I'm thankful that I made that phone call. Mostly, I'm thankful for the look on my beautiful wife's face when I walked in that door, and the way she hugged me. That was a hug for the ages, man. You should all live long enough to get a hug like that.
Sometimes, years pass before we have that lightbulb moment -- noting situations we neither predicted nor imagined -- something like separate vacations or separate activities which, taken to an extreme, may lead to separate lives.