St Kitts & Nevis 🇰🇳
21 December 2025
I did not travel to St Kitts looking for new experiences. I travelled there to return something precious….to return my Granny back home.
My grandmother Mavis Cynthia Liburd had died months earlier (September), and grief had settled into my life quietly — not as a single moment, but as a constant presence. There had been the funeral, the formal goodbyes, the words spoken when language felt insufficient. And yet, something remained unfinished.
Taking my grandmother back to the island where she began — where she was raised, shaped, and formed — felt profound in a way I hadn’t anticipated. It was not a journey I took lightly, and it was not one I rushed. It was her final journey, and it was an honour to carry it out.
Each phase of accepting her absence has been heartbreaking. There was the funeral — the most beautiful, honorary farewell we could give her. There was the eulogy, spoken through tears. And then there was the dismantling of a life: packing up forty years in a house I had known all my life, sorting through memories, holding objects that suddenly felt heavier because they no longer belonged to the present.
What lingered most, though, was incompletion.
Taking her back home — returning to St Kitts and making that her final journey — was profound in a way I don’t think I fully understood until I was standing there. The island where my grandmother began, the place that raised her, became the place where I honoured her ending.
It was an honour I will carry with me for the rest of my life.
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The Absence
I have been noticeably absent from social interactions, social media and from writing for months. I stopped blogging entirely in August 2025, when we were confronted with the reality that the time had come to say goodbye to our family matriarch.
I fell quiet as life narrowed to something far more intimate and difficult.
Mid-July, our family matriarch, had been diagnosed with terminal colon cancer.
By August, she was sent home on palliative care. In September, she died. In October we buried her. In November her ashes were given. By December I was tasked with returning her home.
It’s difficult to accept I am never going to see or even be around my Granny ever again.
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Why St Kitts: The Act of Coming Home
My grandmother was an extraordinary storyteller. Anyone who knows my Granny knows She carried St Kitts with her everywhere she went, retelling her childhood with such vivid detail — a place she never truly let go of.
Returning to St Kitts was not about travel in the traditional sense. It wasn’t about seeing the island. It was about honouring her.
This visit was separate from my first time cruising to St Kitts, when I had explored Basseterre and arrived via the cruise port on a different journey altogether.
This time, the stop felt heavier, more intentional.
Thankfully, Family still live on the island. Relatives I had never met before welcomed me back again as if I had always belonged.
There is something deeply grounding about familiarity without having lived somewhere yourself — a sense that connection doesn’t always require proximity, only lineage.
Walking the streets she spoke of, standing where her memories were formed, made her stories feel suddenly tangible.
Though she left St Kitts physically, it lived on through her stories — through us.
She spoke often of Springfield Cemetery, Of growing up in the houses adjacent to it. Of being five years old, crawling between the feet of adults at her grandmother’s funeral. Of waking at night and looking out of the window toward the cemetery grounds.
Her childhood unfolded in that landscape, Her primary school stood across the road. Everything stitched tightly to memory and all in one place. Returning her ashes there did not feel like travel. It felt like responsibility.
When I arrived, I spent hours in the cemetery. Time moved differently. I was shown the graves of her siblings, friends, aunts, uncles, cousins — people whose names I had heard my entire life, now etched into stone. I listened. I remembered.
Near the entrance, facing the houses she grew up in and visible from the school she once attended, I found a palm tree.
It was perfect. Grounded. Living. A marker without needing to be a monument.
As if the island already knew, yellow flowers were her favourite colour, they were growing throughout the cemetery grounds.
I gathered them easily, laying them down gently, instinctively. Nothing about the moment felt forced. Gathering them felt instinctive, almost guided. Everything about the moment felt aligned.
The act itself — releasing her ashes — is difficult to explain. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t loud. It was quiet, steady, and deeply grounding.
I felt proud — proud that I could do this for her, proud that I could honour her life, her memory, her existence in a way that felt right. I stayed for a long time. And when I finally left, I felt something I hadn’t felt since she died: ease.
There was an ease that followed. A peace.
A sense of alignment I hadn’t felt since she passed. My grandmother was cremated. There is no grave to visit in England. But now, there is a place. A palm tree near an entrance, in a cemetery she spoke of often, on an island she never truly left.
Bringing her home was the right thing to do.
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Connection
Afterward, that peace extended into connection as we visited relatives — her nieces and nephews, people who had visited her in England and now welcomed me as the English relative returning to them. Family resemblance was everywhere. So was affection. I met family members I had never met before, yet somehow recognised. The resemblance was uncanny. Her nieces and nephews spoke of her with fondness and love. They remembered visits to England, remembered her stories, remembered her laughter. Now, as the English relative, I visited them. The exchange felt complete, circular.
Family, once separated by geography, reconnected through memory.
St Kitts held me gently in those moments. The island felt familiar without being mine, personal without requiring explanation. Taking photographs, exchanging numbers, promising to stay in touch — it all felt meaningful, grounding, real.
This is what legacy looks like when it’s lived, not just remembered.
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Leaving
Leaving St Kitts meant returning to the ship, but not immediately. Life was unfolding around me in ways that felt quietly reassuring.
From my aunt’s balcony, set high on a hill overlooking Port Zante, I watched my ship resting in the bay. The view was beautiful, but more than that, it felt symbolic: arrival and departure sharing the same horizon.
I hadn’t come for excursions or beaches on this cruise stop, and I didn’t need to. The purpose of the visit had already been fulfilled.
Returning to the ship I wandered through the port area slowly. Port Zante in Basseterre is an impressive, well-designed port, created to welcome visitors with care, and the island should be proud of it. Whilst exploring the shops a small drumming parade passed through. Movement, colour, and sound filled the space— music carried through the air as part of a seasonal music festival. It felt important to witness joy alongside grief. To stand there holding something heavy while the island carried on being vibrant, expressive, alive. St Kitts does that effortlessly — it holds memory and momentum in the same breath.
When I finally left the island, something had shifted.
Not happiness — but peace.
St Kitts is no longer just a destination I visit. It is a place of return, of honour, and of deep personal meaning. And every time I step onto the island now, I do so knowing that part of her is there — exactly where she belongs.
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Some journeys aren’t about seeing a place — they’re about honouring where we come from, and understanding what it means to return.
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