CHAPTER 10
“The surest path to success is directly through the footsteps of those that have gone before you.” – Christopher Hussey
I am a firm believer in the power of following in the footsteps of those who have gone before us. No matter what the challenges, there is always someone who has faced it before and made a success of it.
Do you want to become an Olympic champion? Walk on the moon? Travel the world? There are those who have successfully managed equally incredible feats. The same is true of dealing with grief, depression, stress, or illness. The secret is to find people who have gone before you, to reach out to them if you can, and follow in their footsteps. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, by figuring it out alone.
For me, the people who had gone before me were very close to home. Both my mother and my grandmother lost their husbands when their children were very young. Both picked themselves up, pieced their lives back together and did everything they, as single mothers, could to support their offspring. I was fortunate to be inspired by these strong women.
My mother was with my father for just over a decade before he passed away. Part of the reason she has been able to be such a strong support to me is that she intimately understands what it is like to lose a companion. After my father died, she did not allow grief to stop her from living her dreams. She completed two degrees, becoming a junior lecturer and eventually a senior lecturer at Fort Hare University. A few years later we moved to Colorado in the USA so she could complete her Master’s degree, before returning to South Africa and later completing her doctorate. She worked extremely hard to ensure that I received a quality education, and broadened my mind through exposure to as many different people and experiences as possible. This meant making certain sacrifices. For example, I only started living permanently with my mom when I was eight years old. Up until that point, I had lived with my grandmother, seeing my mom only during school holidays. However, with the power of love and family, we prevailed.
My mom often told others that she lived for her daughter, me. I watched her work hard for us, giving her all to every project that came her way because it might in some way enhance our lives. She toiled relentlessly to become a better person. It is from her that I learned about drive and the desire to keep improving myself. Through her actions she showed me that regardless of life’s ups and downs, I should never stop striving to reach my next goal.
Aside from my mom and gran, I had other examples to draw on from within my family. Two of my aunts and an uncle also lost their significant partners. They all pieced their lives back together and kept going. Growing up in this environment taught me to view life differently; having a partner was a privilege, not a right, and when change happened – no matter how tragic – you kept your chin up and kept moving forward. None of my family members told me this directly, but they lived it and I watched them do so.
Learning from their experiences meant that by the time tragedy engulfed my own life, I was able to put their example into action and build on it. But what stood out for me was that none of them really spoke about what they had been through. The death of a partner was treated as taboo. I have approached my loss differently. I believe it’s important for me to break through these boundaries and create the opportunity for others to open up to each other and work through those difficult, often painful conversations.
We all benefit from each other’s pain and sharing our own. Death should not be taboo – it is an unavoidable part of life and is, therefore, integral to the human experience. There is no reason to fear it. I’m no longer afraid of my own impending death or that of others in my circle. I have come to understand that the only answer to the inevitability of death is to lead a full life.
Eckhart Tolle often speaks about how living a full life means allowing the present moment to just be and to accept the impermanent nature of all things. He says that one who offers no resistance to life lives in a state of grace, ease, lightness and peace. I take great strength from his words.
Aside from the examples within my own family, I was blessed to connect with a number of women who had also lost their husbands. These women contacted me through social media, mutual connections, or in one instance, a letter in a national newspaper.
Two weeks after Gugs passed a friend sent me a message to tell me that an American woman had reached out to me in a letter published by the Sunday Times. Chelsea Dinsmore lost her husband Scott on Kilimanjaro 10 months before I lost Gugs. Chelsea and Scott had been on a 12-month holiday around the world, culminating in an attempt to summit Kilimanjaro, when tragedy struck, leading to his untimely death. After spotting her letter in the newspaper, my friend reached out to her and connected us over email. Chelsea responded, opening up to me and suggesting we connect on WhatsApp. She shared her story with me, explaining that they were climbing the Western Breach Route, which had been closed intermittently over the years due to dangerous rockfalls. As fate would have it, there was a rockfall during their climb and Scott was struck by a boulder and fell to his untimely death.
The first few weeks of conversation were slow. Gugs’s death was very fresh for me and I was still in shock. But slowly Chelsea and I bonded. We had both lost husbands at a similar age, on the same mountain, in a foreign country. She and Scott had been together for pretty much as long as Gugs and I, and 10 months later she was putting her life back together. She became my sounding board for all the decisions that stirred up my deepest fears.
She shared the details of how she began making sense of life after losing Scott, how she had to deal with going back home without him, and with the everyday reminders of the loss – such as waking up with no one next to her. She walked my journey with me by sharing hers, and we both grew stronger as a result.
After hearing her story, I started following her on social media and suddenly the light at the end of the tunnel became clear. Knowing that someone else was going through the same, but still chose to wake up every morning and embrace life was an Aha! moment for me. That’s when I experienced one of the greatest shifts in my attitude towards my loss. In part, I owe my get-up-and-go attitude to Chelsea.
And then there was Linda Mwananshiku. She lost her husband four months before I lost Gugs. She reached out to a friend of mine on social media to offer me her support. Her husband had died suddenly and tragically in the presence of her and her kids one Saturday morning. He had not been ill and his death came as a complete shock. Hearing her story and connecting with her also helped me with my own journey to healing. We shared our experiences and the tools we were finding to deal with our loss. As the proverb goes, “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.”
I am constantly blown away by the beauty of the human heart, the love I receive from strangers. A nation mourned Gugs and, as a result, many South Africans have reached out to offer their support. Strangers often hoot at me in traffic, wind down their windows and tell me that they pray for me every day. There have been those who have bought me a bouquet of flowers, or offered to give me a hug. It warms my heart every time, reminding me that where there is pain, humans can unite in support of one another.