More than your Emo boyfriend.

On June 26, 2008, my partner, three nervous teenagers and I ventured off to Los Angeles, where we boarded a plane, and then another, and eventually woke up on a transatlantic flight headed for Dublin, Ireland. The whole vacation itself consisted of three cities—Dublin, London and Paris—and if you were to ask any of the teenagers, they would say the trip’s purpose was three-fold: First, to eventually catch up with Madeline, our oldest daughter, who was traveling with a student group in the British Isles; second, for each—our oldest son, Trevor, our nephew Colin and Madeline’s best-friend, Darlene—to see Europe; and third, to afford Trevor and Colin the joy of cramming in the faces of their peers (aka OTHER family members) they fact that they have been to Dublin FIRST.

Naturally, we adults had an agenda too.

DIGRESSION:
My partner in crime and I have many, many things in common. We each like the color blue. We each brush our teeth twice a day. And we each grew up with devoted, family-centric parents who—while offering untold numbers of family camping-trip-based vacations—themselves never traveled abroad until they hit their retirement years. And to both my partner and I, international travel was exactly that: Something we both yearned to do, yet felt only retirees were supposed to enjoy.

And that is when the swirling black cloud of death descended upon both of our lives.

First my father passed, and I was inaugurated into the Dead Dad’s Club (ooh! Matching jackets!).

Sometime later, my then-not-yet partner earned his Dead Mom’s Club lapel pin.

And sometime even later, after the easy laughter and puppy love of early dating, and after slightly-deeper monologues about child rearing, came the soul-baring conversations about these enormous, earth-shattering losses that had changed our lives in many startlingly similar ways.

Such conversations gave rise to various, life-altering realizations, the most profound of which being: Life is for the Living.

Why did we keep saying, “Someday, I will visit X,” when we could visit X now? Why did we compartmentalize all that we wanted to experience into a chunk of time not destined to occur until a series of far-reaching conditions were met?

It was a very scary, but very serious, question. Why did we keep putting off all the things we really wanted to do on a very-distant later? What if, after all the putting off, and more putting off, and STILL more putting off… what if there was never an “on”? What if later never happened?

We both saw firsthand: Death permanently invalidates all the dreams you have sitting out there.

And so we, my partner and I, began making different choices. We began redefining our lives in terms of the now, as opposed to the maybe later.

I planned a trip, an unconventional trip, and planned on taking my sons. After some time, my partner agreed to come along, to meet us on our unconventional trip and so it was that in June of 2006 we met up in Machu Picchu, Peru, and went on to see the Amazonian Rainforest together.

Okay so now we’re getting to the crux of this missive . (I know, finally, right? Bear with me.)

It was on this trip that we realized and saw—truly saw for the very first time—how enormous this great wide world is.

*forehead slap!*

Each of us had lived in many places over the course of our lives, and had always understood that there was more to life than what was in front of our faces. Our parents had said that very thing to us—WE had even said that very thing to our kids: THERE IS MORE TO LIFE THAN WHAT IS IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE. Duh, right?

Still… it doesn’t really sink in until you actually have something different in your face.

For my boys, seeing how people in Cusco or Iquitos or deep within the rainforest live— that was life changing. We were old, seeing this, REALLY seeing this for the first time. But my boys, they were young. They got the realization early and maybe it would change who they became and how they lived their lives, how it affected their choices? Maybe they could avoid getting sucked into the “maybe later” rut, and live in the now?

We left to visit a small bit of the world, and came back with the understanding that there is MORE TO LIFE.

There is more to life than School. There is more to life than College. And Church. And Family. And Fresno and Clovis and CALIFORNIA. There is more than the United States of America, more than just the English language, more than the dollar and the Euro and Lays potato chips and your Emo boyfriend and your X-box. There is more than just YOU, in your little world, with your real and perceived, serious and not-so-serious, dilemmas. There is so much more than you’ll ever know or be able to understand unless you go out and see, really see it for yourself.

A whole wide world churns, grows, cries, laughs, buys, sells, produces, EXISTS just beyond your doorstep, and no matter how deeply involved you are in your own tiny little area, thinking that whatever is in your face is all there will ever be…

You’re wrong.

There’s more.

That was our agenda: To share this message with these up and comers, as they approach the next steps in their developing lives.

That, and to cram in the faces of our friends that we saw Dublin FIRST.