With next stop Barcelona, welcoming a new chapter in my 65th year
With my imminent return to life in Europe, I've been reflecting on the past decade's new chances, its reckonings, losses and grief, and all the ways in which I know my bloom is still unfolding.
In six days I board a plane to Barcelona. The excitement in my body is palpable. So are the tears that spill over when I drive by the memory care facility where my mother took her last breath and as I store items for our daughters at my ex-husband’s house, the home that symbolized the hope we had for our empty nest years in Venice, Florida.
In this past decade in Florida, I’ve been happy and made indelible memories. But Florida is also where I experienced the biggest disruptions of my life: a divorce after a 33-year marriage that I initiated, painfully but necessarily, and the death of my beloved mother after her long battle with dementia.
And so it is a time of reckoning. The losses and grief are still fresh. My mother Freda died last April. For nearly all of the last year of her life I was her full-time caregiver at home. It was a beautiful and anguished time: bitterly sad to watch this smart, well-read, funny, independent woman steadily lose a grip on her dearly prized intellect.
Yet it was also a gift every time she opened up her arms to me so I could nestle my head on her shoulder as she kissed my head. My mother’s nurturing side was ever present. In the end, she gave us the final gift, allowing her children to hold her hands and stroke her hair, the circle of nurturing complete.
People often ask when you have a family member with dementia, “Does she recognize you?” But as medical anthropologist Janelle Taylor movingly put it in the podcast “This American Life,” that’s the wrong question. My sister and brother and I, her granddaughters, friends and extended family—we all recognized the essence of this woman we loved, and that is all that matters.
My mother, who died at 87, was a typical caregiver of her generation but she was also wise. So I know she is overjoyed for me to be moving to Barcelona, to spread my wings, now more than two years after leaving my marriage. As her eldest, responsible daughter, who inherited the caregiving gene, her spirit is in the birds that soar above my head as I walk the beach. “Fly! Be free,” I imagine her saying. “You’ve earned it, sweetie.”
It is not the first time my mother’s spirit came to me as a “bird in the sky” as I wrote about two days after her death:
Empty nest, searching heart
In December 2014, my ex-husband and I moved to Sarasota Florida for the first six months of our Florida empty nest years. Then in May we found the house of our dreams in nearby Venice, a raised two-story Key West style dwelling that fronted mangroves and had a view of the Gulf of Mexico from the bedroom balcony. For the next several years, we settled in, making new friends and enjoying the ability to kayak from our backyard directly to a secluded barrier beach nestled among the palm trees. I managed to persuade my sister—quite easily—and my widowed mother—much more reluctantly—to join us in Florida. Our daughters living in Europe visited us frequently.
But beneath the surface of this idyllic existence the cracks in the foundation of our long marriage were deepening. Bubbling to the surface were long-ignored conflicts over money, income earning and the stability of our financial future into retirement as well as fissures in our respective world views that made me question how closely aligned our values were—whether we really were in fact the same people we had been in our late 20s when we met.
Of course people change over time, I realize that. But as I turned 60 during the pandemic, with our forced isolation and inwardness, I was growing and changing. My soul was restless. Questions pounded me late at night when I could not sleep. Is this the life you want to be living? Is this marriage allowing you to be authentically who you are and pursue your dreams?
For a long time, my dependence on alcohol, on nightly wine, allowed me to push aside those inconvenient questions. Then, on Feb 1, 2021, nearly four years ago, I enrolled in an online 21-day alcohol reset and gained a lifelong friendship, as I wrote about last week.
Sobriety also gave me clarity and helped me step into my power. In September 2022 I told my husband I wanted a divorce. Two months later, after a debilitating fall, my mother’s dementia worsened and she moved in with me. And so the final years of my decade in Florida took an unexpected detour—but isn’t that the way of life? Messy, unpredictable, beautiful and challenging. All of it worth feeling and experiencing. To miss a moment of it would be a pity.
Recently,
asked its community of Lovelets to ask their inner voice of unconditional Love1: What would you have me know about this season of my life? The question was timely, and this is what I wrote in my journal. I hope you’ll find resonance here, too:My darling, the Season of Becoming is your constant, year-round posy of a season.
I know you have not always thought of this season as flowers and rainbows and unicorns and moonbeams. The Season of Becoming (and its twin, The Season of Unbecoming) can feel hard, cold, dull, frustrating and unbearably long. You are sixty-four years old, you say to yourself, isn't this Season ready to come to an end, to drop the gerund so that it at last becomes The Season of "I Have Become Who I Was Meant to Be All Along?"
Here's the answer, my sweet one and it is not a riddle: You are becoming and at the same time you are the woman you were meant to be all along. Can you hold that contradiction in your mind, in your heart?
