He sat with a straight back and the stillness of a breathless body, his eyes gripped by something I could not perceive. If I hadn’t watched her wake up from her daily nap, I might have thought she was an oddly placed statue.
While watching, my vision deteriorated; The light was fading and there were salty tears in my eyes. I never expected to identify so deeply with a wild animal, but I was struck by Faulu, one of the Maasai Mara’s resident leopards: His mother had died when he was young. So is mine.
My stoic, strong and brave mother died when I was 31 and she was only 58, and that’s how I got here. Last year, after an excruciating eight months of hospital appointments, scans, surgeries, emergency visits, feeding tubes and daily medications, he died at the callous hands of cancer. He was very young, and so was I.
I should have been shattered by this, and in many ways I was. My best friend of 31 years was gone. The woman who dedicated her life to making mine a comfortable and easy journey was taken from me long before her time. I cried, of course I cried. But then I didn’t. It wasn’t long after his death that life got back on track. The visceral grief that consumed you in the early days was suppressed and put aside, and I carried on, no matter what, just like she always did.
But I couldn’t help but worry that I had let it fester for too long. Allowing this to grow into something much more powerful that would eventually burst out of the bottle, sending me and everyone around me into powerful chaos. I was disappointed that I couldn’t cry more; My determination was as determined as his. Or at least that’s what I thought until I found myself ugly crying in the Brecon Beacons.
We were there together more than a year before he died. It had rained non-stop, and for three days we holed up in my borrowed trailer with Chinese food and two extremely soaked dogs. Overall it was a terrible weekend but he always managed to make it look bright.
When I passed by again just a few months after his death, seeing the same rolling hills in a world where he no longer existed created a wave of devastation so powerful it threw me off track. I started crying so hard I couldn’t see and stood at a viewpoint and let my tears flow as thick and fast as the Welsh rain we’ve had in 2021.
Traveling—or more specifically, traveling without my mother—seemed to be my gateway to grief. I felt it again on the shores of Ullswater and at Bournemouth, two years after we went to the Lakes together. This was our last trip, just six weeks before he died. At this point he can’t eat or drink because he’s being fed through a tube, but he still managed to walk down to the beach for an evening dog walk under the setting sun.
The resilience it contained was passed on to me, but it felt like both a blessing and a curse. Every now and then I wanted to break away, so returning to the places where we made our best memories felt like the only thing that could help. And so I went to East Africa. While most people travel to escape their pain, I sped towards mine in an A380.
They talk about how people “fight” cancer, but it wasn’t my mother who actually fought the battle. Those who came with their weapons were doctors; his body was merely the battlefield of their clinical conflict. They had won the first time, but the second advance was too strong. His soldiers—radiotherapy, chemotherapy drugs, harsh steroids that swelled his body—failed him, and the battlefield became yet another battleground surrendered to a disease that kills 460 people every day.
Masai Mara is a battlefield in itself. My mother and I learned this on our trip to Kenya in 2012, ten years before she died. We traveled from Nairobi to the Mara to Tanzania, watching some of the rarest and most fascinating wild animals fight for their lives. We were amazed by the power of the cheetah’s speed and the slow movement speed of the elephant.
With my mom reeling from a divorce and job separation and me in my final year of college, this was a bit of a budget experience. Accompanied by a guide named Edward, we traveled for hours between each park in a minibus, camping with bedbugs in some places, and sharing tiny double rooms in soulless business hotels in others.
This time, however, I took my experience to the next level and went the slightly more luxurious route; This was definitely something my mother would have approved of in her later years, when she was able to enjoy some of the finer things in life.
My first stop was Ishara, a relatively new tented camp hugging the banks of the Talek River in the Masai Mara National Reserve. “Tented” seemed a bit cheap: my riverside suite had a wooden frame and a gorgeous terrace; One day I lay on the couch and watched the elephants move across the water, trampling through the bushes. vagabond.
Ishara is a place that attracts the rich and famous, but the real celebrities there are a little wilder than your average royal family. That lonely leopard Faulu was one of them.
My guide, Benard, and the camp’s professional photographer, Eric, told me his story in great detail one evening as we watched him survey the battlefield. He was clearly hungry, but with no adult to show him the ways to catch big game, he relied on a diet of young wild boars left alone in their dens while their parents foraged for food.
Later, I asked Imara, one of the photographers at the camp, if he thought the animals mourned: “They have to,” he said. “Sometimes a cheetah carries its dead cub in its mouth for days. “The elephants will remain with their bodies after they die.”
At two years old, Faulu should have hunted a little more ambitiously – perhaps a gazelle or a baboon – but perhaps grief had hindered his progress. He was stuck in the cycle of taking the easy way out. After a few days at Ishara, I realized that I was stuck in the same cycle, but it had started long before.
I saw that my grief extended far beyond my mother’s second cancer diagnosis. For almost four years, I had been grieving the breakdown of my last relationship, the death of my uncle and my beloved dog Milo, as well as the career I had built that was devastated by the pandemic. I had been suffering since 2020, and it was only now that I could see that to cope, I had shrunk my world, traveled less and gone to more familiar places, closing myself off from new relationships.
I was relieved to rediscover my sense of adventure at Ishara and later at Asanja Ruaha in Tanzania. When my mother died, I vowed to make all decisions in her honor: “What would Helen do?” became the mantra I lived by. Thanks to him, I rediscovered my curiosity and courage. I said yes to ridiculous things like sleeping outdoors in Ishara’s Star Bed, 10 feet above the ground in the middle of the forest, surrounded by trees and growling hippos.
Prosper, Asanja’s resident naturalist, took me on a walking safari from our camp in Ruaha National Park; I agreed, knowing that a leopard had passed by our hut the night before and a pride of lions had taken over the area. their territory. “Don’t worry, we’ll take a Maasai with us,” he said, as if the presence of Rafael and his humble knife would scare away any powerful predator.
I had come to these wild parts of East Africa to rub salt in the wounds of my pain, and there was always a sadness in me as I looked at the changing landscapes. But I also spent 10 days finding parts of me that I didn’t realize were broken and slowly starting to fix them.
It was a journey that many would describe as a “once in a lifetime” journey; I had the chance to watch politics play out among prides of lions, and as soon as we left the landing strip we encountered wild dogs at Ruaha. When I came here in 2012, it was truly a once-in-a-lifetime event for my mother. He never returned. But in her spirit and “What would Helen do?” With his spirit, I will continue to return to wherever he cannot go.
Fundamentals
Lottie was the guest of Ishara, Asanja Ruaha and Hemingways.
Ishara (00 254 011 535 2071) offers all-inclusive accommodation in the Maasai Mara from £965 per person per night; This includes exclusive use of guides and game drive vehicles, access to the photography studio and equipment, instruction from on-site professional photographers, all meals and most beverages, nature breakfast and sunset cruises, and transfers to/from Ol Kiombo airstrip.
Asanja Ruaha (0141 628 7121; asanjaafrica.com) offers accommodation in Tanzania’s Ruaha National Park from £600 per night based on two sharing; Breakfast, lunch and dinner are included. Hunting trips and other excursions are excluded.
For stays in the capital, double rooms with breakfast at Hemingways Nairobi and Hemingways Eden Residence (00 254 (0) 711 032 000) are £664 and £507 respectively.
Kenya Airways offers return flights from London to Nairobi from £672 and flights between Nairobi and Dar es Salaam from £248.