One Way Ticket

He disappeared in the dead of winter: 

The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, 

And snow disfigured the public statues; 

The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.

What instruments we have agree 

The day of his death was a dark cold day. 

W. H. Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" 

On the afternoon of November 7, 2007 - yesterday - I departed Anchorage, Alaska on a Northwest flight to Manila, arriving on November 8 - today - some time around noon. 15 years have passed. I can't let this day go by without apostrophizing it. 

On that day my sister drove me to the airport across a town already locked in ice and the sky was overcast. The road that goes past the two terminal buildings was one-way, and we missed the Northwest Airlines entrance and had to go all the way back around to find it. I lost my temper at my sister because travel makes me so anxious that I can't relax until I'm checked in, sitting near my gate and awaiting boarding instructions. I didn't think what that drive meant to my sister and how it would affect her. I didn't think about what her long drive home without me must have been like, to an empty house (except for Lucky, her dog) on Caress Circle, where I had been living with her for nearly two years. Within months she would lose the house to Wells Fargo's foreclosure. And my dear sister would never see me again. She died of heart failure on October 27, 2016. It had to be heart failure, didn't it? 

As soon as I was checked in, I made my way to the airport lounge and ordered a drink. All my attention was fixed on what lay ahead of me. I had been planning the trip, my sixth trip to the Philippines, since 2005. I had told my sister about it from the beginning, from when I moved in with her just before Christmas in 2005. I had a small disability pension from the VA, which had been eating at my consciousness ever since I started drawing it. The thought of quitting my job and going to live on my pension in a poor country was utterly tantalizing. As I told my sister, I hadn't given up on life just yet. She assured me that she hadn't, either.

If I could change one thing, I would never have got on that plane. I was 49 then and I'm now 64. In a few months I'll be flying back to the States - not to Anchorage but to the other side of the country, Maine. This time I won't be coming back. The fascination that this place had for me when I visited in 1993 and on five subsequent occasions over the years is long gone. 

Bye bye, PI.