My mom enjoying one of our regular pedicure sessions
Reflections & Musings · 9 September 2026
In January, my mother died after struggling for the past 7 years with Alzheimer’s Disease. That may seem like a strange thing to lead with on a travel blog, but in reality, her death is the whole reason for this project.
I was her primary caregiver, though she spent the end of her illness in an Assisted Living Facility, where I could visit her and play ukulele for the residents as often as possible. Being her caregiver was hard. Losing her was harder, even if I’d been losing pieces of her since the saga began.
The thing about grief and logistics is: they don’t politely take turns. I’d spent an entire week mapping out the best route to time diving with the shifting weather, while the same week researching what goes on an altar for a woman who’d never even heard of Hanal Pixán. Local flowers. Copal. Water. Her photograph. Food she loved, even if it’s not traditionally correct. Somewhere in between “daytrip to cenotes on poor viz ocean days” and “how to get chocolate/vanilla twist ice cream to not melt,” the spreadsheet stopped being just a planning tool and started being the only place I could hold myself together.
So, the spreadsheet. Twenty-two locations (down from 28), eight criteria, four scouting trips, and a departure date written in blood. That’s the container. Inside it is a two-year plan to find out where I want to live, built by someone whose brain does not operate terribly efficiently. There are far more unknowns than knowns. I have an Integration Coaching and Kambo practice I care about, but it’s work I can do anywhere with a decent internet connection, which does have its own column. I have a 2e brain that wanted to research Mauritius at 2 am for shits and giggles, which then promptly got its own tab in the workbook because…maybe? Regardless, I’m not going to win an argument with myself at 2 am.
This isn’t metaphor about healing through travel. I’ve done enough of that leading up to this, and while some of those tales may creep into the narrative, that is not what this story is about. What’s true is smaller and less insta-worthy (which is good, because I don’t have an insta-account): building a scoring system for climate, scuba access, music scenes, and whether the tap water would be shut off regularly gave me something to do with my hands and my brain, while the bigger thing – the tangible loss, the not knowing what my life is anymore – was riding shotgun. It really didn’t fix anything. It just meant I had somewhere to put my attention that wasn’t only grief.
The first Temporary Resident card, I’ve learned, is always issued for one year regardless of what you read online, but can be renewed for 3 years after that. Permanent Residency is basically automatic in year 5, at least for now. I like that fact, probably a little too much. The path forward. A real outline. A plan. It’s a small, boring, bureaucratic certainty in a year that hasn’t had a lot of those. I’ll take it.
This blog is going to have posts about diving conditions and canje paperwork (swapping the Visa sticker from Philly for the actual residency card in Mexico) and which towns have decent internet and market, and it should – that really is its purpose. But I wanted at least one entry on record that says the other version: I’m doing this because my mother is gone and I don’t know what my life looks like without her in it, and building a 22-row spreadsheet turned out to be a healthier response to that than many of the things I could have been doing. So, I’ll own it. I have an emotional support spreadsheet, and that’s perfectly fine.
Postcards welcome. Drop yours below.