I first visited Lourdes with my parents in July 2008. Somewhere during that visit, I made a simple prayer: that one day I would return with my husband.
I wasn’t married then, but I already knew this was a place I wanted to share with him. Lourdes had left me with a feeling I struggled to put into words—a deep sense of peace, even with crowds moving around me and so much happening at once.
I carried that memory home, along with the hope of returning.
Trying to Explain a Feeling
After we married in 2017, I often told my husband about Lourdes. I spoke about its beauty and the peace I had experienced there. I would even try to describe the taste of the water from the river that flows through it. That detail had stayed with me, though explaining it was another matter entirely.
He would listen, but he couldn’t quite understand what I meant. I can hardly blame him. Describing the taste of water is difficult enough; explaining why it belongs so closely to your memory of a place is harder still.
The same was true of the calm I kept talking about. Lourdes could be crowded and busy, yet I remembered feeling deeply peaceful there. “Calm in chaos” was perhaps the closest I could come to describing it.
Still, there was only so much I could convey through words. I wanted him to experience it for himself.
Returning, Together
In 2024, sixteen years after that first visit, I returned with my husband and my parents.
Having my parents beside me again made the journey especially meaningful. They had shared my first experience of Lourdes, and now we were back with my husband joining us. A place from my life before marriage was becoming part of our shared story.
There was a quiet joy in recognising that an old prayer had been answered. What I had once hoped for was now happening, with the people I loved beside me.
And this time, my husband understood.
When he experienced the water for himself, my attempts to describe its taste finally made sense to him. Something I had tried to explain for years became a small moment of understanding between us.
He also understood what I meant by calm in chaos. With all the movement and activity around us, he could feel the peace I had spoken about. I no longer needed to search for the right words. We could simply share the experience.
A Place That Became Ours
One of the things I love about travelling together is discovering what stays with each of us. Sometimes it is a meal, a view, or a conversation we return to long after coming home.
With Lourdes, it was the feeling of being there.
For so long, it had been a place I wanted my husband to know. Now it has become somewhere he would like us to return to someday. That means a great deal to me. The place I had kept describing had made its own impression on him, and the wish to go back was now something we shared.
When I think of Lourdes, I remember my first visit with my parents and the prayer I made then. I also remember returning as a wife, watching my husband understand the little things I had struggled to explain.
I am grateful to God for that return, for the time we shared as a family, and for the peace we found there.
And I love knowing that, when we speak about going back, we both understand why.
