Last week I went to my grandmother’s funeral in Mexico. It had been more than six years since I’d last been to the country in which both my parents were born. Every year I’d come up with some excuse as to why I couldn’t afford to go or didn’t have the vacation time to take off from my job. The truth is I wasn’t interested in going.

The reason for that escapes me now, but driving into those celestial Sierra Madre Mountains last week shook me to the core in a way that I hadn’t been in a long while.