9/11 Remembered: The Year of Flying Dangerously (Part 4)
“9/11 Remembered: The Year of Flying Dangerously” (Part 4)
(The third installment of Dick Jordan’s recollections of the events of September 11, 2001 appeared yesterday. The story concludes today.)
Unhappy Travels
A month after returning from Europe we were in the air again, this time flying from San Francisco to Newark where we picked up a rental car and drove northwestward into Pennsylvania. In mid-summer my wife had gone back to upstate New York to help her 94 year old ailing aunt move into an assisted living facility located across the Delaware River just a few miles south of her home. Now we were coming to help her celebrate her 95th birthday.
The health of my wife’s aunt had declined since August. She was hospitalized when we arrived, then moved to a nursing home. We bought a cake and some gifts and held a bed-side birthday party for her.
We stopped at the nursing home the following morning to pay her one last visit before driving on to the Newark airport for the trip home. But she had died sometime during the night, so we rescheduled our flight to later in the week in order to attend the funeral.
As it turned out, we might not have made it home that day, anyway. Earlier in the morning American Airlines Flight 587 crashed in Queens shortly after takeoff from JFK. Flight operations at Newark were temporarily suspended due to concerns that the plane might have been brought down by a terrorist attack.
Less than a month later I received a phone call from my stepfather’s brother. My stepfather had suffered a severe stroke. I flew to Seattle the following day, stayed with him until he passed away at the end of the week, and set about making the funeral arrangements. My wife arrived from California, we buried my stepfather, then flew home just before Christmas.
