Home again

After I learned a week ago today that Emily was gone, I purchased tickets to travel back to Boulder. Because it was Christmas week, the best fares I could find were to travel on the 21st and return on Christmas Day. Any other days would have ratcheted up the cost too much. Smart Guy got up with me at 4:30am on Tuesday and drove me to catch the airport shuttle taking me 100 miles south to the SeaTac Airport. My flight to Denver was uneventful, and I stayed with Sarah and Josh, two skydiving friends who were the bests hosts anybody could have asked for. They have a small menagerie of animals: three cats, a dog, three parrots, and numerous fish tanks. I wrote about their home on my other blog here.

On the day of the memorial service, we were all three of us in a pretty emotional state as we traveled to Mile-Hi Skydiving, where Emily died, and where almost six hundred people had gathered to honor her. If it had not been Christmas week, there would have been more, but although three hundred chairs were set up in the enormous airplane hangar, there were literally hundreds standing in the back, on the sides, trying to find a place to hear her huge extended family tell funny and poignant stories about their beloved cousin, sister, niece. The skydivers were given a chance at a later time to read or tell their own tributes to Emily.

One of our skydiving colleagues does lighting and sound for professional musicians, and he did an incredible job of setting up a fantastic enormous flat screen and creating rotating pictures of Emily's life. He also compiled and edited a beautiful video tribute to her. Much more happened that I documented on my other blog, but here I want to talk about how the experience impacted me, the whole five days out of my life that felt like being in another world.

So many of my old skydiving friends and students were there, all grown up in the sport, and as we hugged and cried together, I kept hearing how much I have been missed. It was gratifying to hear, but the truth of it is that I have changed: Boulder and that Drop Zone are no longer my home. As wonderful as it was to see everyone again, the circumstances made it almost unendurable. I felt every one of my 68 years. Emily's mother Terry is five years younger than me! I left that part of my life behind when I moved here and I never looked back. Now I am a retired senior who makes a few skydives a year, around 50, instead of 250-400 I made each year for fifteen years. That doesn't mean I don't enjoy it just as much, but I am no longer an instructor and like it that way. Emily many times told me she was going to take my place, take care of young skydivers and especially young women, like I did. She surpassed anything I had accomplished in everything except the length of time she taught.

The day after the memorial, Christmas Eve Day, Sarah drove me to my old boss' home in Boulder, where I stayed with them, Mickey and Karen, and got to see their beautiful grandchildren, Samal and Danesh, who have changed incredibly in the three years since I saw them last. Mica, their mother, married a man from Kazakhstan, Sayat, and the children are two of the smartest, most accomplished six- and four-year-olds on the planet. Really. Walking into their home where I had been many times felt very comfortable, and they went out of their way to accommodate me.

On Christmas Day, Mickey drove me to the airport in Denver and I had an uneventful flight home. Smart Guy was waiting for me when I got off the plane, and he drove me those 100 miles north to our home in Bellingham. I was too tired to do much other than eat dinner, sit in a chair and doze, and went to bed at 7:00pm. I slept like a log for the first time since Emily died.

And now I am home, with a week of traumatic and joyous memories behind me, and I can pick up my own life again and thank God for all my blessings, which are numerous. I had no idea how foreign Boulder would feel to me, after only three years away. I had lived there for almost forty years, after all! The brilliant sunshine was lovely, but I missed my home environment every day. My skin felt shriveled after only five days in the extremely low humidity, and although I loved the sunshine, I found myself moving away from so much direct sunlight. Everyone has their comfort zone, and I understand why it's hard for some people to have all the grey days and rain of this part of Washington, but for me at this time of my life it feels just right.

As we dropped down through the clouds and circled Seattle, I could see the Space Needle and downtown, snow-capped mountains in the distance, and I knew I had come home, to the place where I belong.