Presence: What the ICU Taught Me About Travel

There are some places you never expect to return to. For me, it was the intensive care unit.

On July 2, 2025, I walked through doors I had entered countless times over more than thirteen years as a registered nurse. The sounds were familiar. The steady rhythm of the monitors, the quiet conversations between nurses, the look exchanged between families searching for hope before anyone had spoken a word. Hospitals had shaped so much of who I was. They had taught me to remain calm in moments of uncertainty, to notice what others overlooked, and to care for people on some of the hardest days of their lives.

This time, however, I wasn't the nurse. I was family.

My cousin was preparing to say goodbye to her mother, and my grandmother was preparing to lose her daughter. Everything I had learned as a clinician suddenly felt very small. There were no medications to administer, no care plans to coordinate, and no clinical decisions to make. There was only the privilege of sitting beside the people I loved during one of the hardest moments our family had ever experienced. It reminded me that no amount of professional experience can prepare you for grief when it finally reaches your own home.

Life has an uncanny way of refusing to stop simply because your heart has. Children still need breakfast. Emails still arrive. Responsibilities quietly wait for no one. Even in seasons of profound loss, the world continues to move forward, asking us to do the same.

At the time, I was working two nursing jobs while building ThetravelingTrendie in the margins of my life. The business was still an idea growing quietly between pre procedure calls, night shifts, motherhood, and every spare hour I could find. It wasn't replacing nursing. It existed alongside it, asking for the same commitment, the same curiosity, and the same belief that caring for people could take many different forms.

Somewhere in the middle of that week, I was in communication with a client planning a journey through Puglia, Croatia and Venice.

That evening, my screen filled with places that could not have felt farther from an intensive care unit. The Adriatic stretched across my monitor in impossible shades of blue. Stone villages seemed to rise out of the sea, their narrow streets winding toward quiet harbors where fishing boats rocked gently against the docks. I compared ferry routes between islands, lingered over family owned boutique hotels tucked inside centuries old buildings, and imagined the pace of mornings along the Croatian coast.

One waterfront hotel held my attention a little longer than the others. I imagined my client pulling back the curtains on his first morning, hearing the water before he heard another person, and beginning the day's journey without feeling rushed. I wanted the first moments there to invite him into the slower rhythm that had drawn me to Croatia in the first place.

What surprises me isn't that I planned a beautiful journey while grieving. Many people continue working through difficult seasons because life requires it. What surprises me is how completely I could inhabit both worlds.

When I sat beside my family in the hospital, nothing else existed. My attention belonged entirely to them. When I returned home and opened my laptop, my attention shifted just as completely. For the next few hours, my client and the journey they had entrusted me to create became my only focus. I compared ferry routes across the Adriatic, lingered over hotels that overlooked quiet harbors, and thought carefully about the kind of journey I wanted my client to experience. At the time, it never occurred to me that anything unusual was happening. I simply moved from one responsibility to the next, giving each my full attention because that was what the moment required.

I later realized, I don't remember that week as the week I planned a journey through Croatia. I remember it as the week I discovered something about myself.

I could be fully present with my family during one of the hardest moments of our lives, leave the hospital, open my laptop, and become fully present in planning someone else's journey. I wasn't escaping my grief by planning travel, nor was I carrying my grief into someone else's vacation. I was learning to honor the people in front of me, wherever I was.

It was a quiet realization, one I don't think I could have recognized in any other season.

When people ask what makes a great travel advisor, they usually expect an answer about destinations, partnerships, or industry knowledge. Those things matter, and I have spent years developing them. But before I recommend a hotel or design an itinerary, I find myself wondering about the person who will experience it. What season of life are they in? What are they celebrating? What are they carrying that no one else can see? Every traveler arrives with a story long before they ever arrive at a destination.

Perhaps that is why I have never believed I was simply planning vacations. I was creating space for people to spend their most valuable resource, their time. Time with children who seem to grow up overnight. Time with parents whose pace has begun to slow. Time with a spouse after years spent building careers. Time alone to rediscover parts of themselves that have been buried beneath responsibility.

Travel cannot heal grief, nor should we ask it to. What it can offer is space. Space to breathe. Space to notice. Space to reconnect with the people beside us and, sometimes, with ourselves.

Only later did I realize why I almost never shared that Croatia itinerary.

It was never really about Croatia.

It was about discovering that the greatest journeys I create begin long before anyone boards a plane. They begin by honoring the person in front of me, wherever they are, and wherever I am.