Unplugged - Winter Author Blog Challenge #2

I am pre-writing this post because I am going to be out of the house before sunrise.

Today I embark on a journey.   I leave on a vacation just as my best friend's mother enters the last part of her journey on Earth.  She is under hospice care.  My friend, meantime can't be with her because her husband was just diagnosed with cancer.  The first indication of his cancer came 2 1/2 weeks after her oncologist told my friend of 50 years that she was in remission from her cancer.  Her mother lives a couple of hours from her.

And now, I am leaving her, because for part of my trip, I will probably be out of email and cell phone range.

Thanks to social media, we take being connected for granted.

On Facebook, we can share (if we want) the most minute details of our lives.  Of course, most of us don't - thank heavens.

On Twitter, if my phone was near a tower, I could tweet my entire journey.  But again, too much information?

Sometimes, quantity just isn't quality.

Why now, of all times, am I unplugging myself?

On my blog, though, I can reveal my feelings.  My writing isn't transitory, the way it would be on Facebook or Twitter.  Because my friend reads my blog, she will know that I will be thinking of her for the entire journey.  It will be like writing an electronic letter to my friend.

Her Mom was like a mother to me at times after my Mom died, back when I was 12 years old.  In those days, telephones weren't mobile.  Mail meant you wrote a letter and your recipient got it several days later.  Twitter was something certain birds did.  Facebook was....well, its founder hadn't been born yet.

Sometimes, we just don't know what the future will bring.  The situation is what it is.  We both will make the best of it.  My friend's husband's cancer was caught early, which is something all of us are grateful for.  There is one good thing in this story.

We may be apart in distance when her mother's journey is completed, but we will be together in spirit.