The computer says no.

It has been ten years since our mum passed away. In some ways, things have not moved on too much, but then, of course, the Pandemic hit, and the whole world stopped. Strangely, part of me is grateful that mum wasn’t around — I cannot imagine going through the final months of her life and not being able to visit her physically. That would have been unbearable.

But today’s post is about celebrating mum’s life because, during those ten years, we have had:

Two trips to Jamaica — to visit the land of her birth and meet relatives we hadn’t met before. The picture below is from our first visit.

More regular contact with our family in Jamaica, especially since the start of the Pandemic and the advent of Teams/Zoom. Is anyone using Skype?

Regular check-ins with our dad/stepdad, via phone and in person.

So, borrowing a line from the Little Britain comedy sketch show makes a good title for today’s post and how it felt when our insurers refused our claim when we had to cancel our first trip to Jamaica ten years ago.

We had everything paid for; it was going to be a big trip to take our mum back to the land of her birth and to meet our extended family.

We planned, talked, and saved for over two years; however, unknown to us, mum’s cancer had already started to return, and it was to prove too late to get her across. It just wasn’t going to be possible to take her and none of us at the time could face going without her.

But today, I want to celebrate the fact that despite being told initially by our insurers that we wouldn’t receive a penny from the £5000 we had paid for seven airline tickets. We did eventually get our money back.

Being told we weren’t going to get our money back was one of my lowest points, as it felt like losing mum all over again. However, as a family, we accepted this and moved on. We put our visit to Jamaica on the back burner as we learnt to manage and cope without mum.

What happened next shows me that if time doesn’t completely heal, it does at least soothe, as, after a year or so, we were able to review the travel situation a little more clearly and came up with the idea of contacting the airline, directly. It seems an obvious thing to do in hindsight, but at the time, it just didn’t occur to us.

It only took Delta Airlines a couple of weeks to reply with their condolences for our mother’s death and an assurance that we could indeed get a full refund. No admin fees, no hassle; they had, in fact, made this clear to our travel agent, but for reasons no one can fully fathom, this message never got through to us at the time.

Even the travel agent couldn’t quite explain it, though I don’t think they investigated too thoroughly.

In any case, our family trip to Jamaica was back on the cards, and that is what we did eight years ago for our first trip. We travelled out to stay in Runaway Bay and caught up with mum’s brothers, sisters, and cousins and visited the land where she was born.

Thank goodness we didn’t just leave it to, ‘the computer says no’……….

Our resilience as a family and our just ‘give it a go’ attitude brought us to this point, as well as the generosity of spirit of Delta Airlines, who just said ‘yes’.

Here’s to you, mum 😊.

Until next time.