Mom Teaches Daughters Resilience In Cross-Country RV Trip

It all started in 2010 at a campground in Portland, Oregon.

"I had to pee in the middle of the night and I was terrified," says Laura Fahrenthold. "So I brought the box of ashes to the outhouse with me. I tripped and it spilled and dusted me all over. Now looking back, I like to say, that's when he broke out of the box."

"He" was her husband Mark Pittman, a strapping 6-foot-4 investigative journalist for Bloomberg News. One year earlier, on Nov. 25, 2009, he had died of a massive heart attack at their home in Yonkers, New York at age 52.

"My daughters, Nell and Susannah, were 8 and 10 and they saw it happen," says Fahrenthold. "I was 46 years old, and to have your husband drop dead with your two kids looking at you, it was like someone ripped our life apart. Like a bomb went off."

"We were all traumatized," she says. "There came a point, I just thought, let's get the hell out of here."

And so she took a hiatus from her city government job and took her daughters camping across the country.

"We brought Mark's ashes with us because I was afraid to leave them at home, in case something happened to them," says Fahrenthold. "I didn't intend to buy an RV but I did and we ended up traveling 31,152 miles and spreading his ashes all across America."

Check out the full article from People here. 

Photo courtesy: Laura Fahrenthold