I think you would miss an important part of the story if I didn’t tell you a little of the back story on how this all started. Like walking into a movie midway through you miss a lot of significant details to the story being told.
So, let me give a bit of the back story. In 2010, the movie The Way came out in movie theaters and both my mother and I decided to go see it. It is the story of a father whose son dies while walking the Camino de Santiago and the father decides to finish the walk his son started and carrying his son’s ashes and it is the story of what the father learns and experiences along the way.
I think it would have been just another great movie we have seen but, some movies have a way of touching you in such a way that it impacts one’s life emotionally and spiritually. There were parts where I felt an emotional tug and a spiritual touch. I knew when driving home and my mother made the statement that she was going to walk the Camino that something was stirring and she said it in such a way that told me she wasn’t joking. It was made more real when she added that was going to take time off from her job.
The piece of my mother’s walk that I didn’t know at the time was that she carried some of my father’s ashes along the route she took. Like the father in the movie. When she arrived home besides hearing her stories and seeing her many pictures, I felt that it had impacted her and set her free from the sadness and loss of my father. I think that it has been a hope of my mother that we her kids would want to experience the Camino and she would drop hints that maybe we would do it together somehow at some time.
I would go see another movie involving the Camino called “I’ll Push You” the story of two friends one of whom has a disability. As you can imagine, my Mom was interested and excited to see it. While I was inspired the initially thought that ran around in my head was, I could do that yet, to actually do something like that would take a great deal more effort and people then I could imagine. Yet, throughout my life things that I saw and was told were impossible for me to do have somehow happened over the years. I may have not done it in a way an able-bodied person may have done the task but, I have done enough to believe you never say never.
It was a conversation my mother had while helping a customer at work that led to her find out about “The Grit Chair” which I will use on my Camino and it would be while celebrating Mother’s Day and my Mom’s retirement day that we as a family would actually talk about the idea of doing part of the Camino as a family in 2022.
As they say the rest is history!
Thoughts? E-mail: francisearly@francisearly.com
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