Pilgrimage

ARIZONA, SEPTEMBER 2022 — I am currently hiking the Arizona Trail, but I wanted to post this essay I wrote last spring about my pilgrimage across Spain. You hear me read it on the Heart of the Story podcast, episode 74 “Navigating Transitions,” which was posted last July. I recorded the essay last spring in the quietest space I could find at the time, my bathroom floor in the middle of my sister’s condo in Kihei, Maui at 5 in the morning. I am reposting it here.

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The view along the Camino de Santiago, the morning after the big climb.

CAMINO DE SANTIAGO, SPAIN, MAY 2018 — Alone, I slog up the steep hill toward Laguna de Castila on the Camino de Santiago. It is the third week of my 500-mile pilgrimage in northern Spain, and today, for some reason, has been a rough one. I’m tired. As I climb, I see apparitions of people I know and love along the path, but they are dead. I hold my breath as I turn the next corner, expecting the body of one of new my pilgrim friends to be lying there too. My intellect knows that these images are crazy, just grief, but my emotions believe they are real. My face is wet with tears. Breathe, I tell myself. Just breathe. My heart pounds in my ears. I think about the first day of this pilgrimage more than two weeks ago, how exhausted I was walking over the Pyrenees. This hill is harder, but how can that be? I am stronger now than I was then.

I stumble. I stop walking to catch my breath, lift my head, and look around. I am transported to an alternate reality where everything is heavy, moving in slow motion, but is also breathtakingly gorgeous. The valley below shimmers like gold sequins in the late afternoon sun.

Just seven months before I started my pilgrimage in northern Spain, I lay beside my husband Bill, watching his itty, bitty breaths. He was dying. I set my alarm to ring every two hours so I could turn his body and give him morphine. It was a Wednesday afternoon when he took his last.

I didn’t have to wait for the next one to not come. I knew there would be no more.

We had been holding vigil for six days at that point, but I had been his caregiver for two years. Two years of hyper-vigilance combined with boredom, two-years of crises. Two years of trying to hold onto every single moment, knowing the decline would be fast. Two years of too little sleep, too many potatoes, and not enough exercise. My body felt like it belonged to someone else. I needed this long walk.

The Way of St. James chose me, I think. I knew that a day hike, or even a week in the wilderness would not be enough. I had been curious about the Camino ever since I read Shirley MacLaine’s book years ago and had wanted to go to Spain since Spanish classes in school. I also knew two people close to me who had recently done it, and they guided me in the planning. I was being led.

It is said that the healing power of the Camino comes in thirds. The first third tears down the body, everything hurts. But I needed that focus on my physical wellbeing. I needed to feel my lungs move air in and out and feel my muscles lighten and loosen. I needed to find my own pace of life.

The second third of the Pilgrimage breaks down emotions. When I quit thinking about my sore feet, emotions bubbled up for me to acknowledge. Not just thoughts about Bill, but thoughts about my first marriage and divorce, my children, my not-such-a-straight-line career path. My parents. My embarrassments. I spent quite a lot of time in forgiveness too, especially to my younger self for mistakes she had made and for crap she had put up with from others. I forgave those others too.

It was like an end-of-my-old-life review.

Then the last third of the pilgrimage, with my body and emotions broken down, there is an opening for the Great Mystery to come in and begin to rebuild what was broken down. That was how it was for me.

My grieving journey these past four years has been a pilgrimage. That first year after Bill died, I felt as though I was recovering from a long-term illness, one that required a lot of time and rest.

Then, sometime in that second year, the red-hot-poker-in-the-stomach pain changed to a dull ache, and my emotions moved from depression to anger, and then to moments of peace. That was also the year I scattered Bill’s ashes, started dating, sold my house, and finished writing my book. I kept climbing that hill.

There’s a sign in the Pilgrim’s office in Santiago that says “your Camino begins when your Camino ends.” Maybe I am at the final third of my grief pilgrimage, I can’t say yet. The Camino may be a straight line, but a grief pilgrimage is not quite that linear.

Old love, I’ve come to understand, doesn’t die. Instead, like those gold sequins on the hill that day, it shatters itself into a million pieces, lighting the way for those of us left behind.