Moving and dying

Even in my youth, when I moved from one place to another I thought of how like dying it was. You go through old things, getting rid of most of them, and it takes a long time to do it. 
Now that I'm dying I see that I was right. Of course, it's much worse because dying is an end, not a change.
Today I cleaned out my bedroom closet. A large bag of clothes went to Goodwill. Eighty pounds of weights went to a used sporting goods store, which gave me $20 for them. In the closet were letters I both wrote and received from my college years in the late 1970s to my years abroad, which were from 1985 to 1990. 
Does anyone at age fifty-nine like the person they were thirty-years ago? I don't. My letters to my parents were too often filled with bitterness at not being able to find employment that meant something to me. 
There were happy times, of course, but the bad ones stand out because I want to go back in time and do them over but I know I can't.

Me, far right, in Shanghai, China, 1985.

The first picture is of me in Shanghai in February of 1985. I'm on the far right. The Chinese man is the one who hired me to teach at a technical institute in Guizhou. He spoke excellent English which he used and developed, he said, as a young man during the Korean conflict, during which he "interrogated" captured U.S. Army soldiers. He was a gentle, kind man named Wang Jong Je, and I like to think that verbal questioning was all that he did, but he may well have been party to doing other things. The man on the far left was another teacher, who was fired halfway through his one-year at the same university. The woman was there to help Mr. Wang (pronounced "Wong," by the way) get us from Shanghai to Guiyang. 
The second picture is a little over a year later and is of me in Nagoya, Japan, where I taught

Me, second from the right, in Nagoya, Japan, 1986.

for three years, after my one year in China. The man on the far left is Tony Johnson, who became a good friend. Tony was from Ireland but he's lived in New Orleans since 1990. The man on the far right is named Andrew, who was British. All three of us taught at a small pay-by-the-hour English school for awhile. Andrew and I got along well enough, but we were never good friends. The woman making the peace sign—a typical thing young Japanese people do when photographed—is Masami Kodaira. I think this was taken after she and a friend named Yumiko, to her right, had performed in an amateur dance recital. Masami and I became good friends early on and remained good friends until I left Japan in February of 1989. We corresponded for awhile afterward, but it fell off in the early 1990s and I have no idea what became of her. I hope she had a good life, with love, marriage, and children, which I think is what she wanted.
When you get rid of things in the place where you live, at times you think to yourself, there is more air in this place now than there was before.