Another Goodbye

I stood in my bedroom, the bedside lamp the only light, watching the red taillights on my old Suzuki light up as Michael put on the brakes and prepared to reverse out of my mother's driveway. A minute later he was gone and I was standing there, silent. It was just another goodbye.

The alarm went off at 5:15 am and I blearily stumbled out of bed, trying to wake up through enormous yawns and a few sneezes from the cold. After packing and tidying up the last bits and pieces, I had turned off my bedside lamp just after midnight, ready to get a few hours of sleep before interrupting my REM sleep. My brother would be leaving at 5:30 for his pilot training job and I wanted to spend a few minutes with him before he left.

I watched him microwave his oatmeal, then bag his three meals for the day along with an apron to catch the spills as he ate the oatmeal on his hour-long morning commute. Familiar in its constancy, though I'd not been up that early to watch him get ready to leave before, we made small talk as he prepared to leave. He finished a few minutes early and sat to chat a bit more, then we both fell silent. There was nothing more to say. It was a moment that had come all too soon and now we had to face it.

A couple of days ago, he'd handed me a book about a missionary pilot and encouraged me to read it, saying it was really interesting. In the midst of the adventures, I'd realized that what he would soon set out to do was even more terrifyingly dangerous than I'd wanted to think about. Prayer would need to be even more important. The last two pilots with more than 11,000 hours of flying did not fly out of their mission station alive; their lives were claimed by the jungles of Papua. Now my brother was preparing to answer his own call to the same station.

Would this be the last time I saw my brother? I wondered. Granted, the men were in their 50s or 60s, they had lived full lives with children and grandchildren. But just a week ago, a young native man in his mid 20s had been brutally murdered in a bizarre revenge-killing likely due to mistaken identity, in a remote area of Papua. Death came without notice. When it did; it was final.

When Michael began flight training, as my mother and sister and I anxiously watched his little toy plane toss into the air and somehow soar up to the heights, we began to learn the meaning of trusting God in a different way. My mother told me, as we thought about how mission flying was a high-risk calling, that if my brother died while flying for God it would be the best way to die because he would be working for God. Theoretically, I knew she was right. Emotionally, I wasn't ready to accept it.

Goodbyes are not my thing. They never have been. Perhaps that's why I either pretend they aren't happening, as I gave Michael a long hug, told him I loved him, and then smiled as he walked out the door, as if it was just another day. Or I have to say goodbye to friends before going on a short two-week vacation, as if I won't be seeing them for a year or more. Either way, I don't like to face or ignore the reality of the possible finality of it all.

My friend was driving me home before I'd left on my last trek to the US when I remembered I hadn't said goodbye to another friend I hadn't seen in 10 days. I asked if we could stop briefly, he looked a bit confused as to why it was necessary to stop just to give her a hug and say goodbye. He didn't understand, he couldn't understand, that my life had been a series of goodbyes, most of which were expected to be said with a smile on my face even if my heart had sunk to the bottom of my toes. He didn't know that I had to say goodbye because I couldn't say goodbye 20 years ago to all the people and places that were so dear to me. He didn't know that saying goodbye, now, had become a ritual of sorts because in saying goodbye it was my way to remind myself that soon I would be saying hello.

The last five times I'd taken to the skies from Beirut, heading out over the sparkling Mediterranean Sea, I'd prayed my little prayer that I always prayed. God, please bring me back. I was excitedly anticipating my next adventure, after all I was born with travel in my DNA, but I needed to come back. My goodbyes couldn't be the defining of my identity; I needed to know that my hellos were secure. Sure enough, soon I would return and though the long hallways and the baggage carousels still had to stamp themselves in my memory with their familiar smells, as I stepped up to the next available window and handed my residence permit and passport to the smiling immigration officer, I knew I was home.

Soon I would be walking through those glass doors that separated the in-between from the certain. Perhaps a taxi driver, or a friend, would be waiting for me, ready to drive me back through the haggle of cars and motorcycles and buses that made life in a city so stressful yet exciting at the same time. Soon I would be hefting my exactly-51-pounds suitcase up the two flights of stairs, 14, then 12, then 11, then 11, and rolling it to my door which I would unlock to a tidy little dorm room. Soon I would be messaging my family to let them know I'd arrived safely and then soon, my head would be on my pillow, my arm around my stuffed dog, and a smile on my face as I softly drifted off to sleep.

This living between worlds thing, I don't like it very much. I have had to learn to accept it because it is my reality. Just like my sister, I cannot live in a world so small I can see people on the other side of the glass cage I'm in and if I wipe the glass from my breath, I see them staring in at me, wondering why I am so very different from them. So I leave, to find my own knowing, but this means I must return to see family because it is those threads that also connect, tenuously, to the person I was and am today. I cannot measure my identity only in the place I am most at home; I find my home in the people who settle me and my family is very much a strong part of that. But to see them, I have to return.

So I learn to live with the regret and I learn to say goodbye, reminding myself that this is what people do often now. We say goodbye but then we say hello. In a few minutes, my brother will start his day while my sister, 16 hours away, is ending hers. I will be buckling my seat belt in a cylindrical metal box as I prepare to lift high above the ground and let the wind carry me to one of three airports in three countries today. The in-between will be my reality for 28 hours until I can settle back into the routine, exchanging one familiarity for another.

This is my life. It is not one I would have chosen but it is one I must live in order to breathe. So I say goodbye but in doing so I know. . .I will say hello.