Je Regrette Rien

About two months ago, one of my girlfriends told me the sad news that her mother had chosen to take no more treatment for the ovarian cancer she had been diagnosed with 18 months previously. Because of the wording she used, or perhaps because of the wine we were drinking, it took a few minutes for what she was saying to truly sink in. When it did, the purpose and finality of her mother's choice struck a chord. A loud chord in a melancholy minor key.

It was just a few days later, my own mother, who's hale and hearty and turning 74, was talking to some of her friends about her extensive travels ('everywhere they speak English, plus Scotland!'), and I chimed in that I'd love to take a "Jane Austen" trip someday, perhaps looking at the houses where the movies were shot, seeing where the author lived and wrote. I do love Austen's work and I read all six of her novels every few years.

Not two hours later, Mom called to tell me about a trip she had seen in the travel section of the newspaper. It was to England and Wales, including Bath, which is where Austen lived for three years, (two of them happy) and which was the setting of Northanger Abbey. My immediate reaction was to say no. It was too expensive, and my husband would not want to come along, plus I could tell it was going to be a "Q-tip bus ride": white-haired old ladies farting and shuffling along, plus from what I understand, a lot of being rushed from place to place. Even so, I told Sweetie about it as part of a conversation about mothers in general and the heartbreak our friends were facing. The next thing I knew, at Sweetie's insistence, I was writing a big fat cheque to my mom to cover my half of a week on a blue-hair bus trip.

It was a red-eye to the UK, and the trip was indeed set mostly on a bus: Windsor Castle to Stratford Upon Avon (literary? check.) to York, Liverpool, Llandudno, Conwy, Chester, Snowdonia National Park, Ludlow, some other places in the north of England and south of Wales, Bath and back to London. There was a castle or cathedral to look at every day,sometimes two. They call these trips ABCs: Another Bloody Castle, or Another Bloody Cathedral. There were indeed some old ladies with canes and complaints. My mom (apart from the snoring) was a marvelous traveling companion. She's funny, although I think she's going a little deaf. That, or she simply ignores a lot of what I say, which is equally possible. (Probable, actually...) She's also sometimes silly, but she's willing to walk 90 minutes to look at Buckingham Palace even though she's seen it before, and willing to be dragged through pubs as I taste the local beers, and willing to check out local grocery stores, because I find the little differences, fascinating.

I'm grateful to have traveled with my mother, and I will do it again, since the very night before we left, Sweetie and I went to a visitation with the family following the death of my friends' mom. Her shattered husband and daughters will never again get a chance to see the world through her eyes.