When Your Heart Says Go–My Year of Traveling Beyond Loss and Loneliness

What sort of mad longing leads a woman—nearing fifty and recently widowed—to sell everything she owns, buy an around-the-world airline ticket, pack a single suitcase, and set off alone on a year-long journey without a plan or agenda? When Your Heart Says Go answers that question.

Set in 1990–’91, my memoir takes readers from San Diego through eleven European countries, the then-Soviet Union, and finally India, during the lead-up to the first Gulf War.

Explorations of foreign locales and interactions with strangers and acquaintances who become a lifeline to friendship are interspersed with occasional flashbacks to life with my beloved husband, Tom, as well as his illness and death. Descriptions of sites historic and current serve as both daily life and background for my struggle to find my way as a sober, single, independent woman in the vast world as it edges toward the collapse of the Soviet Union and war in the Middle East. The outer journey serves as a container for the inner; the more I experience of the world, the more I learn about myself—and the closer I get to realizing my lifelong dream of being a writer.

When Your Heart Says Go–My Year of Traveling Beyond Loss and Loneliness is available at Bookshop.org and Amazon.com