A New Year: Journey Completed

In my last diary, I wrote about our recent journey. While we are not back home yet, that journey has now been completed in a wonderful way, as if the sentence was being dotted with a period at the end.

Those of you who have been following my diary entries for the past few years know that after my burst aneurysm–about 6 years ago now–I became somewhat psychic for awhile, and one of the "messages" I received was that our goddaughter Amy needed us. After I got back in touch with her, we discovered that her mother, our old friend Dora, had just been diagnosed with colon cancer, from which she eventually died. We went down to Texas to help, we found there wasn’t much we could do, since loyal doctors and lawyers were in attendance: Doctors to help Dora and lawyers to create a trust for our goddaughter and her younger sister, who was about to start college.

After we left the "mouse house" and ended up in a nice, cozy hotel–and before we peregrinated on to a friend’s house where we would spend New Year’s Eve before heading back to California–we spent a final hour in our favorite San Antonio coffee shop. We were sitting there sipping tea, Whitley tapping on his computer keys while I read a magazine, when suddenly our goddaughter’s sister appeared–she and her boyfriend were visiting her father for Christmas and they had just happened to stop at the same coffee shop where we were ensconced.

We were amazed to see her: She was radiantly beautiful, as only a young girl of a certain age can be (all women remember those days of effortless beauty–a time we spend the rest of our lives, and a great deal of money on makeup, trying to recover). We all greeted each other with hugs (and a handshake for the boyfriend) and caught up with the latest news. After they left, I felt as if Dora had returned from the dead, as if she was saying, "Look at my legacy, what I left behind." And after a long, and sometimes arduous trip, I suddenly knew why I had made this journey, and felt very happy.