My 3 kids spend little time with their grandpa. So, we flew across the country for a surprise visit.

15.10.2024 - 01:53 / insider.com

At 19, I fell in love with a long-haired musician wearing a white linen shirt dotted with wooden buttons. He caught my eye while strumming an acoustic guitar and singing his heart out at an open-mic-night dive bar in Montana.

It only took two years before I packed up everything I owned and moved across the country to build a life with him in Chicago, leaving the weathered mountains, coniferous forests, and wildflower-filled meadows of my childhood forever in the rearview mirror.

Later, I'd marry that music man. Together, we weathered the vicissitudes of life through the challenges of working and paying for college, moving multiple times, and going through career changes. And, just as I was becoming a mother, I'd lose my own through a lengthy and painful struggle with breast cancer.

Even though we could barely afford it at the time — with three little boys to take care of — we made the journey back to my home state to spend time with my parents and to give my children a chance to feel their grandparents' love.

After my mom died, the worry about my father's health and welfare grew. How would he endure, all alone without my mom? What was my responsibility in all of this, living several states away and raising my own family?

But my father had created his own life, surrounded by horses and wide-open spaces. The fact that the only time he had ever visited me was for my wedding — something I told him he was obligated to do — was incredibly telling for where he'd want to spend his remaining years.

When my dad found love again and chose to get remarried a few years later, it was a great relief. I was proud of him for fighting for his existence and for deciding that he deserved happiness — even at his mature age. I knew it was challenging to be vulnerable and put yourself out there again after so many decades of marriage.

When we arrived in Montana for his wedding, I popped in a local coffee shop before the big day, while my husband and boys waited outside. As soon as I spotted the bold brush strokes, I knew it was hers, my mother's painting hanging on the wall.

Unbeknownst to me, the owners had bought it from an antique store, where my mom sold some of her outsider art before she died. Gutted, all of it came rushing back — the pain of watching my mother get sick and lose her hair, her vibrancy, as she withered and suffered and eventually didn't know who or where she was anymore. The sting of seeing the faraway look in my dad's tired eyes when he told the young men setting up the hospital bed in his living room, "you'll be back to pick this up, she'll be dead soon."

I ran out of that coffee shop, sobbing into my hands as I struggled to explain to my husband what I had seen, trying like mad to pull myself