Journey To Solace

Writer Vivian Warby reveals how a solo road trip to mourn her parents’ passing became a cathartic journey into the next phase of her life

- Vivian Warby

I felt privileged to spend every day with my father, and almost every night next to him, in the month leading up to his death. My father, Joe, had played a huge role in his community, and was loved and revered by so many. After his death, we had a six-day open-house wake, where hundreds upon hundreds of family and friends arrived to show their respect. The streets were closed and a guard of honour formed at his funeral.

While every step of this journey was so important to me, I actually hadn’t had a single moment to myself to take in the enormity of what had just happened. My father had died less than a year after Dot, my beloved mother, had passed away, and one day before Valentine’s Day.

I’d feared and dreaded my parents death since I was a little girl, right through my teenage years and well into later life. And yet, here I was carrying on as normal, as if nothing had happened, back to my daily life. It didn’t feel right. I felt it in my body’s unusual aches, in the way my tears refused to fall.

This event – the death of both my parents within a year of each other – needed something more than a simple, courteous nod. The end of their road here on earth needed an exclamation mark. My parents have died. Exclamation mark. The great loves of my life are gone. Exclamation mark. It is not business as usual. Exclamation mark. Added to that, I hadn’t found a safe place to express the inordinate amount of mixed feelings swirling inside of me.

I needed a space to howl, but polite society often does not understand this base instinct within us, this primal need to let our bodies speak our pain. I refused to shut it down. It wanted to talk – loudly – and, as a great act of self-love, I was going to give my body the space to do so. I put in for leave and, within a few days, I was packed for a solo road trip.