Another first: a family vacation for me while Evelyn stayed home

“Are you excited about your vacation?”

A friend asked me that two days before I left town for a wonderful week in western Canada with my son, his wife, their 5-year-old wonder child, and my daughter-in-law’s parents.

“Umm, yeah,” I managed. But actually, I hadn’t taken time truly to anticipate. In contrast to everyone else in our group, I had looked at no travel guides and found no website pictures of Banff or Lake Louise (our two destinations). I couldn’t have told you where we were staying (All that was in an email from my daughter-in-law), let alone give you any details about the natural beauty ahead of us.

I had done well to upload Covid documentation to the government of Canada and download boarding passes from the airline. Meanwhile, I had been mentally compiling information and instructions our daughter would need before coming to spend the week with Evelyn. (I wrote a physical list the day she arrived.) All that plus grocery shopping, getting ahead with my weekly writing and editing, tending to Evelyn and the house, and oh yeah, packing left little energy for anticipating the upcoming get-away.

Unimagined beauty

But even if I had been making a file of must-sees, I never would have imagined the unparalleled rugged splendor comprising this corner of the Canadian Rockies.

Lake Moraine photo by Lisa Sweeney Taylor

I’ll resist the urge to write a travelogue because I could not do justice to the turquoise of the water in Lake Louise and Lake Moraine, the jagged outcroppings of towering mountains that seemed always to surround us, the roaring plunge of Takkakaw Falls, the violent churning of Bow Falls, the chilly air and clear skies and pencil-thin evergreens on walks around Emerald Lake or through Johnston Canyon, the spellbinding awe of vistas from the top of two gondola rides.

Riding the Lake Louise gondola. Peggy Sweeney photo.

My support group leader and one of my best friends each wrote that they hoped the time would be restorative for me. I hope so, too. I tried to let it bring the calm and healing they were wishing for me. From time to time I consciously stopped in an effort to take in and memorize the beauty we were seeing. “We have this moment” I had quoted here the week earlier, and we enjoyed so many wonderful moments together.

Uninvited memories

But I couldn’t quite put the melancholy behind me.

My wife and I have taken more trips than I can count with this group or one or the other of these couples. The visits to Kauai or Europe or Alaska or Hilton Head often happened around this same time in July, and Facebook memories have been popping up to remind me. With each one I saw photos of a smiling Evelyn and tried to think, How long was this before we received her diagnosis? What signs was I ignoring then to tell me one year too soon I would vacation without her?

I am sentimental by nature, so silencing the What Might Have Been drumbeat was a daily battle. And all the smiles and all the laughter were regularly accompanied by private (or sometimes not so private) tears.

These I’ll not forget

One piercing moment. At bedtime the first night, my grandson told his mother, “I hear you talking about Grandma. Is something wrong with her?” So she explained that Grandma has a brain disease. She went to the internet and found pictures of Alzheimer-afflicted brains. She explained to him, “It’s not her fault.”

“I feel like I should be sad that she’s not with us,” he said. “But I really don’t know her very well.”

And the biggest laugh-out-loud. We were resting beside the walk around Lake Louise when a group of older hikers descended from the starting point for a hike my daughter-in-law’s mom wanted to take. But she wasn’t sure she could handle it. “I’d like to ask them how difficult it is,” she said, “but I think they’re speaking German.”

I walked over to demonstrate what I’d learned in high school. “Entshuldigen Sie mich, bitte,” I said confidently. “Sprechen Sie Englisch?”

The woman’s head snapped up at me, and she replied, “We’re Italian!”

Her “Englisch” was impeccable. (“And she probably speaks better German than you do,” my son remarked.)

She was about Evelyn’s age. Fit. In command of the situation. Sharp. I’ll likely always remember her.