Finding family
Eleven years ago, on February 1, 2015 I sat down grumpily in a dreaded middle seat on a flight from Phoenix, Arizona to Philadelphia. The dramatic chain of events that followed changed my life forever
Addie Purnell, my second mother
PCB Central is a blog by Wharton Professor Peter Conti-Brown on a wide range of topics from the technical (about banking, finance, central banking) to the personal (about PCB’s journey through life as an athlete, father, reader, Christian & Latter-day Saint, amateur epistemologist, and more). Paid subscribers have access to this full post, my full archive of hundreds of essays on these varied topics, and a separate email with a conversational narrated overview of the post, plus more. Tell your friends, subscribe below.
Note: this post is adapted from one I published in November 2024. Every other month or so I will dip into my archive for posts over a year old that I want to amplify for new readers. I am posting this one for my paid subscribers, with a new conversational audio narration coming separately. I hope you enjoy it.
The Conti-Browns have always practiced an extended conception of family. Our dearest friends earn the moniker “Uncle” or “Aunt” irrespective of their relationship to us by blood or marriage. This has led to some questions from the young ones: is Uncle Britton really your brother? But it is also an occasion for us to explain ourselves, that ethos about family, that reality that family is the people around you that provide your world with strength and meaning, wherever and however and whenever they came into your life.
No one illustrates this reality in my life more than Addie Purnell. Eleven 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.
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 eventually for an airline and, with Addie, starting a side business ferrying out-of-towners to and from Ocean City (still going strong, all these years later).
With his jaunty cap and unusual wit, Harris was a fixture in Salisbury. “How are you, Harris?” came the usual question. “Same old soup, just warmed up,” came one common answer.
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, with a layover in Phoenix.
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 working on my PhD in financial history at Princeton while also practicing law. 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, but only there. Free advice to budding academics: this is not the way to do it. I applied to only six schools, all elite, and no one was buying what I was selling. I had no job offers, mounting debt, and uncertainty everywhere. My usual self-confidence as a young scholar was shattered. This led, perhaps ironically, to even more self-absorption. The opposite of my plucky self-regard was not humility, but a sense of self-absorbed worthlessness. This plummeting ego made me quiet, introverted, grumpy, bad company. My brother asked me to stay longer than the 24 hours I had booked to be with him, but I declined, because I felt too busy and too stressed.
I boarded the plane in Salt Lake City in that fog and funk, heading to Princeton by way of a layover in Phoenix and the airport in Philadelphia.
Even in the best of times, I should be clear, 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 over meeting new people. Cocktail parties are torture for me. Business dinners could all be reduced in time by 75% with great profit.
Nowhere is that introversion 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’m not listening to anything. 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. I assumed my seatmate was flying alone.
An emergency onboard
I quickly put my headphones in (yes, without music), grabbed my Kindle, and alternated between reading and dozing. After a few hours, I woke up in a start to Addie 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 the divine urging you 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, work in my PhD program, a court deadline for a brief I had not finished, a job talk—one of only two I had secured—that was looming soon thereafter. Who knows how long she was going to be in Memphis?
Deplaning, together
The mental and spiritual 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. Still I hedged. 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.
