Nikki Peterson is Director of SLOW – Surviving the Loss of Your World.
This is part 2 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.
I signed up to walk 55km
Rosie was born in April 2006. She lived for six days. She would have turned 20 this year.
I signed up to walk 55km. SLOW’s fundraising campaign this year is ‘Give 5‘, but I didn’t consciously choose a 55km route to mirror that. When I realised the connection, I thought, of course, two fives – I’ve been greedy and taken two of them.
55km, Give 5, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, Rosie.
We walk alongside
There’s something else other than the number that feels so right. SLOW walks alongside families, that’s not just a phrase we use, it’s what we actually do.
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.
They built a charity
I didn’t find SLOW (Surviving the Loss of Your World) simply because it was a job. I found it because I know, in the most profound and irreversible way, what it means to need it. Somewhere along the line, the thing that nearly broke me has become the thing I dedicated my working life to.
SLOW was founded by Nic Whitworth and Susie Hanson, two bereaved parents who looked at their own grief and decided to do something extraordinary with it.
They built a charity. They created spaces where the worst thing that has ever happened to you can be spoken about openly, honestly, without apology.
Where your child’s name doesn’t make people flinch.
Where you are, perhaps for the first time since your loss, truly understood.
I am so grateful to them. Genuinely, deeply grateful, not just as a Director, but as a bereaved mum who knows what SLOW has meant to families like mine. What Nic and Susie built from their own pain is a lifeline for thousands of people. I don’t take that lightly for a single day.
This walk is partly for them too.
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 registered charity (1161337) providing free, peer-led bereavement support for bereaved parents and siblings. She is also Rosie’s mum.
