ROUTE 66
When Our Daughter Died, We Tackled Our Grief by Going on a Honeymoon
Deserts, Grief & Route 66
For our honeymoon, we should have been there, under the great wave, the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, as it vanquished its way across the Indian Ocean. We should have been there, pulverised by the disintegrating buildings, swept flat like a sandcastle. But instead, we watched it on CNN from the safety of a motel room somewhere in Oklahoma.
Our wedding had been so last minute that all the winter sun holidays had gone. So rather than find somewhere nearer to home, here in the UK, on a whim, we ended up travelling down Route 66. This famous road took us from the iced air and snow of Chicago to the t-shirt-wearing weather of California. Three weeks and 2000 miles of driving.
But then we shouldn’t have been having a holiday, a honeymoon at all. This is a story of how we started to come to terms with one of the greatest losses you can go through by heading west and travelling the empty desert roads.
On the 21st of November 2004, my wife and I’s daughter, Liberty Jane, died. She would have been 20 this year. She…
