Walking with Dad: The journey Home

I’m home from Sri Lanka now, having finally completed the Pekoe Trail. All 22 stages, 323 kilometres, spread across three trips. A journey that turned out to be about considerably more than simply trekking.

I’ve been trying to find the words to write about my final stages, but it’s difficult to know where to begin. I went to Sri Lanka with seven stages left to complete, looking forward to finishing something I’d started last year, although with some reservations about whether I would manage it this time, which I write about in my previous substack article. I came home with a real sense of achievement, fabulous photographs of the wildlife, nature and people I met along the way, and plenty of stories still to tell. I also returned with a much deeper understanding of how quickly life can change.

On a Thursday morning, at dead-on 5am Sri Lankan time, 12.30am in the UK, my sister called me with the devastating news that Dad had died suddenly from a heart attack the previous evening. I’d only been on our daily FaceTime call with him a few hours before. That was just 3 weeks ago today on 30th Sept.

Dad has been my sister’s, my, and my son, Joseph’s, constant, our greatest supporter and someone we could always rely on. He was 88, and although we knew he wouldn’t be with us forever, none of us was prepared for losing him so suddenly.

I was a long way from home, with the final four stages of the trail still ahead of me. My instinct was to keep walking. I had an hour to wash, get my gear on and pull myself together before Sarath, my trek guide, would arrive to meet me to start walking.  I knew Dad would want me to continue, both with the trek and with my project work in Sri Lanka, which has been such an important part of my life for so many years. However, I wasn’t sure how Lisa and Joe would feel. When I asked whether I should fly home early, they both said, ‘No way!’ They agreed that Dad wouldn’t have wanted that. He’d have said ‘Why would you do that - I’m dead!’

So I walked.

Walking with grief

A couple of days later, I posted that I was now walking for Dad. I mentioned that walking was helping me manage my emotions and that, although it was hard being so far away from my family, I felt Dad’s spirit was with me.

It was a strange, almost surreal feeling, but one that seemed natural at the time. I don’t mean that I experienced anything extraordinary or that I can explain it. It was simply a sense of his presence, a feeling that I wasn’t quite as alone as I might otherwise have been, and that staying in Sri Lanka to complete the trek was the right decision.

There were hills to climb, winding paths to follow, rainforests to walk through, wildlife to spot, people to talk to along the way and a landscape that was as beautiful and absorbing as ever. Sarath continued to share his knowledge of nature and wildlife, pointing out things I might easily have missed. Life carried on around me, even though something fundamental had changed in my own world. I found that walking gave me a way of being with what had happened without needing to make sense of it. I didn’t have to find the right words or decide how I was supposed to feel. I could simply put one foot in front of the other and allow the day to unfold.

Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I’ve always been drawn to walking. It gives me something practical to do when my thoughts are anything but practical. We have a path in front of us, a destination to reach and the next step to take. We don’t have to know how the whole journey will feel or pan out; we can just keep going.

Of course I soon realised that walking doesn’t take grief away but perhaps it could give me a little space to carry what I could not  yet make sense of. Sometimes, simply putting one foot in front of the other is just enough.

After three trips, 22 stages and 323 kilometres, I finally completed the Pekoe Trail. I was proud of that, partly because I knew Dad would have been even though he couldn’t understand why I’d want to walk that far or in that heat! Yet the achievement felt different from how I had imagined it. It was brief but somehow profound. I may be able to explain this better sometime in the future.

The journey home

Returning home after a long trip always involves some adjustment. There’s the unpacking process, the time difference, the admin to catch up with, messages to answer and familiar routines to resume. This time, though, there was something much harder and that was coming home to a world in which Dad was no longer here.

He and Mum had been married for 65 years. He adored her, and they remained together until the end. Looking back, my memories of Dad are woven through the ordinary details of family life: the small conversations, sharing funny cat photos, the teasing, the familiar habits and the reassuring knowledge that he was always there. It’s those everyday things I’m missing most after only 3 weeks.

I don’t know how grief will unfold over the coming months. I suspect it won’t follow a particularly tidy path, and I don’t expect there to be a single moment when everything suddenly feels different. I’m told there will be difficult days, alongside ordinary ones when something unexpectedly brings him to mind and I’ll come crashing down. I’ve come home though with an even stronger sense of how fortunate I was to have him as my dad, and how much of him remains part of the person I am, and of who my son is and is still to become.

Perhaps that’s what I was feeling as I walked in Sri Lanka. Not that Dad was physically there, but that the connection we shared hadn’t simply disappeared because he had died. His encouragement, his belief in me and the part he played in shaping my life are still with me and will always be.

Completing the Pekoe Trail feels like the end of a chapter. It has taken longer than I expected, and the final pages were certainly not the ones I would have chosen. But I’m grateful to have finished it, and to the people who helped me along the way.

I also know that Sri Lanka will continue to be a major part of my life. There are friendships to maintain, projects to support, stories to write and, no doubt, more paths to explore. I don’t need to decide on the next big adventure just yet.

For now, I’m allowing myself some time to settle back into life at home, to be with my family and friends and to come to terms with everything that has happened. Perhaps, in time, I’ll come to see that these two parts of the journey belong together. For now, I’m simply grateful that I was able to finish it, and that Dad was part of the journey, in his own inimitable way. 😊