasn’t going well for me. I had no job offers, mounting debt, and uncertainty everywhere. My usual levels of self-absorption were getting high and dizzy as I boarded the plane in Salt Lake, heading to Philadelphia by way of Phoenix, looking down the barrel of another insane week.

Here's another confession. I am an introvert. I can turn it on at parties or at a conference or in the classroom, but the old test of whether large groups fill up your bucket or drain it is easy for me to assess. I would vastly prefer to sit quietly and read to meet new people. Nowhere is that more common than on an airplane. I have even been known to put on my headphones when a seatmate starts to pick at a conversation with me, even when I don’t have anything to plug them into. I’m just a little bit shy and a little bit crabby any time I am traveling (and at other times, too).

To make matters worse on this particular flight, a combination of fog in Phoenix—I didn’t know this was a thing—and the Super Bowl in that city on that day meant that we were delayed for hours and almost didn’t make it out of Phoenix at all. As I finally found my seat—a dreaded middle seat on a long flight after hours of delays—I looked expectantly at the empty aisle seat and hoped that it would stay that way.

It almost did. But because Harris was a career employee of the airline, he and Addie flew free so long as they were willing to fly stand-by. So it was on February 1 that Addie sat down next to me, Harris a couple rows ahead, as the last two on the flight. I didn’t even notice Harris; I was too grumpy about not having an extra seat.

An emergency onboard

I quickly put my headphones in (yes, without music), grabbed my Kindle, and alternated between reading and dozing.  After 2-3 hours, I woke up to Addie jumping up, running toward Harris, then yelling for help. Harris had stopped breathing. She had watched her husband coming out of the bathroom looking dazed, almost blank. Moments later, he slumped over in his seat.

The flight attendant asked if there was a physician on board, and an EMT sprinted to the front of the plane where we were sitting and started chest compressions. It was an agonizing three rounds of compressions before Harris gave even a faint pulse. The pilot announced that we were being diverted to Memphis for an emergency medical stop.

As Addie sat back down next to me, she shook in sobs. I ached for her, powerless. My fatigue, work anxieties, and introversion were snapped away from me in a moment, and I felt strongly what Latter-day Saints call a “spiritual prompting,” a call from divinity to do more and be more in a specific moment. The thoughts came: “You need to deplane with her. This is overwhelming for one person. She needs to focus on her husband until her family can join her. Get off the plane.”

Even as my heart broke for this stranger, I immediately felt that this was a spiritual misfire. I didn’t know her name. We hadn’t spoken a word. And I didn’t want to impose on her during her time of grief. I silently prayed as much—this is not my place. I felt it would be rude for me to insert myself into her life. And, I’m embarrassed to admit it, I thought of the mountain of work waiting for me in the week ahead. Who knows how long she was going to be in Memphis?

Deplaning, together

The rebuke came quickly. “Get off this plane.” I have felt such direction few times in my life and did not want to reject it lightly. I turned to my seatmate and spoke to her for the first time. “I am so sorry this is happening to you. Do you know anyone in Memphis who can help you through this?” She didn’t even look at me, but kept crying, her head in her hands. “Not a soul,” she whispered.

I took a deep breath: “Would it be helpful to you if I came with you to help with all the details at the hospital and airline and hotel? I want to respect your privacy, and won’t do it if that would be uncomfortable or disrespectful. Would you like me to come with you?”

She looked up, gripped my hands powerfully and, still weeping, said “Would you do that for me?” I said that I would. For the next twenty minutes or so of our descent, we sat hand-in-hand, and introduced ourselves to each other. When we arrived in Memphis, we left, the three of us—Harris on a gurney, with me and Addie following behind.

Harris died on the way to the hospital. For the next 24 hours, I barely left Addie’s side. We spent most of the night in the hospital where I coordinated the logistics, from the required police report to the interactions with the medical examiner, hotels to the airline, mortuaries, and more. There are an impolitely large number of decisions you have to make when a loved one dies; those decisions increase by an order of magnitude if he does so on an airplane.

