1. Arrivals

Florida was never on my list of favorite destinations (sorry, Florida). But since I moved back to New England I’ve embraced that without Florida, the Winter Ship of Sanity would set sail forever and burst into flames on the horizon.

I’m a searcher and a ground gazer, so from the very first time I saw pictures of the beaches of Sanibel Island strung with thick garlands of carnival-colored shells, I knew I wanted to go. And I wanted to bring my kids, who only knew the hard-won small sand dollars of Maine or the occasional fresh water snail shell delivered from Lake Champlain. I was hungry for abundance in the dead of winter, for saturated color and steam-soaked air.

When we landed at Fort Myers, I was immediately struck by the formations of grandparents dotting the arrival area — couples, singles, flocks. One with a thin cane, another with obedient curls, all with the look of permanent tourists. Relaxed, tan, and wrapped in Florida t-shirts with swoopy beach graphics. Their faces bright with expectation.

I hadn’t thought much about my grandparents while planning this trip. I’d never been to Sanibel Island before and for all I knew, neither had they. I had just never connected my memories of my grandparents and their life in Florida with this trip until that very moment. As soon as I did, my heart felt the way a bruise does when it’s newly discovered, tender to the touch, a purplish surprise.

I thought of all the times that I should’ve visited them. I thought of all the times that it could’ve been them waiting for me. I thought of all of the trips I could’ve made happen, but didn’t.

2. The rearview mirror

When I was little we lived in Rhode Island, next door to my maternal grandparents. I rode to nursery school on the back of my grandmother’s bike. I played in their garden and plucked the tiniest blue-white flowers from the shaded patch of our mutual yard. And although we eventually moved to Wisconsin and then to Massachusetts, I spent two weeks out of every summer staying with them just a block from the beach.

The details, the indelible details, of those days. The way my grandfather rose before the sun, humming to himself and stirring his coffee over and over again. I can hear the spoon circling around still, clanging against the inside of the cup, a meditation.

The days were long and free, full of high-stepping-bare-feet-on-searing-asphalt walks to the beach, searching for shells and pulling seahorses from fishermen’s nets. My friends and I held fashion shows and plays in the backyard, pinning a sheet to the clothesline for the theater curtain. We baked cupcakes and I learned how to make a bed. I caught tiny jellyfish in a jar and learned how to sew. I ate seedless grapes and a nightly dish of vanilla ice cream and rivers of Cheez-its. I felt loved and cherished, cared for and fussed over.

I never knew how good I had it. Do any of us, ever?

3. Unforgivable, merciful fate

Their early lives were punctured with loss. My grandmother is a first generation American and one of nine children. Her mother, my Portuguese great grandmother, was often a single parent, throwing out her husband for the uncontrollable drinking that would eventually kill him.

Her sister Dorothy, who had been institutionalized for reasons we can’t track down, died at the age of fourteen. Probably from neglect, most likely from the way people who were confined to a “School for the Feeble-Minded” were treated. Out of the arms of her mother, away from the eyes of the world. What have we done? What do we continue to do to those most vulnerable?

My grandfather was one of six kids and grew up poor in Pennsylvania coal mining country. Both of his parents died by the time he was seven. His oldest brother Bill — who was just seventeen at the time — took on the unfathomable task of keeping his own family together. His girlfriend Eva, who became his wife, was fifteen or maybe sixteen at the most. A teenage girl, an adoptive mother of five.

His brother Andy died on the train tracks. A child lost in front of children. The tracks had switched for an oncoming train, trapping his foot. No one could free him. No one could save him. None of the children could do anything. In that moment, they crossed over into a lifetime of reliving over and over again the unimaginable, of one day warning their own children away from the tracks with a fiery sternness born from heartbreak.

From these circumstances, their early lives dotted with absence and need and unforgiveable fate, came two of the most generous good-time-having people you could ever hope to meet. Quick to laugh, quick with a hug, and quick to pick up the check (and mad at you if you tried, as I once learned the hard way). What they had lost early on, they had gained in each other. Forever.

Sometimes fate has no mercy. And sometimes it will save you.

