A few months ago, my mom started talking to me about jumping out of an airplane, my 74-year-old mom,

who's not at all physically adventurous or any kind of adventurous.

She doesn't ride bikes or go jogging. She doesn't even eat at new restaurants.

Like, the most adventurous thing she did before this whole airplane thing was probably fall asleep one night without her heating pad.

Nick's sense?

To you?

Yeah, does it make sense to me? I mean, when you first told it to me,

I just was shocked.

Because you're not that kind of person. Like, when you mean you want to go skydiving, just seem crazy.

Yeah, obviously, because I mean, who at my age will do it and it will be considered sane.

The whole thing started with a loss.

The kind of loss that subtracts from your life, something so central that you no longer really know who you are.

About a year earlier, her husband, my father, who was a super vital guy, was diagnosed with a rare stomach cancer and died within a few weeks.

Healthy, athletic, to death.

It just did not compute in your head. What went wrong here?

They'd been married for 51 years and they did everything together, everything.

Like, he drove her to the subway every morning. He picked her up in the evening. He made her tea every night.

And it had been that way for over 50 years. Every inch of their lives, they had walked together.

And my mother had no way of understanding her life story without him.

Do you feel what thoughts about Ellie's death were going through your head over and over?

Could they do more? Did we miss anything? Why didn't I just take him and went to another hospital?

All day long. All day long, it hit me.

...