By Susan Valek
I was going to Europe! It was the summer after my freshman year of college. At the Miami airport, I was in the plane waiting to take off, and I could see my whole family, standing at the railing, waving to me. Except Fred, my brother. I had never had a premonition before, but all of a sudden I was having one right then. "Please wave! Oh, Freddy, please wave. Then I'll know everything's going to be all right." He never did.
Four weeks later, I got that middle-of-the-night phone call that everybody dreads: Fred had died in a car accident.
The day my family drove me to the airport in Miami, Fred and I had talked Mom and Dad into letting the two of us go in one car, and the rest of the family in the other one (this was a 4-hour, 200-mile trip). So the last time I saw Freddy, we had each other's undivided attention for four hours, and we talked and talked, and got caught up on a lot of things, and had a fine time. But why our parents let us do that, I'll never know. I can only say: bless them.