Brockport native’s new memoir explores revisiting life while facing death

Mark Chesnut is an award-winning, New York City-based travel writer who was born and raised in Brockport. He is returning to the village later this month to discuss his new book, Prepare for Departure: Notes on a Single Mother, a Misfit Son, Inevitable Mortality and the Enduring Allure of Frequent Flyer Miles (Vine Leaves Press, 2022). 

Prepare for Departure is a memoir about a mother, a son, and the journeys that families sometimes must take together. It touches on complex issues, including death, grief, parent/child relations, growing up gay in the 20th century, self-acceptance and finding your place in the world. Woven through it all is humor. 

The mother in the story is Eunice Chesnut, who lived in Brockport for 60 years. She earned her undergraduate and master’s degrees after being widowed and while working and raising her children. Eunice was well-known in the community and served for more than 30 years as the historian of the Western Monroe Historical Society. During that time, she founded enduring community events like the Old-Fashioned Fourth of July Celebration and the annual Peddlers Market at the Morgan-Manning House. A prolific writer about local history, she had nine books to her credit, including a two-volume Encyclopedia of Brockport, which contains the stories of almost 2,000 people, back to the earliest settlers of the Brockport area.

Mark attributes his overwhelming wanderlust to his misfit childhood in Brockport with an indulgent upbringing by his mother. At an early age, he learned to dodge discomfort by jumping on the nearest plane, bus or car. That tactic proved especially useful when his mother made it clear that there was no room for discussion about his gay identity.

In 2015, 89-year-old Eunice moved to a New York City nursing home to spend her final weeks near her son. It was then that Mark embarked on the most emotional journey of all. “I hadn’t lived this close to my mother in more than 30 years. And now I was responsible for her life, health and death,” Mark said.

Prepare for Departure showcases what happened as the two of them faced death while revisiting life – from airport shoplifting to avoiding Southern Baptist salvation, from acting like Hillary Clinton in a nursing home to hanging with a dragged-out grandfather, from creating an imaginary airline to flying away and finding a place in the world. More than an end-of-life memoir, more than a collection of childhood memories and travel stories, the book takes readers on a trip – through time, through loss and through forgiveness and acceptance.

Mark said, “I wrote this book because I had to. My mother’s illness and physical decline made me really step back and look at my life and hers, and I was compelled to tell her story and mine in order to make sense of our lives and her impending death. It was therapeutic, and as I started sharing parts of my story, I realized it could resonate with a lot of other people who’ve gone through similar experiences, too.”

While the book deals with heavy topics, it is filled with humor, often dark humor. “I got my sense of humor from my family – especially my mother and my grandfather,” Mark said. “Humor can be used in a lot of positive ways. It can alleviate stress, reduce conflict and improve health. What’s the point of suffering if you can’t joke about it at some point? Gallows humor can work wonders!”

Mark has been a travel writer for more than 20 years and won the NLGJA Excellence in Travel Writing Award in 2019. He has written for Fodor’s, Forbes Travel Guide, HuffPost, the Miami Herald, Travel + Leisure Mexico, the New York Times bestseller 1,000 Places To See Before You Die, and the inflight magazines of Aeromexico, American Airlines and Avianca. He writes about Latin America in his travel blog, LatinFlyer.com, and regularly contributes to travel industry media outlets. Prepare for Departure is his first creative nonfiction book.

Travel publicist and author, Geoffrey Weill, describes Mark’s memoir as one that “explores a childhood, youth, and travel writing career through the prism of his mother’s caring, her eccentric rules, her fears for his future as a gay man, her parade of quirky relatives, and mostly through the lens of her final years in nursing homes. This is a story of a child who preferred designing his own airline to doing homework, and who understood that hotels and traveling could lead to adventures, passions and contentment. It is a story of unashamed love, and an unashamed thirst for travel that results in both success and fulfillment.”

When asked what it feels like to share his personal story rather than travel tips, Mark said, “I’m really exposing myself now. I want readers to get something from my story, to relate to it, laugh at it or learn something from it. It’s really cool to see how much we all have in common.”

Mark hopes the book helps others “by showing how you can come to believe in yourself and follow your life’s passions while coping with difficult situations, including the decline of a parent.”

A book reception and reading, hosted by the Western Monroe Historical Society and Lift Bridge Book Shop, will be held Thursday, September 29, from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Morgan-Manning House, 151 Main Street, Brockport. It is open to the public.

For more information about Mark Chesnut, visit http://www.MarkChesnut.com.

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