Free Highest Duty by Chesley B. Sullenberger

before they take their first steps, say their first words, or need a visit from the tooth fairy. And it’s not just early-childhood rites of passage that we’re sorry to miss. We also miss nuanced changes in our children’s lives as they get older.
    Just before Christmas last year, I was off for a few days, and Lorrie and I took our daughters, Kate and Kelly, on a skiing vacation at Lake Tahoe. It was so nice to have this extended time withthe girls when they weren’t rushing off to school and I wasn’t hours away from returning to the airport. It was just a perfect, relaxed vacation.
    Tahoe has always held a special place in our hearts. When we take Interstate 80 and cross over the Donner Summit, a part of us feels like we’ve come home. There’s the smell of pine in the air. The sky is clear and crisp. It’s just invigorating.
    We always try to stay at Northstar, the resort where both Kate and Kelly learned to ski when they were three years old. The resort resembles a European village with cobblestone walkways, and the family programs there are great. We have many wonderful family memories of visits there.
    On that particular trip, the first big snowstorm of the season had ended the day before, and the trees were still heavy with fresh snow. Decorated for the holidays, Northstar was covered with little twinkling white lights in the trees. It had a real magical, fairy-tale feel. The lights, the snow, the European village.
    Late one afternoon, we had just parked the car, and we decided to do some window-shopping before heading to dinner. It was very cold out, and we were all dressed in heavy jackets, gloves, and hats. We were walking into this valley of buildings, on this cobblestone walkway, when I noticed that the girls, twenty feet ahead of us, were arm in arm and skipping along the sidewalk, Kelly’s head on Kate’s shoulder. I was so happy to see this, to realize that they had come to a place, here in their early teens, where they could publicly show physical affection for each other. Siblings, of course, are sometimes at odds, and here they were expressing so effortlessly what they meant to each other.
    I pointed them out to Lorrie. “Take a look at that,” I said. I thought I was noticing something very special and new.
    Lorrie took my arm and smiled. “They’ve been doing that for five or six months now,” she said. “It’s just that you’ve missed it.”
    She said she had frequently seen them walking in the mall, holding hands. She said it was happening very easily and naturally, and she had loved watching it.
    I had never fully noticed this. Not until that afternoon. And I felt sadness at the realization of how much of their daily lives I had missed—their activities, their interactions. How could I have missed witnessing these acts of love between my daughters for all these months? Lorrie looked at me sympathetically and saw a sense of loss and remorse in my eyes.
    I put my hand over my heart. It’s a gesture I sometimes fall back on when the girls do something endearing, or that I feel grateful about. It’s a sign between me and Lorrie, a reminder of how lucky we feel about our girls.
    I know why it hit me so hard. This was almost like a dream come true. When the girls were very young, one wish Lorrie and I had for them was that they’d be close when they were older. Seeing them together like this was a wonderful realization; I felt like maybe we had done something right. But it was also a painful reminder to me that I am so often not present in my children’s lives.
    Lorrie says this was one of those “pilot moments”—a pilot comes home and notices a change in his home or family—and seeing my mixed emotions was emotional for her, too.
    I took Lorrie’s hand, and a few seconds later we made a right-hand turn and came upon a large plaza in the village. Laid out in front of us were twinkling lights. Holiday music was playing and people were ice-skating and roasting marshmallows. There