There’s no new news from Richmond; the last time I spoke to my brother, he said that Mom was breathing about 4 times a minute, and the hospice nurse said it should be “soon”.

I’m glad my brother’s keeping me in the loop, even if I jump every time the phone rings. It was especially unnerving when I picked up the phone after working out this morning — the display said “1 new voicemail”, and I couldn’t bring myself to play it until I got home from the JCC. As it happened, the call was from the Rabbi, letting me know she’d be available this morning if I wanted to stop by the shul, but….

She lent me a couple of books: Anita Diamant’s Saying Kaddish and Anne Brener’s Mourning and Mitzvah. I haven’t looked at them yet, but I expect I’ll be doing so on the plane back to Richmond, whenever that is.

In the meantime, I came into the office this afternoon; we were having a departmental Tech Talk that I wanted to hear, and I decided I could wait here as easily as at home. But I think I’ll leave early. There’s a huge pile of mail at home (I’ve been travelling since the beginning of April), and I’m not really doing a lot for IBM at the moment.

As soon as we entered the terminal in San Jose, my phone rang. It was my brother, who was at the hospital listening to Mom breathe very, very slowly and infrequently, and warning me that I’m probably going to be returning to Richmond even sooner than I’d thought.

We decided that there was no sense in my rushing back to Richmond (all of my stuff was actually in a separate suitcase, so I guess I could have just bought a ticket on the spot and gotten right back onto the same plane I’d just flown in on) — I might or might not arrive in time, and I’ll be more useful if I’ve gotten at least one night’s sleep.

So I’m waiting for the phone call before I make my next set of travel arrangements.

Maybe Mom decided it was time when we said “goodbye” this morning, or maybe this was the time no matter what. Only God knows — but I still feel that we made the right decision to come home today.