Chapter 7 - The Sunset Over SintraThree days in Lisbon blurred into a golden montage of narrow tram rides up steep hills, the haunting, soulful strains of live Fado music echoing from candlelit taverns in the Bairro Alto, and endless plates of grilled seafood washed down with crisp, effervescent Vinho Verde.
By our fourth day, the travel club arranged a private excursion westward to the misty, fairytale town of Sintra and the rugged cliffs of Cabo da Roca—the westernmost point of continental Europe.
As our bus wound its way up the verdant slopes of the Serra de Sintra mountain range, the air grew noticeably cooler, scented heavily with pine needles, wet moss, and damp earth. Through the fog, the brightly colored towers of the Pena Palace emerged like something out of a storybook—yellow and red domes perched precariously on craggy granite peaks, looking down over the vast, endless green valleys toward the Atlantic.
Joyce and I walked side by side along the stone battlements of the palace, wrapped in our light wool cardigans against the brisk mountain breeze.
“Can you believe we’re actually here?” Joyce asked, leaning against the stone parapet as she snapped a photo with her phone. “If someone had told me six months ago I’d be standing on a nineteenth-century Portuguese royal palace roof drinking iced coffee from a tourist kiosk, I would have laughed in their face.”
“Me too,” I murmured, resting my hands on the cool stone and staring out at the mist rolling across the valley.
“You’ve been remarkably quiet about home, Myrna,” Joyce noted gently, turning to look at me. “Did your family survive the transition?”
I smiled, watching a hawk glide effortlessly on an updraft far below us. “They survived. In fact, I think it’s the best thing that could have possibly happened to them.”
“Oh?”
“For the first time in five years, they had to figure out basic logistics without defaulting to me,” I explained. “Caleb had to navigate international parenting panic from Tokyo, Tori had to negotiate domestic terms with her mother, and my grandchildren got to see that adults have lives outside of their immediate demands.”
Joyce raised her eyebrows approvingly. “A masterclass in strategic absence.”
“You could call it that,” I laughed. “Or simply refusing to be invisible anymore.”
Later that afternoon, our bus descended from the mountains down to Cabo da Roca—the westernmost edge of the Eurasian landmass. A massive stone monument stood at the edge of a sheer three-hundred-foot drop, inscribed with the famous words of the Portuguese poet Luís de Camões: “Here... where the land ends and the sea begins.”
We stood at the wooden railing, watching the immense, crashing turquoise waves of the Atlantic smash against jagged black rocks far below. The wind whipped our hair across our faces, salty and raw and alive.
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I closed my eyes for a moment, feeling the wind press against my chest, and thought of Charles. For years, I had carried his absence like a heavy stone in my pocket, letting grief shrink my world down to the dimensions of a single empty house.
Standing there at the edge of the European continent, looking out toward the horizon where the ocean stretched all the way back across the globe toward home, I realized the stone was gone. The grief hadn't disappeared, but it had finally transformed from a prison into a compass.
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