A daughter’s pilgrimage of love
Jenny was 27 when she lost her dad. Now, 15 years on, she feels closer to him than ever – after embarking on a deeply emotional journey...
LOOKING out across the Welsh valley below, my feet planted on the very spot where my father had placed his own 27 years earlier, I felt a connection with him so profound he might as well have been sitting beside me.
I was taking in a view that only the determined few who find their way up to this precarious peak ever get to see: a verdant landscape that must have taken Dad’s breath away all those years ago, just as it made me gasp now.
Behind me was the gruelling climb I’d just completed up the south side of Snowdonia, called Amphitheatre Buttress, to reach this pinnacle — a challenge I’d set myself to mark my 40th birthday.
But my hike had been about so much more than simply reaching the top. It saw me retrace Dad’s footsteps so that I could recreate a photograph that was taken of him at the very same spot back when I was still a little girl.
That picture had been safely tucked away in my rucksack all the way up; I only had to look at it to be transported back to that long ago day before Alzheimer’s cruelly robbed Dad of his faculties.
At 52, my father Martin, a brilliant teacher, was just a decade older than I am now when he was first diagnosed with this appalling disease. As is devastatingly common with the early onset form of the condition, he deteriorated rapidly and died just three years later, in 2003.
Fifteen years on, I still carry with me a sense of loss. But I have found a way to lighten its burden. And that’s by revisiting the walks that Dad carefully documented in a series of journals, and having my photograph taken at various places where he once posed for the camera, too.
His love for the outdoors; his passion for climbing mountains, trekking across valleys and great swathes of the British countryside, defined my father. It was an interest that grabbed him as a teenager, when he and his friends would go off hiking together — they called themselves the Moorlanders. A
S A STUDENT at Matlock Teacher Training College in Derbyshire he continued to share this pastime with likeminded pals, trekking with them in the Peak District. He met my mum — also a teacher, but now retired — on one of those walks back in 1967.
My older brother, Christopher, joined him on some of the 100mile treks he arranged for his students in the school holidays.
But as a teenage girl I wasn’t remotely interested in strapping on a pair of walking boots and joining them out in the hills. It was an interest that only started to appeal to me in adulthood.
I did go off with Dad once, as a Girl Guide looking to bag my Hiking badge.
I have no memory of that walk, but I know it happened because Dad made a note of it in one of his journals — an unflattering entry mentioning that ‘Jenny was a bit slow’.
Since he died I’ve pored over the dozens of other notebooks that detailed the walks he made. They remain wonderful records of his life, and have proved my dad’s great legacy to me, since they contain descriptions of beautiful walks that don’t appear in any guidebook. The fact they’re written in his hand makes them all the more precious.
Dad first started showing signs of his condition in 2000.
His mind was always very sharp, so when he started experiencing episodes of confusion and forgetfulness it was of great concern to him — and of course to Mum, Christopher, and I.
He started forgetting important tasks at work, like putting in exam papers — something he’d never normally neglect to do.
He pulled out at a junction in front of other cars, causing a terrifying near miss; became panic- stricken on a station platform, having forgotten why he was there in the first place; out with me he became so disorientated that he grabbed hold of me, sending me flying into a bush. It was devastating to see my strong, dependable father so diminished.
After these episodes he’d become completely lucid again, which was just as troubling.
I hated seeing the horror on his face as he wondered how he could have lost so much control.
Tests followed, which we all hoped would uncover a simple explanation that might easily be resolved. Instead, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
It made no sense: this was an old person’s disease, and my dad had only just entered his 50s. Dad cried when he told me; harder still was watching him deteriorate so rapidly that, just 18 months later, we had to help him dress, wash and use the loo.
I live in York, where I then worked as a sales administrator. My parents’ home is in Shrewsbury. I’d come home every couple of months and find Dad so much worse each time. He stopped talking and often didn’t seem to know who we were.
Watching him getting upset and
‘I feel Dad with me when I sit or stand where he did’
frustrated when Mum tried to dress him broke my heart.
Mum was utterly devoted to Dad, but in the end he needed so much care she simply couldn’t cope. So he spent the last six weeks of his life in a home, with specialist carers.
When he passed away, his death felt like a blessed release for the wonderful man we’d started to lose three years earlier. I remember in his last few hours thinking ‘everyone’s dad dies one day, but not like this, and not so young’.
Losing Dad had a profound effect on me. I quit my job as I couldn’t find meaning in it. I work now in a home for dementia sufferers. My personal experience means I don’t just help our residents; I can give support to their loved ones too.
The idea of taking up walking popped into my head about six months after Dad died, when I was looking for a way to get fit.
Losing him relatively early in life, I felt horribly robbed of time we could have spent together. Walking seemed like the next best thing, because I was doing something that meant so much to him.
Three years ago Mum gave me Dad’s walking journals. Flicking through them, seeing the detail he went into as he recorded the events of each trek, somehow brought him back to me. Reading what he’d written about, the weather, the flora and fauna he saw along the way, I could hear his voice again.
But best of all were the photographs that slipped out of the journals. Pictures of Dad in Scotland, on Welsh mountains, in the Yorkshire Dales and his beloved Peak District.
he’d taped them in, but over time the stickiness had worn off and so many fell out without me being able to see where they’d been taken.
he hadn’t written any details on the back of these snaps, so I turned detective, posting them on internet walking forums to see if other hikers could help place them.
At first I saw Dad’s pictures as inspiration for days out. But as people from all over the country came back with answers, it occurred to me that recreating the images could be a wonderful tribute to him.
This has turned into a three-year project that hasn’t just brought me happiness — it’s given such pleasure to my mum and brother too.
It’s allowed him to take me to places I’d never otherwise have seen. I feel him with me when I sit or stand where he did.
Of the 16 photographs I have, there are nine left for me to re-shoot; who knows how long that will take me.
But every walk brings Dad back to me, as he was before he became ill, in my thoughts and in my heart.
None more so than climbing Amphitheatre Buttress on my 40th. It was such a challenge I had to go with a mountaineering instructor.
The experience was deeply emotional as well as physically challenging. I kept thinking ‘Dad saw this’ and ‘I wonder what he made of that’. At one point I had to jump from one rock to another, with a sheer drop beneath me. It was so high you needed binoculars to see the ground. It took me several minutes to find the courage to leap. The second before I did, I said out loud: ‘Be with me, Dad’.
And I like to think that, actually, he was. Just as I feel him with me every time I stand on the exact spot where he smiled for the camera — when he had no way of knowing what a gift for the future he was creating for me in the process.