One More Trip

Dr. Walt Sander has spent years listening. As a psychologist in a quiet Midwest city, he has held the interior lives of his clients with steady, careful hands-sitting with grief, with chronic pain, with the long work of rebuilding after loss. His clients trust him completely. None of them knows he is dying. When a cardiologist delivers a diagnosis of chronic cardiomyopathy, Walt does what he has always done with difficult information: he thinks it through carefully, makes a list, and decides what to do next.
His father's inheritance sits in a bank account, saved against a catastrophe that never came. The catastrophe is here now. Walt buys a red Porsche he should have bought twenty years ago, closes his office for a month, and sets off alone. His clients are people who live with physical limitations, and he has carried their trust for years. He isn't going to become their burden. He keeps the secret with the same care and discretion that he has always kept theirs-and in this way, ONE MORE TRIP becomes something both heartbreaking and deeply affirming: the story of a man who gave everything he had until the very end, and who found, in the last chapter of his life, that he had also lived.
ONE MORE TRIP is a story about the full weight of a life spent in service to others, the courage of a man who chose joy even in his last season, and the ordinary human miracle of being truly, lastingly known. For readers who have ever been held steady by someone else's quiet dedication, this novella is a tribute to every person who sits in the chair and listens until the day they cannot. It is based on a true story.