My mother died on Christmas Eve, an hour before Christmas this last year.

I was there. I had been there for all of it, the diagnosis, the treatments, the moments in waiting rooms where she looked at me and said things she had been sitting with alone in the dark for a long time. When the time came, I helped transition her from this life. I held her. I stayed until her breathing changed, and then slowed, and then stopped.

Paikea was there too, my cat, resting on her, keeping watch the way animals do when they understand something we haven’t said out loud yet. A few hours after my mother was gone, my father found her in my parents’ closet, pressed against my mother’s clothes. By Christmas morning I was driving her to the emergency vet. By Christmas morning I had let her go too.

In less than a day. Both of them. Gone.

I have no job to return to. No desk waiting. No calendar full of the ordinary obligations that tell you who you are and where you belong. When my mother became ill last June, I stepped away from years of social work, advocacy and organizing because there was something more important, and I knew it, and I chose it without hesitation. I would choose it again.

But now I am standing in the aftermath of that choice, in a life that has been stripped down to the studs, trying to figure out what gets built here next. Who I am on the other side of this. What I am being asked to become, without her physically beside me.

The honest answer is I don’t know yet. I am thirty-two years old, starting over in ways I did not choose and cannot fully see, doing it without the woman who always helped me find my way back to myself. When I was twenty, she pulled me back from the worst depression of my life. Stood at the edge and called down until I could hear her. She also gave me Paikea, placed that small animal in my arms like she already knew I would need something to keep tending to.

After she died I kept seeing Joshua Tree in my mind. Not as an idea. As a call. I decided to trust it.

I am going. This October, for my thirty-third birthday, I am taking my first solo trip, driving alone through California and the Southwest, through Joshua Tree and the Redwoods and Monterey Bay and Big Sur and Zion. Carrying some of her ashes with me. I am going without a safety net, without a plan beyond the road itself, trusting that the grief I have been carrying will find more room to breathe out there than it does inside the four walls where I have been trying to survive it.

I have to believe that the more I walk toward this instead of away from it, the more I let the ocean and the desert and the old growth forests hold what I cannot hold alone, the closer I will feel to her. Not just the pain of losing her. Not just the beauty and sorrow of transitioning her. But the fullness of who she was. The woman who danced and loved fiercely and chose me and stayed. My healer, my spiritual leader, my greatest ally, the love of my whole life and my greatest friend.

I am not going out there to disappear into my grief. I am going to build something inside it. A deeper foundation. A place to stand. The beginning of whatever comes next. I am not wanting to escape. I am wanting to surrender further, and keep walking forward, with the belief that all roads lead back to her.

This is the risk I am taking. The only one that makes sense right now.

I am raising $3,500 for gas, food, park entry, and safe places to rest along the way.

If you can help carry me toward that road, I am more grateful than I know how to say.

And if you can’t, reading this, staying with it, not looking away, that is already something.

I am on a wild, tender path. I walk on with infant love always. To the mountains and beyond.