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Caught in this candid moment, not long after the catamaran that had waited for two years to sail our family around the islands for a week left the port of Athens, I can still vividly feel all of the emotions churning underneath what appeared as an otherwise placid pose. The deep sadness, the gratitude, the finality, the strange newness of my world which had been rocked for the umpteenth time in the last year sloshed about inside my body and occasionally escaped out of it throughout the afternoon. It was hard to tell if I was tasting salt from the sea or my tears.

The night before, just hours after we had landed in Greece, we received the news from our beloved pet sitter that our eleven year old English bulldog had died in her arms at the emergency vet. Just three weeks and a day before, her fifteen year old “sister”, our standard poodle, had died in my arms at home on our back terrace. The bully, unlike her sister, had been relatively healthy by all accounts for a dog her age; in the end none of us could have gauged her will to live without her sissy. That’s a bulldog for you: stubborn and in charge, down to the last broken heartbeat. We knew that this day was imminent although we didn’t anticipate losing our four-legged girls in such rapid succession. But here we were.

I was thinking about moving our two-legged daughter into her new, off-campus house, two weeks from that day, to begin her second year of university, and how I would miss simply having her around as we did for much of the summer.

I was missing our middle son who was unable to be with us as planned because he had just moved to New York to start a dream job that he had landed weeks before and couldn’t yet ask for vacation days.

Our oldest son was with us because he’s worked long enough at his company to have earned vacation time. And while I was grateful to have six days left on the boat to hug him before his return to Chicago, I knew there were only six days before I had to say goodbye.

And amidst all of the beauty and devastation and gratitude and love surrounding me, in this moment I was also overwhelmed by my sheer luck for the opportunity to see and to feel it all. Everything had been such a whirlwind for over a year, and I finally had space to think about me. And how dang fortunate I am to not be dead. Literally.

It was one year ago that I spent all of 9/11 (and five hours of the 10th but who’s counting?), reading memorials and tributes, sat in a metal chair at the Accident and Emergency department in England’s East Midlands. (I will get into more of what happened at another time, not to call attention to my version of “Near-Death in Nottingham”, but because I learned some valuable things during my ordeal there.) Look, I knew I wasn’t in great shape when the surgeon finally removed my disintegrating appendix twenty seven hours after it burst, and even though I had faith that everything would turn out just fine, I was still flat-out surprised when I actually woke up from that operation. And, after a year of wading through complications, resting, and rebuilding, I think every day of how darn lucky I am to still be puttering about.

So here I was caught on camera by my daughter, as we embarked on an actual journey, but at the same moment, captured as I reflected on both the weight of the past months and the freedom of my next. My nest is legit friggin’ bare. As is my “next” also – all of the sudden – completely empty. It’s the first time in over 25 years that I haven’t had a life, human or four-legged, dependent on me in the day to day. (Well, John needs me around for my excellent laundry folding skills and my super-secret jalfrezi recipe that is only super-secret because I don’t measure any ingredients other than “that looks about right” to create what he thinks is utter magic, but if things had gone differently in Nottingham I’m certain that he’d probably still be smartly dressed and well fed without me.)

We saw in 2001 and have seen in the years and even days since how instantly life can change. Mine has, in a bunch of bumps and detours that my path has taken over the past year. Today, I reflect on the broader world and my own little one from, thankfully, safety and health. My heart still hurts but my body is strong and my head is getting there too, albeit a little more slowly. It’s learning to take in all that has happened, and ready to take on everything to come…Next.