Cheryl Strayed

And now it was official: I loved REI more than I loved the people behind Snapple lemonade.

It__ hard to go. It__ scary and lonely_and half the time you__l be wondering why the hell you__e in Cincinnati or Austin or North Dakota or Mongolia or wherever your melodious little finger-plucking heinie takes you. There will be boondoggles and discombobulated days, freaked-out nights and metaphorical flat tires.But it will be soul-smashingly beautiful_ It will open up your life.

But compassion isn't about solutions. It's about giving all the love that you've got.

I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprisingly of all, that I could carry it. That I could bear the unbearable. These realizations about my physical, material life couldn't help but spill over into the emotional and spiritual realm. That my complicated life could be made so simple was astounding. It had begun to occur to me that perhaps it was okay that I hadn't spent my days on the trail pondering the sorrows of my life, that perhaps by being forced to focus on my physical sufferings some of my emotional suffering would fade away. (93)

The thing about hiking the Pacific Coast Trial, the thing that was so profound to me that summer -- and yet also, like many things, so very simple -- was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do. How there was no escape or denial. (69)

There are so many torturous things in this life. Don't let a man who doesn't love you be one of them.

If, as a culture, we don__ bear witness to grief, the burden of loss is placed entirely upon the bereaved, while the rest of us avert our eyes and wait for those in mourning to stop being sad, to let go, to move on, to cheer up. And if they don__ _ if they have loved too deeply, if they do wake each morning thinking, I cannot continue to live _ well, then we pathologize their pain; we call their suffering a disease.We do not help them: we tell them that they need to get help.

My mother's last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love.

A beloved daughter who now spent holidays alone.

Within forty minutes, the voice inside my head was screaming, WHAT HAVE I GOTTEN MYSELF INTO? I tried to ignore it, to hum as I hiked, though humming proved too difficult to do while also panting and moaning in agony and trying to remain hunched in that remotely upright position while also propelling myself forward when I felt like a building with legs.

Grief doesn't have a face.

It was good. It was like something inordinately beautiful and out of this world. Like I__ found an actual planet that I didn__ know had been there all along. Planet Heroin. The place where there was no pain.

I put her burnt bones into my mouth and swallowed them whole.

Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally I'd see their beauty and solemnity so plainly that I'd realize in a piercing way that my mother was right. That someday I would be grateful and that in fact I was grateful now, that I felt something growing in me that was strong and real.

There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise.

I was twenty-two, the same age she was when she'd been pregnant with me. She was going to leave my life at the same moment that I came into hers, I thought. For some reason that sentence came fully formed into my head just then, temporarily blotting out the Fuck them prayer. I almost howled in agony. I almost choked to death on what I knew before I knew. I was going to live the rest of my life without my mother.

I lay down in the mother ash dirt among the crocuses and told her it was okay. That I'd surrendered. That since she died, everything had changed. Things she couldn't have imagined and wouldn't have guessed. My words came out low and steadfast. I was so sad it felt as if someone were choking me, and yet it seemed my whole life depended on my getting those words out. She would always be my mother, I told her, but I had to go. She wasn't there for me in that flowerbed anymore anyway, I explained. I'd put her somewhere else. The only place I could reach her. In me.

But now that she was dying, I knew everything. My mother was in me already. Not just the parts of her that I knew, but the parts of her that had come before me too.