In September, my mother left for Europe.

It was a whirlwind cruise, blowing through Spain, Italy, Rome and Monaco all under 30 days, with their five-star liner stopping briefly at every major city in the Peninsula. After almost a month at sea, she brought us home souvenirs, postcards, chocolates she’d smuggled from the ship, and of course, tales of heartache, discovery, and hope.

Monaco. September 2006. Photo by Honey Mata.

Most importantly, while on this trip, she finally learned how to use a camera. For most of her life, my mother had seemed hopelessly inept at it: she would either point the lens in the wrong direction (too high up so that the top of the subject’s head would be cut off, or so low that one could only see his trousers), or she would accidentally put her thumb over the flash, so there were always vague shadow-prints lurking in the corners of her snapshots.

In Europe, she had never been surrounded by so much beauty – the long, winding canals in Venice, the intricate churches in Madrid, the serene, foggy mornings of Monaco … in Italy, boys, young and old, called to her on the street – ciao, bella, we love you so much!, while in Pamplona, a fledgling matador pledged his allegiance to her before charging into the ring to face his first bull alone.

My mother began to understand how privileged she was to be there, to be strong and healthy, to see what she was seeing, to walk where she was walking. At long last, after so many years of guilt and self-doubt, away from her responsibilities back home, she felt fully in the moment, free from the weight of her past and the burden of having to worry about the future.

So she took pictures. She spent most of her time away from her fellow tourists. She would crouch down, tiptoe, hide behind corners, and almost get into trouble, if only to take photos of couples kissing, children running in and out of patisseries, mountains beyond the mists of Monaco, old men sitting on stoops outside their houses in the afternoons.

When we asked how she was able to overcome her difficulties with her former nemesis (the camera) my mother replied: “It’s easy to learn things once you stop being afraid of them. While I was (away), it was impossible to be afraid of anything.”