I made sure to give her privacy throughout the night so she could grieve without my hovering, but also kept the avalanche of information to a trickle so that she could make the decisions one at a time. Addie learned in our initial conversation on the plane that I was a lawyer, and she saw that I was wearing a Stanford ball cap. For the rest of the night, she introduced me as “This is Peter, he’s my lawyer from Stanford.” I would then briefly explain how we met and then handle the matters at hand. This gave me added credibility when I had to get a bit tough with a well-meaning but overly solicitous mortician who showed up offering a steep discount on his irrelevant Memphis-based services. Luckily, I didn’t have to threaten any lawsuits on Addie’s behalf. My lawyer’s stink-eye was enough to get him in line.

The miracles of the evening

Three memories of that extraordinary night stand out to me especially. First, was Addie herself. She was simply majestic in the hours of her most intense grief. She treated everyone in this tragic scene with care, respect, attention, and comfort. She wept, of course; I will never forget the sounds of this widow’s pleas with God for her husband’s restoration. Her heart was broken, her partner and best friend dead at her side. And yet, on the phone with her five children and many others, and in person with the nurses, social workers, doctors, and many others, she was the physical embodiment of comfort to them all. This angelic woman bore others’ grief alongside her own. Everyone who met her during that day left, I am certain, with the same impression I had: we had interacted with a holy person.

Second, at one point in the night, the hospital chaplain came to be with her. Both the chaplain and Addie are from a black evangelical Protestant tradition, obviously different from my Latter-day Saint religious experience. The chaplain led us in prayer, in a circle around Harris’s body, leading us in a chorus of Amens and Praise Gods. That’s not how Mormons pray, I can tell you. And it was beautiful, soaring, mournful, and hopeful, one of the most spiritual experiences of my life. I felt such a profound connection to Addie as we held hands, comforting each other though race, gender, age, religion, and more separated us.

And last, a couple hours later, probably around 2am, Addie was weeping softly on my shoulder and starting to drift as we waited for the police report and medical examiner to conclude so that we could get a little sleep. As we stood there with my arm around her, Harris’s body two feet away on the hospital bed, my mind wandered to the week and month that awaited me. The demands from my law practice, graduate school, my job search, my wife’s professional plans, and much else had become such a weight on my soul rather than an expression of my life’s purpose.

The point of PCB

In that moment, in an emergency room in Memphis with this loving couple broken by death before me, these burdens were lifted almost by miracle. Looking at Addie, reflecting on what she had just faced and how she still managed to touch everyone with her goodness and love, I saw a sense of my life and its purpose that I had not seen before. The point of Peter Conti-Brown was not to get a job, or finish my PhD or find financial stability. My point was right there next to me in Memphis and waiting for me in Princeton. The purpose of my life was to connect with the people around me on a more deeply human level than the rough-and-tumble of my professional pursuits typically allowed.

The next afternoon, Addie and I headed back to Philly and met her family. Her son, ten years older than me, a big man who didn’t look like either the hugging or crying type, embraced me closely and wept as he whispered the words: “I will never forget you for what you did for my Mama.” As I said goodbye to my dear friend and her family in the Philadelphia baggage claim, I cried, too, thinking about how much her gentle goodness and the privilege to participate with her in a day as holy as this had changed my life.

A week later my family and I went to Salisbury for Harris’s funeral. During the funeral, the preacher told our story and referred to me as Addie’s guardian angel. As I sat there with the other 700 people who came to pay their respects and show their love for Harris, Addie, and their family so completely, I felt again God’s love for this sweet family. And looking at Addie, I felt His powerful love for me and my family. Here I realized this profound truth: even in her moment of grief, Addie had been receptive to “spiritual promptings” of her own to include and give comfort, to me and to the many others who were blessed by coming into her orbit that tragic February night.

Addie and I are still close. This summer, two of my sons and I joined her and her extended family at a family reunion. We will have lunch with her next week in Salisbury. Her children call me their baby brother; my children call her Grandma Addie. We have found through every conceivable barrier family connections that will last us the rest of our lives. In the process, we have peeled back a few layers of life to discover meaning and purpose that aren’t easily discoverable in other ways.