What would the best day of your life look like?
A slow morning in bed, maybe coffee brought to you?
Some shopping, a relaxing drive and enjoyable lunch?
Walking around town, a raucous dinner of your favorite meal?
Watching a sunset?
What does the place look like?
A place from your childhood?
The people you love around you?
Why not make more days like that?
If I had one day to live, I’d spend it in a little town on the California coast called Carmel-by-the-Sea.
The fog rolls in off the Pacific in the morning, and sometimes it stays all day.
But on really special days? It burns off early, giving you the clearest view you could ever imagine, the sun mottling across mossy rooftops and cobblestone streets.
It’s a hidden gem – a town that feels distinctly European, gets covered once a year with the most beautiful cars ever created.
It’s a place my parents fell in love with, where they had their honeymoon, where they returned with me when I was a baby and a place they took me every year.
It felt more like home than home ever did.
Some years we took my grandparents – one cantankerous “Nonny” (who actually relaxed there), one grandfather who saved me from the waves risking his ever-present camera in the process, and my kind grandmother Rachel who recalled babysitting a young Wyatt who’d jump on the bed the second his parents were out of sight.
L: mom, R: grandma
My grandpa went first (despite surviving falling off a ladder onto a chainsaw well into his 80s, cancer took him), then seven years later my dad (an even more aggressive cancer), the next year Nonny (97 and fiercely independent until the end, just went in the garden) and my beloved mother, who passed just a couple days after my first ever trip to Carmel as a grown man without my family (but with – gasp – a man).
The guilt that my mom couldn’t be there with me one last time rolled in like the fog at the end of every day on the peninsula.
And like that fog, the relationship dissipated too, through no one’s fault, scattered into a mist of “wanting different things”.
A few years ago I ventured on another trip there as a grownup, in a relationship, with some dear friends.
And let me tell you (well, it’s not like you have a choice) it really was the best day ever.
An impeccable meal at Casanova the night before, walking down Ocean Ave eating chocolate covered shortbreads in the morning, driving with the top down to Big Sur to catch a rare sunny day, the 17 Mile Drive, sunset champagne at Spanish Bay and buying some etched martini glasses I didn’t need but had to have, it was heaven.
Until it wasn’t.
Dinner came slow, the manager was rude, I drank too much on an empty stomach and got irritated, the man I’d been dating a few months talked down to me like a child, and then I just tore into him when we got back.
It probably the worst fight I’ve ever been in with another person I’ve loved – so bad that everyone heard and he packed a bag to leave.
apparently this is not the correct stance to take in an argument with someone you love!
The next day was spent walking chastened and rebuked side by side through Monterey, begging for forgiveness and understanding.
Little did I know that it was an irreparable offense, one that would come back to haunt me in every argument afterwards…
Including the night it all ended two years later…
…and a year later when it ended again.
After that – how much can you love a place when your last two experiences there were horrible – by no fault of the place itself – just your own damn fault?
apparently this is the correct stance to take in an argument
In my last two conversations with my grandmother Rachel, still sprightly, of sound mind, and nearing 100, she remembered the trips we all took together.
She remembered Carmel, and me jumping on the bed.
It brought a smile to her face and a chuckle to her soft cadence to recall the fun times we had as a family.
Her life was not an easy one.
Born on June __ 1926?7? (her birthday was in a constant state of flux, just know if you called at any time the first week of June you’d either be the day before or the day after) in Mt. Signal, a small California town overlooking the Mexican border, she was the youngest of nine children.
We never knew much about her family. I remember meeting her brother once before he passed.
When my grandfather saw her playing softball, he pointed directly at her and said “she’s tough! I’m going to marry that woman!”
He was right about that, and they stayed married for 61 years. It was a marriage of hard work, devotion, and two people who became each other’s greatest companions through life.
I really never saw or imagined them apart. It was just Grandma & Grandpa. You’d call to talk to one and hear the other scolding in the background, like an Abbott & Costello routine.
Married at 21, she ran a ranch and raised six children – responsibilities which she handled with aplomb. She was embraced by a big, loud, feral Armenian family who deeply loved and respected her, especially after she took to learning the recipes.
Still, however, her salsa – only made with the freshest tomatoes and peppers grown on the ranch – is what sticks in my brain, and is so simple yet so impossible to replicate.
As a grandmother of ten, and great grandmother of even more, she took her job seriously – hosting holidays, showing up for sports games and spelling bees, embracing her new role in life with joy and effortlessness.
Her true passion was reading, and she always wanted to learn more about the world, about people, and how to live the best, healthiest life.
I’d bring her books, she’d finish them and want more.
Later in life, she was blessed with the ability to travel and explore the American West. When I was a baby and my parents took everyone in a Suburban through Colorado, and the hotel caught fire, she raced downstairs holding me with the rest of the family. When we drove up to Northern California and it was pouring, she doted on my grandfather to make sure he was well despite having a recent hip replacement. She would fall, get up, tell no one, and move it along.
She was selfless and unfailingly kind.
When I said goodbye to her after visiting during Christmas week, I had a terrible feeling it was goodbye for good.
a few years back age 96 – I hope I look this good!
Not many people make it to their centennial year, or through 40% of American history, and despite being sharp as a tack, she looked like she just finally, at long last, wanted some rest.
It felt special to know that even after everything, Grandma Rachel still remembered Carmel. She remembered the meals, the shopping, how beautiful the place was, what the ocean was like, and spending it with our family.
Finding out she was gone in the moment was the sting of knowing she was at peace, but that it was one more door to that place I loved and the people I loved there closed.
The final one.
I still love that place.
I still dream of it.
I still see home listings in Carmel and think “what if”.
It’s a place that represents peace in my mind, that I go to in visualization, but it’s a place fraught with sadness, and loss, with grief and failure. With a pointed reminder of my own shortcomings.
Of mortality.
Of the black hole that exists when I look back at my life.
Of the fear that’s all I’ll ever be.
In the Maronite Catholic Church, which I’ve been blessed to attend with someone I love, I learned a prayer repeated at the end of every service.
I leave you in peace, O Holy Altar, and I hope to return to you in peace. May the offering I have received from you be for the forgiveness of my faults and the remission of my sins, that I may stand without shame or fear before the throne of Christ. I do not know if I shall be able to return to you again to offer another sacrifice. I leave you in peace.
I don’t know how many “best days” I have yet to come.
I don’t know how many I can make for others.
I don’t know peace.
But I do know that there is a place, that feels special, that there are people who are still with us, that I can make my presence peace, that the best days are ahead.
That they have to be.
That there’s no other way.
That my job is to make those best days happen.
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