Nikki Peterson is Director of SLOW – Surviving the Loss of Your World.

We are sharing part 6 of 6 in “Walking For Rosie”, a living blog by Nikki Peterson, Director of SLOW, written during this summer’s training for the South Downs Ultra Challenge 55km – Eastbourne to Brighton – 5th September 2026.

“There is no arriving yet, not really. Today is the walk. Everything until this point has just been learning. And I think: that’s grief too, isn’t it? Forever in training.”

Long distance walking takes you down paths you never knew were there.

You think you know the landscape, the area, it looks familiar, it looks like the same hills and fields and coastline you’ve been walking all morning and then the path turns, and suddenly you’re somewhere entirely new.

Somewhere you’ve never been. Somewhere that has no map in your memory because you have never stood here before.

Grief does the same thing.

Grief takes you down paths you didn’t know existed

Your life, your home, your routines. They look the same from the outside. The same walls, the same streets, the same faces. And yet inside, the feelings are anything but familiar.

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.

Frightening, Beautiful, or Both

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

Just like the landscape, it’s always the same, yet it can look and feel entirely different depending on where you’re standing, what you’re carrying, what light you’re walking in, or who you’re with – so many comparisons to grieve.

What I’m finding, out on these walks, is that I’m learning to trust the path even when I don’t recognise where I am.

Even when it looks (or feels) nothing like I expected. Even when the terrain is unfamiliar and the feelings are new and I’m not sure which way the path is going to turn next.

I trust it. I keep walking.

For Rosie. For SLOW. For every family out there on a path they never asked to be on, in a landscape they don’t yet recognise, learning – one step at a time – that they can do this too.

The Long Distance of It All

Grief is long distance. I know that now in a way I couldn’t have known at the beginning. When Rosie died, the length of it was incomprehensible. The idea that this would simply be my life now, forever, without end, felt impossible. Unsurvivable, even. And yet here I am, nearly twenty years later, still carrying it and still standing. Still walking.

Long distance walking feels the same at the start. You look at the map, you see the distance, and some part of your brain says: I cannot do this. It’s too far. It’s too much.

And then you start. And you keep going.

And at some point you turn around and look behind you, and your start line is nowhere in sight.

You have already come so far that you can’t see where you began.

That is grief. That is exactly grief.

The Terrain Shifts Too

The terrain shifts too, just like grief does. Some stretches are smooth and you find a rhythm and almost forget how far there still is to go.

Other stretches are rough and tough, uneven ground, steep climbs, the kind of path that demands everything you have just to stay upright.

Grief is like that. There are weeks, sometimes months, where it feels manageable. Where you think: I have found a way to carry this. And then the ground changes beneath you and you’re back in the thick of it, wondering how you’ll make it to the end of the day.

But you can. You always can.

Who’s Setting the Right Pace

Then there are the people. On a long walk, sometimes you get overtaken. Someone passes you, younger, faster, lighter on their feet and they disappear into the distance.

Other times you’re the one moving faster, passing someone who has slowed.

And you start to wonder: are they doing this right? Am I? Who’s setting the right pace here?

Grief is exactly like that.

You look at other people and you compare, their journey, their timeline, their apparent ability to function and you wonder if you’re doing it correctly.

If you’re too slow, or too fast, or if you’ve somehow taken a wrong turn that everyone else has avoided.

But here’s what I’ve learned, on the paths and in the twenty years since Rosie: there is no correct pace for grief.

There is no map, no dedicated path – only yours. You cannot compare your mile markers to someone else’s. You are walking a completely different route.

Alone in a Room Full of People

And this: sometimes the walks have been busy. Families, dog walkers, tourists, people everywhere. And not one of them has looked at me.

Not one has made eye contact, offered a word, acknowledged that I exist at all. You can be surrounded by people and yet be completely alone. Completely alone with your grief.

That is a reality check that hits hard out on the cliffs, because it’s so true in life too. You can be in a room full of people and feel utterly unseen. Grief is often like that. It is invisible to everyone except the person carrying it.

Other times I’ve been completely alone on the path. Not a soul in sight. Just me and the landscape and whatever is moving through me.

And that solitude, strangely, is easier. At least it is honest. At least it matches how the inside feels.

There is one more thing. At the end of a walk, I feel it, that quiet satisfaction of having reached the finish. Tired, done, grateful to stop. And then, almost immediately, the reminder that this is training.

That it’s just one more piece of a much longer preparation.

That there is no arriving yet, not really. Today is the walk.

Everything until this point has just been learning.

And I think: that’s grief too, isn’t it? Forever in training.

Getting grief fit

And then there’s the shadow. My shadow: always there, always beside me. Some days more obvious than others. But every single day, without fail. I put one foot in front of the other, and Rosie is with me.

Forever learning how to carry it, how to move with it, how to let it be part of you without letting it be all of you. There is no graduation.

No finish line where the grief ends and the normal life resumes. There is only the walking.

It’s getting grief-fit – not stronger, not better, not healed, but more practiced at carrying it. More able to live with it and grow with it.

Which, when I think about it, is enough. It has to be enough. And most days, it is.

If you’d like to support the walk and the families SLOW serves you can donate here:

Nikki Peterson is Director of SLOW – Surviving the Loss of Your World, a UK charity providing free, peer-led bereavement support for bereaved parents and siblings. She is also Rosie’s mum.