Blue Sky, Blue Water, Blue Heart

Our first trip as new "empty nesters" was bittersweet. We married young and I gave birth to our first child, a daughter, just 7 months later. Three short years later our son was born and suddenly, life as we knew it was gone. The hopes and dreams, vanished. Thirty years later, we are still very much in love. On paper, our marriage is storybook. However, we are not a conventional family by any stretch of the imagination.

Our children are unique and came complete with a variety of physical and medical needs. Rest and sleep left our vocabulary so long ago that even hearing the words remind me of a foreign language.

We grew as our children grew. We were not only their parents but their nurses as well. To say we lived in the local children's hospital would not be much of a stretch. Santa has visited our kids there, birthday cakes have been eaten there New Year Eves have been rang in there and Fourth of July fireworks have been viewed from there. In an attempt to better care for our fragile children I decided to become a nurse. In 1996, I became a paid employee in that very same children's hospital.

We had some good years without many hospitalizations. My husband, Buddy, and I learned to roll with the flow. We accepted the bad and rejoiced at the good. Through it all we have remained best friends and lean not only on God but on each other to get through whatever comes our way. So when our world was turned upside down in the summer of 2010, we continued to do just that.

Our son, whose health had steadily been declining for the last couple of years, suddenly became ill one day and died in the emergency room just two hours later. Once again, life as we knew it was gone. However, this time, the hopes and dreams emerged from our grief addled fog and shone brightly in front of us.

Suddenly, after nearly twenty five years of no time for each other, time was all we had. In the beginning the quietness was deafening. Gone was the melodic tinkle of the musical toys our son loved so much. Gone was his gutteral belly laugh and deep groans summoning us to try and figure out what he needed or wanted. Our house seemed to have died as well.

No longer were we depended upon by someone else. Our daughter, although still battling her own illness, had married and now lived three hours away with her husband and young daughter. A new word, so long forgotten, soon emerged...freedom. We were free to go and do whatever we wanted. No longer was having one person stay at home with our son an issue. It took a while for us to realize that this freedom was not a bad thing or something we should feel guilty about. We loved our son and missed him very much so in our minds, having freedom was wrong. In actuality, it was the opposite. It was exactly what we needed. That was when the plan to escape began to hatch.

Once we accepted that we could not change the fact that our son was gone and our lives had changed, we began to see the possibilities. We dared to book a cruise. We needed to get away and sort through our feelings and deal with our grief. A cruise seemed like a great place to do just that.

And so our journey began. Our ports of call were Jamaica, Grand Caymen and Cozumel. I left tears at each stop and many more in the deep waters off our balcony but I allowed my self to have fun as well. Soon, I realized that no matter how far away I was, my son was still there in my heart. Just as real as when he was growing under my heart. I had my memories and the knowledge that he was no longer in pain and that I would indeed see him again someday. Armed with this new realization, I was able to let go of the deep ache that had consumed me. I began to uncover ME.

That me, that I found, is a beach bum at heart and still madly in love with the same man I married so many years ago. We swam with the stingrays, we snorkled and we lazed on the beach. We also found each other all over again and realized that we very much enjoyed each other's company and our new found freedom. We decided to mark this as the first of our many travels together as a couple.