Sheila, What a horrible way for your great-aunt to lose her life, and that stays in a family for generations like a black hole in their history, even when people don’t speak of it. 7:10pm tonight, is the 20+ year anniversary of my son’s father’s death. I write it that way because that’s the biggest relationship lost. Our son was 16 1/2 at the time and an only child. All those years not to have his Dad, and he has rarely spoken of it. A few months after his death we were walking on a beautiful street on a starry cold night with little fairy lights in all the trees and going for pizza. Out of nowhere he said, “I think Dad lives in another energy stream.” It was like he’d reconciled in his mind that this was how it was, and his Dad still had existence in another form. But I’ve thought of him every day since. A very kind man. 6’2, dark hair, beautiful blue eyes, charming laugh, sweet disposition, appreciative of everything I did. Like our son, great looking and a devoted one-woman kind of man. Like your great-aunt he died in a terrible way. Fishermen were watching him do ‘lazy-eights’ in his plane near a rural lake when the wing collapsed and he plummeted 1,500 feet to the ground, about the same distance of the WTC. He was a calm person…the last person to deserve horrifying last moments. I’ll never forget him, and was lucky to know him. I know I made him happy, and regret any moments I did not. This was our dumb song as teenagers when there was never any daylight between us. When I was 16 and he was 19 we were on the Santa Monica beach at night for a grunnion run, and said that if anything happened to either of us…..”In heaven find a place like ‘Thunderburger” (a teenage hang-out we liked) wait for me there. I’ll find you.” Kids. That kind of intense connection never dies. All the men I dated in the intervening years, doctors, lawyers, CEOs-including the one I married and the other engaged to…no one can hold a candle to him. Am so grateful for those years in our own ‘Ithaca” and like Penelope I have faith I’ll see my Odysseus again. Which just made me realize, while Penelope spruned other men and knitted, waiting, Odysseus stayed on the island ‘goofing-off’ with the Sirens and then there was that King’s daughter, etc. Hmmm. I can hear him laughing now. Watch yourself Mr. Man. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRd4y04lb5s