Learning to walk with grief and gratitude
I’m home now, having reached the Pacific Crest Trail Monument at the Canadian border three weeks ago, and I’m feeling all the feelings that accompany the completion of a grand adventure, the end of a season, and the culmination of a five year effort to fulfill a childhood dream. So many people ask me how it feels to have hiked the width of this beautiful and complicated country of ours. Continuous footsteps from Mexico to Canada; How do those 5.3 million steps change a person?
The truth is I’m still settling into life back home. I’m thinking deeply about what the effort of my last five years has left me with besides a stronger back, a slower heart-rate, and legs I barely recognize but kind of like. What I’m coming to realize is that my feelings have nothing to do with accomplishing a goal, and everything to do with receiving a gift that I never expected: A whole collection of life lessons from the trail.
My last week on the PCT was beautiful beyond measure. It was a bittersweet time that I spent reflecting on all of the ways that this trail had changed me over the five years that I had walked its course. Repeatedly I returned to gratitude for the simple chance to just keep walking. I have always understood that having the strength, health, and energy to put in twenty plus mile days, day after day after day is unusual at my age. I don’t know why this has come so easy for me. I suppose it has been some magic combination of genetics and the privilege that comes from growing up in a family where adventure was both encouraged and tenaciously embraced. I haven’t “earned” this opportunity, I was gifted all of it.
Another sunrise..This time just short of Sonora Pass in Northern California
The longer I walked, though, the more I realised that my gratitude was deeply tinged with grief. As sunlight broke through the silent fir forests of Washington the soft afternoon air brought thoughts of the many friends and family members I had lost over the five years that I had been focused on walking.
The losses weren’t insignificant: I received the call that my mother had died the morning I descended the flank of San Jacinto. It was one of those un-expected/expected calls that brought me to my knees in pain. I climbed out of Scissors Crossing the day we lost my mother-in-law. As the wind howled on that rainy November morning it wasn’t hard to imagine that her spirit had decided to depart with the same sort of energy with which she had lived her life. I walked miles grieving a best friend who lost her battle with glioblastoma. She was diagnosed just before I crossed the California/Oregon border, and was gone by the time I reached the Goat Rocks Wilderness in Washington. I myself, had received a nearly equally scary prognosis that very year in what proved to be a false alarm. I was as grateful for my outcome as I was devastated by her’s. Two of my husband’s best friends, died while I walked close to the Sierras. Three others, all beautiful and deserving souls are now gone. Why? By what stroke of luck, did I get to just keep on walking? The feeling is gratitude enriched by grief.
Just hiking the trail itself was an exercise in balancing my feelings of loss and celebration; Each step I took, and each milestone reached, was one that, at my age, I would, in all likelihood, never take again. Each section hiked with a loved one, an adventure to savor, but not to be repeated. I actually grew tired of repeating the words of Dr Seuss: “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.” Ultimately I gave up and settled for learning how to smile while I cried. The older I get the deeper my awareness gets that every day holds the same challenge; I really won’t ever pass this way again. More gratitude enriched by grief.
Most of us, lucky enough to reach the Northern Terminus, experience the paradox of profound pride in completing an adventure that we don’t want to end, and relieved we have finished a challenge that we dearly wish to continue. I wonder if this is exactly how I will feel one day, as I grow close to the end of my own, very well-lived life. More gratitude enriched by grief.
It’s such a profound revelation to me, that I can smile while I cry, celebrate what I lose, lose what I celebrate, and hold both gratitude and grief lightly in one palm, neither eclipsing the power of the other. I guess I’m someone who needed to walk my way to that truth.
There aren’t words to express how grateful I am that there was a trail to teach me gentle but important life lessons. All I did was show up, lace up, wake up, and keep walking. It was often so so hard but it was always pretty simple. I am so glad that I just kept walking!
