2/ Getting There, Part II

“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”

-- Attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Easier said than done, Johnny G!” 

          -- Stan Wentzel, 2018

It turns out that having a picture in your head of a fantasy life elsewhere is an entirely different thing from actually making it happen.

Then again, I didn’t think it would be easy. From day to day my picture of our imagined future life would shift, lose focus, morph this way and that. On some days Martha openly questioned our sanity; on other days it was I who had doubts, though I rarely spoke them aloud. To reinforce our now-shared vision I made a point of informing a few selected friends and family about our plans, to hold myself to public account for the commitment we were making to the dream.

One major consideration was to figure out when we could actually go. Once Noah, our younger child, was out of college, it seemed the door might open a crack. Martha could take a year’s leave from Swedish at any time after that and then pick up where she left off after our return. The problem, increasingly, was that Martha wasn’t interested in returning to work after spending time away. She had been a nurse her entire adult life, and was more than ready to be done with it. Better, then, to wait until she reached retirement to make the move. We’d be older, but hopefully still spry enough to handle yet another leap into the unknown.

Then there was my mother Connie. While outwardly supportive of our plan (and having always been an avid adventurer herself), she never missed an opportunity to subtly undermine my determination to move away from Seattle, even for a year. Especially dubious for her was our plan to reside in Latin America (which she generally viewed as a medieval no-man’s-land of bandits, despots, drug runners, bad hygiene, rabid dogs and the like). But I knew, deep down, that she simply didn’t want me to be so far away as she entered her 10th decade. I was sympathetic, but at the same time rather defiantly determined to be in charge of my own life.

But as Mom grew older and increasingly infirm, it became clear that I was also bound by an obligation to stay close to her in her time of need. We had tentatively pegged our departure to coincide with Martha’s retirement date of May 2018, but as that date drew closer we were walking a tightrope of second thoughts, wondering whether we might need to postpone our departure until such time as Mom no longer needed our help.

Maybe she sensed the conundrum she had put us in; maybe not. In any case, in the latter part of 2017 she began to decline rapidly, finally passing from this life in December at the age of 93. And although the days and weeks that followed were obscured by vortices of grief and the stress of dispositional details, it was also suddenly, brilliantly clear that the last roadblock to our destination had been removed. One chapter had closed, and another was about to begin.