Grief takes you down paths you didn’t know existed within yourself. It leads you to places in your own interior landscape that you have never visited, depths of love you didn’t know you were capable of, depths of pain that surprise you even after all this time, corners of yourself that only open in the dark.

Sometimes those paths are frightening. Sometimes they’re strangely beautiful. Sometimes they’re both at once.

I’ve learnt to zigzag my way downhill, taking the pressure off, finding a different angle on the same slope. It takes longer. It’s less direct. But it gets me down in one piece. And in my way. Grief is exactly like that. There are days I brace myself for, the days that are marked in the calendar as ‘harder days’. I prepare. I give myself permission in advance to fall apart. And sometimes I do, often in private. But sometimes those days arrive and I find I can breathe through them, because I was ready, because I had armoured up, because the anticipation held me together.

Grief is not linear. Anyone who has lost someone knows this with a certainty that no amount of well-meaning advice can shift. It doesn’t move through stages. It doesn’t resolve. It changes shape. It goes quiet sometimes, and then it arrives, without warning, at busy Birling Gap in front of loads of people because a song came on shuffle.

We don’t fix grief. We don’t offer a map through it or a timeline out of it. We simply walk beside people, for as long as they need us. No end date on the support, just as there’s no end date on grief. So walking 55km, quite literally putting one foot in front of the other across the landscape I now call home, feels like the most honest expression of what SLOW is that I could have chosen. We walk alongside. That’s all. And it turns out that’s everything.

But walking it for Rosie is different still. Recently I walked from Seaford Head to Eastbourne, via Birling Gap and Beachy Head, about 15 miles of the jaw dropping, spectacular coastline. My now backyard. And yet I saw it differently.