Life lessons in the Yucatan with Dad

Writer Tracy Barnett’s father, Gary Brunk, took his first trip to the Riviera Maya with his childhood sweetheart and wife of 55 years, Judy.

PLAYA DEL CARMEN, Quintana Roo – A light breeze moves in the jungle beyond our patio at the Grand Velas resort. Birds call to each other with liquid notes, and my mother reads her Bible beside me as my father sleeps. We’re winding to the close of our action-packed itinerary – maybe too action-packed, I reflect, but as Dad would say, “We had ‘er to do.”

Unforgettable moments flip through my memory: my father’s boyish grin lighting up in spite of himself as he stood, lifejacket up around his ears, the dolphin leaning in and kissing his cheek. Shaking his head in disbelief as our two waiters explained the special six-course meal that the famous French chef at Piaf, Michel Mustiere, had prepared for him, tailored to the complicated restrictions of his diet. Lying back on a canopied lounge on the beach, soaking up the sun and the attentions of a watchful staff.

My factory-worker dad, father of nine and grandfather of 21, had never come close to such luxury. He hadn’t even known it existed. A shade-tree mechanic and consummate fixer of broken things, I found him examining the cooling system in our suite and chatting up the shuttle drivers we would meet along the way.

Recently diagnosed with mesothelioma, an asbestos-induced cancer, he was given no more than a year to live. Doctors said it was too late for surgery or radiation, and that chemotherapy might at best give him a few more months.

He rejected the death sentence and decided to work with a naturopathic doctor. One strategy was a radical change in diet; my meat-and-potatoes Dad was a sudden vegan. Another was to keep living to the fullest, doing things that brought him joy.

“I’m not afraid to die,” he told me not long after his diagnosis. “But as long as I’m here, I’m going to live.”

I decided to support him in that vow. And as luck would have it, I would have 18 months to do so. Dad had shared with me my love of travel, but rarely had the resources to go far beyond the borders of his native Missouri.

I had long dreamed of bringing my parents to Mexico, my adopted second country, to share with them a bit of the culture that I had come to love.

I knew there was no time to waste. Just five months had passed since I had bid him – an unstoppable force at 72 – farewell at the Mexican border. When I arrived back in Missouri and embraced him after the diagnosis, I couldn’t believe my eyes; he had aged a decade in a few months.

I persuaded them to get their passports, and in December, we escaped the dreary Midwest winter for nine precious days on the Yucatan Peninsula. Then in March, we boarded a ship for the Holistic Holiday at Sea, a weeklong macrobiotic cruise through the Caribbean (atasteofhealth.org). And finally, in September, we took a trip to the Bahamas to receive an alternative treatment that ultimately didn’t cure him, but gave us memories of a lifetime.

The trip to Mexico was everything we’d hoped for. First we took a road trip across the peninsula to Merida. We stayed at the intimate colonial Hacienda Petac, lovingly restored from ruins by Houstonians Dev and Charles Stern. “A little piece of Eden,” my father termed it, a place where an attentive staff of traditionally dressed Mayan women worked closely with us to prepare an exquisite vegan menu inspired by indigenous traditions.

There we soaked up the ambience of the storybook-perfect environs, and were serenaded by one of the leading music trios in the region, pampered in the hacienda’s first-rate spa, taken on a birdwatching walk through the jungle, and treated to a level of TLC unheard of in the hotel industry.

Then we headed to Grand Velas on the Riviera Maya – named one of the world’s finest hotels by Condé Nast and AAA. There we would explore the ruins of Tulum, swim with the dolphins at Xel-Há and enjoy some exquisite chef-prepared vegan meals from the resort’s Mexican, Asian and French restaurants.

Ultimately we will never know if the diet helped him; we do know that he outlived his prognosis by more than a year, and it was a year we packed full of love and life.

“You just had to see it to believe it,” he’d say. “…and there were these chefs…. and we had a butler… and they treat you like a king… and the dolphin kissed us, and we kissed the dolphins.”

“And me, an old boy from Iron County, Missouri. It was just more than I could have imagined.”

Editor’s note: Tracy L. Barnett (tracybarnettonline.com) is an independent journalist and author (and former Houstonian) based in Guadalajara.