Once again, I find my self blogging at the airport. I'm sitting at the terminal for ATA flight 267, with non-stop service from Chicago/Midway to Mineta San Jose Airport. I've been home for a grand total of 7 days (it was last Tuesday that I arrived back in Chicago). It feels like I was home longer.

There some things that happened which I expected, and some that were unexpected. On the whole, I thought that the trip was going to be a harder, fraught with a lot more emotion. I'm not trying to downplay this whole thing, or say that the wake and the funeral were both total cake-walks, but what I am saying is that in my mind, as I prepared to come out here, I had things really built up to the point that I was dreading this whole thing. I think that part of that, has to do with for most of the weekend that preceeded this trip, I thought that Beth was going to be coming home, and that all of us were going to have to care for her until she passed. I knew that that was going to be really, really hard. Having her go while she was still in the hospital, with dad, was quite a bit easier, I think.

On the whole, I think that Beth's death is going to be one of the biggest harbingers of change that my family has seen in a long, long while. The last "big" change that I can think of is when we moved from New Jersey to Chicago. And this doesn't really even compare -- sure, there was a lot of churn and such before, during, and after the whole moving process. But at the end of the day, the jobs that we all had before the move, we more-or-less had afterwards. For my mom, though, this is no longer true. Her #1 job for the past 30 years has been to take care of her children, specifically Beth. Now that Beth is gone, my mom has to find something else to occupy herself. I heard via 3rd party that my mom said that this is like Beth "firing" her, but I prefer to think of this more like a layoff.

So, I think that the lions share of the dealing that is going to have to be done in the wake of Beth's passing isn't going to happen in the minutes, hours, or even days that immediately followed. It is going to happen months and weeks out, as my mom tries to start over again, and figure out what she is going to do now.

My dad doesn't have this problem, of course, because he's just going to go back to work, which he started doing again on Monday. And in a like vein, that's what I'm going to do too -- hence my flight back to California, so that I can go back to work tomorrow.

Because, as the old saying goes, "tomorrow is another day".

-Andy.