It’s another New Year, so I am naturally thinking about resolutions… “goals” for 2026. Hopes, dreams, accomplishments, etc. This made me start thinking about things on Lynn and my “Bucket List” that we never completed. One big one that was on the list forever was to travel to Europe – specifically to Italy, where her family was from. She knew the towns she wanted to visit, she remembered family tales about who did what in which town, scandals and rumors, stories that had been told and retold for generations. We would ask her Dad and Aunt for details regarding exact names of family members, their professions, the family tree, etc. Being Italian, they shared the information in long format and in a tangential way, going off in one direction about so and so, interrupting themselves when another thought came to their mind. It was fun hearing Lynn’s dad and his sister reminisce about their family. 

After Lynn passed, I still planned to go to Italy, to check that one off our Bucket List. It was a bittersweet feeling, of course, and I had to remember and “research” the places we knew we had to go to, because they were significant to her family. I was intent on making the trip exactly how we would have done it together.

I still have not gone… and I still want to. However, my desire to go to Italy, and what i might want to do there has evolved – to my own surprise – in the past 11 years since Lynn passed.

I have always felt, and still feel, that Lynn’s family is my family. We are still very close, and I still refer to them as my in-laws. Therefore, Lynn’s family history was also my family history. And while I still feel that way, my sense of “obligation” and connection have lessened. I imagine the contrast of going to a small butcher shop in an Italian countryside town by myself versus with Lynn, who biologically has a family connection with it. Very different feeling and connection, lol! She joined my family and I in the Philippines, and experienced our family’s culture and traditions, visited ancestral homes, etc. I imagine her experience, understand, feeling would have been different had she visited without my / my family. 

So… resolutions and hopes and goals. I hope to make it to Europe this year (I’ve never been and I am 50 years old! Ack!). And while I would LOVE to go to Italy, I really asked myself what exactly I wanted to do and experience – and eliminate any notions of obligations to Lynn or fulfilling old goals or feeling guilty if I do this or don’t do that. And the very top of my list is – I want to visit Spain. I am Filipino, and my Aunt traced our roots (my Dad’s lineage) back to Spain, and found the family crest for The Villafuerte’s, which depicts the various values and history of their journey in Spain. 

It was quite a mental and emotional shift to take Italy off the top of the list, where it had been without question or reassessment for years, and to put Spain on the top. (And one day, the Camino de Santiago…) It felt a little selfish, and a little isolating, because it was only MY goal and not a collaborative one. BUT, as part of the superpower that comes with turning 50 years old, I am not overthinking it because I don’t have the energy or time to do so! lol.