Leaving on Lufthansa

II Pause. 5:56 PM, July 21, 2014. We are taking off. The relentless nausea blurs my vision. I grip the armrests as our Lufthansa airbus ascends. II

I’ve had a pit in my stomach for days, which I have been filling mainly with gin. I’ve never been afraid of flying before, but ever since my alarm clock went off on Thursday morning and the ever-calm NPR newscaster voice announced the crash of Malaysian Airlines flight 17 near the Ukrainian-Russian border, I’ve been terrified. The disaster, it caused me to grieve.

Maybe I should clarify that statement. I have no connection to the people who perished on that flight, save for our common membership of the human race. From what I hear on the various Western media outlets, a number of the passengers were prestigious AIDS researchers en route to an international conference in New Zealand. There were college students, an athlete I think. Children: something like 90 little children (Liebe Kinder, as the German Lufthansa flight attendants say).

Such an unspeakable tragedy for the family and loved ones of the victims. My heart aches at the sight of the belongings strewn amidst the smoldering rubble while half-drunk Russian separatists rifle through the wreckage, unsealing the duty-free-bag liquors of the dearly departed. Pouring one out for the homies that ain’t.

A particular image haunts me. It was from yesterday’s Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room--the Sitch Room as one might call it. The video image showed singed socks, toiletries, a shitty airport newsstand paperback, a children's stuffed animals, all scattered across a field in the Separatist-controlled region of Donetsk, the whole area shrouded in a fog of sulphuric wreckage smoke.

Everyone I’ve encountered since news of the tragedy broke--the Verizon customer service rep, the Clerk at Radio Shack, family, friends, FB friends--they all have the same reaction when I say “Ukraine.”

“It’s not very safe there right now, is it?”

Even the TSA agent who interviewed me prior to boarding this flight to Frankfurt made a face when I told him that my final destination is Ukraine. Definitely not reassuring.

To be quite honest, I think that might be the source of my grief. For three days, I have grieved as if I were one of the passengers on that plane. As if I were saying goodbye to my father for the very last time, in the grand marble lobby of downtown Philadelphia Macy’s nee Wanamakers, above which his Federal Government office is located.

As if Dante and Luigi’s in South Philly was the last place that J and I would ever share a meal (and a damn good one at that!), as if I would never again take Hannah to the Francisville public swimming pool to do underwater handstands and dive for pennies. As if I would never again play fetch with Miles on our concrete slab of a patio, amid the hop plants and crepe myrtle, the lilacs, roses, tomatoes, citronella, lightning bugs, the dusky sky at that moment just before nightfall when the bats flutter out of rafters and hollows of trees. Brushing my hair, wiggling my toes, holding a downward facing dog, all as if for the very last time. Clearly I love to torture myself.

When you are faced with the remote possibility of losing everything, and this feeling gets amplified and distorted by fear and media frenzy, then reason gives way to morbid paranoia. I have to weep, so I can move past this. Believe you me, I am probably weirding out the other passengers as I cry to myself here in 28C. This is when I try to translate this ominous feeling of mortal uncertainty to a metaphorical musing about change: a part of me is dying. Well, maybe ‘molting’ is a better term to use.