4. Big life

Eventually they went the way of the snowbird — to Florida part time and then full time, enjoying the type of retirement that no longer seems to exist. They became a part of a community that cooked, swam, traveled, golfed, sunbathed, played cards, dressed up, and, quite frankly, partied harder than I did.

Whenever I spoke to my grandparents, one on the main phone and the other on the extension, talking over one another, they always gave me the weather report followed by “You know you can always come to Delray!” They invited me to visit every time we spoke. Every time. I always begged off. I knew I would see them when they traveled north to visit. And I didn’t have the money or enough time off for an additional trip. But if I had had the money I wouldn’t have spent it on going to Delray Beach to stay with my grandparents in their retirement community. I have a sharp memory of saying those actual words out loud. Not to them, never to them.

All I knew is that I needed to start my big life and go to big destinations that had bigger and better things for me to do.

Looking back now I never felt guilty about not going, because they never made me feel guilty about not going. Their lives were bursting there, full. They didn’t need me to come to fill up what was missing. They wanted me to come because they loved me. And they were happy there. Simple.

But was guilt really the reason to go anyway? Who has the big life now?

5. Hello, goodbye

I’ve been to Florida maybe five times in my life. All at very different stages of my life — and theirs. I was a twelve-year-old road tripping with my family from Massachusetts to visit them and go to Disney World and Epcot. I was a 29-year-old newlywed on my honeymoon. And on my last visit I was a 38-year-old mother of two with my 8-month-old daughter in tow. I brought her to meet my grandfather for the first and last time. He loved babies. And he was dying. His eyebrows lifted, so slightly, at the sight of her. His animated, head tilted back laugh, already gone. But there she was. And so was he. And never would that meeting, those old eyes meeting new, ever happen again.

When I returned to Vermont I spoke to him one last time. I don’t remember most of what was said, the call was brief, he would die just a few days later. But towards the end of the call I quietly said, “I should let you go” (as if this was a routine call, as if I could really ever let him go, how bound we are to our conversational shortcuts) “… I don’t want to tire you out.” He replied slowly and with a catch in his voice “You will never tire me out.” Eight years later, that thought, the intention behind it, the love I felt so crisply and clearly from his weakening voice, floods me with sadness. I have never let him go.

“You will never tire me out.” Isn’t that what we all want to hear? To know?

My grandmother was never the same after he died. Maybe the kind of marriage they had is a thing of the past, I don’t know. Born from conventional wartime (if anything about war can be considered conventional) and success that’s modest yet inspires generosity, what they had feels almost foreign to this world now. As I unpack boxes from our move, every fifth letter or card is from them, still with a dollar or two tucked inside for a treat. Sent fifteen years ago, never to be received again. Their marriage wasn’t fractured by the simultaneous invented closeness and real distance of technology but bound up in handwritten letters and photographs printed on beefy squares of paper. Built to last.

She has survived so much, a brain aneurism and surgery, breast cancer, strokes. But losing him was the beginning of what continues to be a long, slow, sad end. I’ve sat in front of her, not being able to grasp the person I once knew. The forever ironing, lipstick-mark-from-kissing-you, kick in the pants grandmother I knew my whole life. The one who made her evening gowns and bikinis and my Christmas stocking by hand and the one who taught the neighborhood kids how to bake. And the one who — the last time I visited them in Florida — was rummaging through a basket of photographs, held up a school picture of a child none of us recognized and said “Who is this kid?” and threw it in the trash. She’s lost to most of us now, locked in a place that she sometimes reaches out from, remembering her birthday or tracing invisible dance steps with her fingertips.

My aunt, who lives down the road from my grandmother, visited her last week and noticed that she’s losing weight. Her wedding band close to slipping off, probably for the first time since it was wiggled onto her finger sixty-nine years ago. We are all just slipping through. We will all be released.

If you have grandparents, visit them. Go because no one will ever love you in the bold and gentle, big and uncomplicated way they do. Go because you can. Even if you think you can’t, find a way. Take them up on their offer, let them wait for you at arrivals. Go because we all assume that what we have in our lives now, we will have in our lives forever. But the reality is we’re only certain of our good fortune once we glimpse it in the rearview mirror. Go because you are loved. Go because you love. Go.