“Did you hear the news?”, my neighbor asked, breathless, on the other end of the phone. A small plane had just crashed near my home, into the supermarket parking lot I had been planning to visit to pick up some groceries.
I turned on the news and tried to piece together what had happened. It was an Angel Flight: a pilot had donated his time and plane to take a cancer patient and his wife to Boston’s Dana Farber Cancer Institute for treatment. I imagined a sick old man and his wife, holding hands, and felt terrible for them and the pilot.
The next day, I learned that the patient wasn’t a sick old man, but a 43-year-old father of 4-year-old twins. In a flash, two children were left without, not only their father who had been battling cancer, but their 37-year-old mother as well.
I can’t stop thinking about those twins who are around the ages of my Jilly, who is 5, and D, who is 3. What do they know? What do they understand? I hope that extended family has swooped down around them to love them and take care of them.
About four years ago, Fairly Odd Father and I got around to making our will. In doing so, we had to designate guardians for our kids should both of us die. It was an awful feeling, imaging our kids growing up without us, but the choices weren’t difficult. Honestly, I’m not sure we’d even need a will for a judge to know where the children should go, but we wanted to be sure that the family wasn’t torn apart should others come into the picture and want to lay claim to our kids.
How about you? Have you figured that out yet? It sucks to think about, and I hope that we’ll never need it, but this week’s events really drove home the need to consider life without us.
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