Pilgrimage

22nd January 2012 Sunday

I pack most of my suitcase before it gets dark.

We leave for Heathrow tomorrow morning. It’s hard to believe this journey is finally beginning. We booked this family holiday a year ago to accompany my cousin on his pilgrimage to scatter his brother’s ashes at the site of our grandfather’s grave at Knysna in South Africa. Where he also took the ashes of his parents - each time.

I didn’t know then that it would turn into another kind of journey - for my father. The perfect place as well to take ‘a rest pause’ as my mother used to say, and feel into the loss of him. And find a way to celebrate him - our family together - in the heat and the dust of the continent which nourished his soul.

And now it’s not too late to paint my toenails red.