This post concludes this serializing of my six-chapter travel memoir about a trip to Italy’s Cinque Terre in 2008*. In 2010, I self-published Write Your Travel Memoirs: 5 Steps to Transform Your Travel Experiences Into Compelling Essays. It included five how-to chapters and, to provide an example, this memoir. The book is available on Amazon.com.

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Epilogue

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My mother has a saying: “You do the best you can with what you know at the time.” She is prone to add, “and it’s never enough.”

In the months that followed that dream trip to Cinque Terre, and the equal and opposite nightmare trip for Team Fred, that phrase came to mind frequently. Slowly the realization worked its way through to me: I was the villain in this piece.

Through my selfishness, I had nearly killed our dog and poisoned a friendship. By my inability to even think the words “thank you for the offer, but let’s wait until Fred no longer needs us,” I drew us all into the events of those ten days, in which we each did the best we could with what we knew at the time. And it wasn’t enough.

I tried to apologize to Dave and Elaine in various ways, and mostly made myself feel worse. The generosity of spirit I’d found in Cinque Terre could not be retrieved once I got back home. We may have found our place there, but now it was thousands of miles away. Home felt like a foreign land full of guilt and sadness.

Fred regained enough strength to enjoy what he could of the summer that followed. Life in the yard, centered on his rug, his people, and his treats, was good. But Labor Day came, I had an accident on my motor scooter, and I returned from the hospital with a shoulder in a sling. The next day Fred began screaming with pain when he tried to walk. The day after that, the vet diagnosed cancer in his shoulder, and we sent him to his final sleep.

Now I see the pattern, that a dog’s response to frightening changes can be a systemic weakness that allows disease processes to attack. I didn’t know that then.

Now I struggle to do the best I can with what I’ve learned from the experience. I try to make amends for what I’ve done. Still nothing feels like enough.   

© 2024 Sarah White

*I self-published Write Your Travel Memoirs mainly as an experiment to test the print-on-demand workflow before offering it to my clients. I had the content, from workshops I had taught for Story Circle Network’s online classes, and enjoyed adapting it to book form.