Antidote for Sadness

It has been two years since actor Cary Grant died, but I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news.

I was savoring the balmy evening breeze on the Lido deck balcony of the Royal Princess as that elegant mountain of lights cruised through the Caribbean south of St. Thomas.

My mother knocked at my stateroom door, then swept in with two pomegranates and the headline. She had met Grant on a Princess cruise to Alaska some years earlier. They had joked beside the railing in Glacier Bay and traded travel stories.

She had hoped to run away with the gentle charmer, but his wife--and my father--stood firm. She settled for winsome photographs and memories she could embellish forever.

My father died unexpectedly in September two years ago, which was the prime reason that mother and I had decided to immerse ourselves in travel and sail for the Panama Canal. On the night of the pomegranates we sat on the balcony for sundown champagne.

We stared at distant islands and I babbled about summertime Jeep trips over the hump of St. John to towns named Calabash Boom and John Folly. We both knew it was three months to the day since dad’s death, but we did not mention it for a while.

“To daddy,” I finally said, raising my glass toward the heavens, which were streaked with gold and purple. I plucked a rosebud from a basket of flowers on the table and tossed it into the sea. Mother smiled and nodded, her eyes glistening.

Then she reached for the basket and snapped off a daisy.

“And to Cary,” she said firmly, as she flung the flower into the soft night air.

That broke the throat-throbbing spell and we hugged and walked off to dinner, swapping stories of other heroes and other trips.

Travel can be an antidote for sadness, but the timing and the company must be right.

I have a New York City friend who, not long after her husband’s death, invited another widow to join her on a lengthy cruise on Queen Elizabeth 2 to Southeast Asian ports. The trip was a bad idea, she later said, because the cruise was to have been a retirement spree, something that she and her husband had spent years in planning.

When laughter rolled out from the dance floor she had sinking spells. When she saw gilded temples or smiling youngsters she reached for her husband’s hand. The nights were more painful than the days.

Since that time she has made other cruises with good results. These are trips she has plotted alone or with friends of like interests. They are shorter cruises.

They have themes, such as music or adventure. They often begin or end with a family visit, so that she feels buoyed by a “bon voyage” or a “welcome home.”

The Christmas season can be an especially lonely time if it is the first December after a divorce or a death in the family. It can seem empty if it is the first year that your children choose to go skiing with friends instead of coming home from college. It can seem bleak if condominium neighbors return to far-flung nests and you’re left holding a new job with no vacation. It is a time to think of others, if only in self-defense.

If you have time and money, a change of scene and weather can brighten the holidays.

Take yourself, or your leftovers of family, to Williamsburg and spend the holidays in the warmth of the 18th Century, with its merry music and Colonial recipes and hand-fashioned door wreaths of pineapples.

Or go to London, or the city of York, for an English holiday package complete with yule logs and plum puddings and carols sung by choirs of fresh-faced youngsters whose voices seem to be changing in mid-verse.

Or head for the inns of the 19th Century towns of California’s Gold Rush country along California 49, which rambles west of Yosemite National Park. Try the fetching Sutter Creek Inn in Sutter Creek, or the funky old St. George Hotel in Volcano or the Hotel Leger in Mokelumne Hill.

I have shared the warmth of Christmas with strangers in Dublin, where no one’s a stranger for long, and with families who smiled in the parks of Provence, where the days were so golden that children flocked to ice cream parlors along the promenade in Arles.

I’ve been drawn to mountain lodges in Jackson, Wyo., and Park City, Utah, by the notion of sleigh rides and sitting down to someone else’s home cooking.

If you can’t afford to leave town, invite friends in for potluck and video trips. Or gather people without plans and celebrate with a beach picnic, or at a restaurant or hotel such as the century-old Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, with its three-story lobby tree and Victorian bows and candles.

That was my plan last year when I invited my mother to California for the holidays. But things changed. I had a chance to join a group that was heading for Antarctica. Mother laughed and shook her head. We’ve done this to each other before.

I am fortunate to have a sister in San Diego who sometimes does what I say, not what I do.

My mother and sister enjoyed a Victorian feast in sunny Colorado, while I sat down to Christmas dinner at the table of Antarctic travel pioneer Lars-Eric Lindblad as our ship dodged icebergs not far from King George Island.