The beauty of this crazy, wonderful, surprising, challenging gift of being human is that the Becoming--if we're lucky enough to be aware of it, to own it, to wear it proudly--is that this is all there ever is and ever will be. That is the delight of Earth School, baby: one long delicious Season of Becoming.
That is why you can hold your 12-year-old self, your 24-year-old self, your 44-year-old self all at once, with the grace of your elderhood.
That is why every season is a Season of Discovery, your word of the year, and yes, especially this year, as you move on from your recent divorce and the grief of losing your dear mother and move to a brand new country and city, Barcelona, to make a new start: To plant yourself in this Season of Becoming where you sense your roots will find nourishment and you will bloom in all the ways you desire.
I know how much you want this new place and new beginning to be the time you finally arrive and come home to yourself.
Listen, though, dear, if I may offer some parting wisdom today: However this next season unfolds into its bloom, your becoming in 2025 is exactly the season you were meant to have.
And I'll be right there beside you, reminding you when you stumble, that you, my dear, are loved unconditionally, forever and always. In every season of your life.
Love, Love
3 Songs for Living in 3D
“Mantra,” by Esteban Uriona. Esteban is the partner of my daughter
and a talented pianist as you’ll hear in this elegiac piece he composed. Look out for the release of more of his original music soon."Blossoming,” by Samuel Andryk
"Barcelona Nights,” Ottmar Liebert
NOW IT’S YOUR TURN! LET’S CHAT! Below in the comments, please share:
Are you in a Season of Becoming?
What does your inner voice of Love want you to know about this season of your life?
In honor of blooming together in 2025 and to celebrate new beginnings, I am offering a 30% discount on annual subscriptions forever until Jan 31. That’s as little as $3.50/month and $35 a year. I spend many hours each week crafting these essays with an eye to what will most serve my readers’ interests. If my writing has brought you value and connection, and you have the means, now is the time to upgrade. Thank you to everyone who upgraded their subscription this month!
New Offerings for Paid Subscribers in 2025
For paid subscribers in 2025, I will have new offerings launching in February once I make my move from Florida to Barcelona:
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What is a letter from love, you ask? Elizabeth Gilbert in her most recent video explained it perfectly: “It is an open-hearted, undefended listening to what unconditional love would say to you if it had a voice.” Give it a try!
Becoming, developing, turning a fresh page every day. That is how we live. This is a glorious essay. Thank you. I named my own Substack Becoming because that is the most important part of my living. I was the oldest child, the responsible child, the one who tried to take care of my mother. I did not succeed as well as you did, but that is another story, my story.
So much of this resonates with me, Amy. I am seeing both a mirror and an inspiration in you. I especially enjoyed the peek into your journal-there is profundity there.
It is a joy to witness the arc of your story of becoming-and yes, unbecoming. Having just turned 60, I feel this journey even more.
Like you, the pandemic was the catalyst for me putting my marriage to an end-it was less a tragic death and more a relieving euthanasia-for both of us. I related to the questions you were asking yourself leading up to your asking for a divorce and admire your courage to make a difficult change-many want to, but are too afraid to (as I bet you hear, I as I do, from those who are either questioning their long term marriage or wanting to leave it).
Unlike you, my mother had long died before my marriage did. When my father passed in 2001 at just 66, my mother became a despondent, depressed, lonely widow. She lived just a few minutes from me and I did all I could, while also raising my then 1 and 4 year old girls, to take care of her, from having her to dinner often, visiting her in her home near daily, accompanying her to doctor appointments and becoming her medical advocate, at her request.
Only now, as I face being 60 and single and eventually living alone again once my daughter graduates from PT assistant school, do I feel I can truly empathize with how lonely my mother must have been; how frightened she must have felt to live alone for the first time in her late 60s. She was a rare woman who was still in love with my father when he died. Despite having us 7 kids and over a dozen grandchildren, she confided in me that she had no desire to stick around to see them all grow up-she ached to be with her one and only love-my father. While this sounds so romantic, I was at once somewhat horrified and also judgmental. I could not fathom it, having never loved my then husband, now ex, as she loved my father. My mother had a stroke at 73 in 2008 and though she was in the hospital for three weeks and was never conscious again, she not survive it. Losing my mother was the portal to a grief I did not let myself feel -and did not even know I was not feeling-and it came out sideways a year or so later, in binge drinking and in other damaging, addictive behaviors.
I admire how you have accepted your journey and all the detours, especially the one where you unexpectedly and suddenly became a caregiver to your mother. She sounds like a truly special woman. I was so moved my this sentence, it gave me goosebumps:
"My sister and brother and I, her granddaughters, friends and extended family—we all recognized the essence of this woman we loved, and that is all that matters."
May this next chapter of moving to Barcelona be one in which you dis-cover and un-cpver even more of your true essence, Amy, and I look forward to reading about it here. Buen Viaje!