Nikki Peterson is Director of SLOW – Surviving the Loss of Your World.
This is part 3 of 6 in Walking for Rosie, a living blog by Nikki Peterson, Director of SLOW, written during training for the South Downs Ultra Challenge – 55km, Eastbourne to Brighton, 5th September 2026.
Nikki wearing a SLOW hat while training at the Seven Sisters, South Downs
Here’s something I don’t talk about enough: the strange, complex territory of being both a bereaved mother and the Director of a bereavement charity.
The Hat I Can’t Always Take Off
Most of the time, those two identities sit alongside each other fairly naturally. My lived experience doesn’t undermine my professional credibility, it informs it. I understand, from the inside, what our families carry. That matters.
But sometimes the line blurs in ways I don’t always anticipate.
Because the truth is, I don’t know who she was. I knew her for six days. I know who I imagine she would have been. I know the shape of the absence she left. I
know her in the way you know someone you have loved without ever really getting the chance to learn them.
And being asked to speak about that, on air, with my professional hat still firmly on, it undid something in me that I had to very carefully put back together afterwards.
Both of Us, In Different Ways
I’m not saying it was wrong to ask. It was the right question. It just reminded me that there are moments when the Director and the mum are the same person, and no amount of professional composure fully changes that.
I don’t know who finds that more difficult, those who don’t understand grief and don’t know quite what to do when it surfaces unexpectedly, or me, because I feel the full weight of both roles at once and have to find a way to hold them. Probably both of us, in different ways.
I’m learning to be okay with that. More than okay, actually.
Because the moments when the two identities collapse into one are often the moments when I am most honest, most useful, and most connected to the reason any of this matters.
One foot in front of the other
55km of coastline like this, one training walk at a time
What the Walking Is Doing
Movement help- it gives the grief somewhere to go
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 (Read Part One for more on what music can trigger in grief).
Arriving at Birling GapStopping to enjoy the view
Somewhere It Can Breathe
What I’ve found, walking these miles, is that movement helps. Not because it fixes anything, nothing fixes this, but because it gives the grief somewhere to go.
And here’s the thing I didn’t expect: as I walk, as I connect so closely to Rosie and am reminded of how vast and BIG my love for her is, the grief grows too. Not heavier, exactly.
Bigger. Fuller.
Like the love and the loss are the same thing expanding together, which I suppose they are. It externalises something that usually lives much more on the inside.
You put one foot in front of the other, and somehow the weight shifts, just slightly, just enough. It comes, and then slowly, gently, across a few miles of the coastal path it goes. Not away. Never away. But somewhere it can breathe.
For Every Family
Then there are the moments of connection. Not just to Rosie, but to every family SLOW has ever supported. Because I am not walking alone, not really. I’m walking for all of them. For every parent who has sat in one of our support groups and felt, perhaps for the first time, that they were not completely alone in what they were carrying. For every sibling who has grieved in silence for too long.
For every family who found us and said, finally. This is the place, my safe space.
That is what keeps me walking when the hills are hard and my legs are frickin loud about it.
Every mile gets Nikki closer to 5th September
More to come
I’ll add to this as the training continues.
I’m sure each walk will bring something new, different terrain, different weather, different moments I don’t see coming. I’ll write them down here because writing, like walking, is how I’m making sense of (most) things.
On 5th September I’ll walk 55km. Eastbourne to Brighton. For SLOW. For Rosie. She’ll be with me every step of the way. Every day. Everywhere.
Nikki after a training walk – tired and sun-burnt but smiling
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.
Join SLOW's daytime online support group for bereaved parents via videoconference on a Thursday each week from 11am until 12.30pm during school term time.
Join SLOW's daytime online support group for bereaved parents via videoconference on a Thursday each week from 11am until 12.30pm during school term time.
Join SLOW's daytime online support group for bereaved parents via videoconference on a Thursday each week from 11am until 12.30pm during school term time.
Join SLOW's daytime online support group for bereaved parents via videoconference on a Thursday each week from 11am until 12.30pm during school term time.
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.
Every time I thought I couldn’t do it – every time the weight of Rosie dying felt unsurvivable, impossible, too much for one person to carry – I did it anyway.
