My husband Tom would be home from work within the hour to drive me to the airport for my flight to San Francisco where I was to meet up with my sister, my mother and my aunt for a "girls' week" in San Francisco.
I really needed to get up, get dressed, and get packing, but my heart wasn't in it. I'd been looking forward to this vacation when it was weeks away - though my mother was 81 at the time she was still the life of the party and my 76-year-old Aunt Mary could also still hold her own and regale us with her Aunt Maryisms (see posts from 5/30/2014, 6/2/2014, and 6/3/2014) - but when the trip was days away I started feeling differently: a week suddenly seemed too long to be away from my family.
For all my traveling nowadays, I never did any traveling back then. In fact in September of 2001, after 22 years of parenting, I'd never been away from home for longer than two or three get-away weekends (in town) with Tom during which we spent most of our time shopping for gifts to bring back for the kids, and a long weekend in Boston the previous summer with daughter Theresa to visit daughter Maria, who'd had a summer internship at the Harvard Arboretum.
So it wasn't that I was desperately needed at home - two of my children were away at college, one was in high school and one in 8th grade. It was that I was homesick before I even had my bag packed. The longer I sat on the bed in my bathrobe the less I felt like flying to San Francisco and the more I was wishing I didn't have to.
I was still sitting on the bed when the phone on my bedside table rang. It was Tom, he was frantic.
I didn't finish packing my bag, after all.
Rest In Peace.