The Gone-But-Also-Everlasting Theory

A simple, rusting cast iron bed sits between two trees. The thin mattress is covered with children’s bedding: pink with teddy bears, mushrooms, and hearts. A battered wooden bedside cabinet, a plastic stool, and a plastic chair complete this bizarre tableau on a ridge overlooking the Jordan Valley.

An hour earlier, I had passed a shepherd with a mighty number of goats in tow. Is this where he sleeps when he’s out with his herd? I wonder.

It’s a surreal image, and deeply ingrained mental connections flicker into gear. Like hundreds of times before, I have the urge to take a photo and share it with my mum — to send it to a number no longer in service, to a person with whom I’ll never share moments again.

~~

I spot a rock sitting in the center of the path. It looks like so many others — weathered, discolored, ancient, unremarkable — save for two painted white letters: “M A.”

The sun above is merciless, yet the canopy provides a cocooned glade. Silence. My mountainous backpack sits beside me. In the side pocket is a battered, purple Fortnum & Mason tin carrying my mother’s ashes.

Her name was Marie Agnes.

Those harrowing final weeks, as cancer reduced her to a crumpled shell, return with a knifing ferocity. Touching her cheek at 3 a.m. to find it as cold and hard as stone. The dual emotions that followed: enormous relief and catastrophic pain.

I carefully open the tin. Tilting it sideways, a stream of ashes fills my palm. I lean forward and gently scatter them on the rock before replacing the lid.

As I stand and wrestle on my backpack, something holds me in place. 

Nearly a year has passed since my mother died in her bedroom at home. The raging agony is gone, but a deep ache and knot of trauma remain. Stumbling upon a random rock with her initials painted on it opened the floodgates. It is painful, confusing — the closest I’ve felt to her since her death.

~~

The process of grieving, argues Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor — a leader in prolonged grief research and author of The Grieving Brain — is about acceptance but also about learning. The “Gone-But-Also-Everlasting Theory” on which she focuses her research suggests that in grief, the mind becomes a battlefield where longstanding beliefs and assumptions based on a lifetime of experiences with a loved one are at war with new information that the loved one is gone forever.

“This means that for the brain,” O’Connor writes, “your loved one is simultaneously gone and also everlasting, and you are walking through two worlds at the same time … [It is] a premise that makes no sense.”

And that conflict threatens to tear down the foundations we have based our lives upon. 

~~

Plunging from the small town of Dana, Jordan, perched above, the path through the Wadi Dana is a showstopper, with towering canyon walls that slowly converge until I am squeezing through slot canyons. Two weeks in, I’ve had a spectacular day of walking and will enter Petra in a few days, but there’s a dawning realization that an international powder keg has erupted, and everything is unraveling.

The plan had always been grandiose. As the first anniversary of my mother’s death neared, I wanted to spread her ashes in Israel. My mother and father had visited Jerusalem shortly before my birth, and despite their eventual separation, the city had always glowed warmly in her heart. Spreading her ashes there on the anniversary felt poetic.

At the same time, with the COVID-19 pandemic and my mother’s cancer and death, years had escaped me. I was aching for adventure. I chose the rugged, north-to-south, 400-mile Jordan Trail to lead me to Israel.

There was something cinematic about a grueling journey culminating in a triumphant entrance into one of the most breathtaking, revered places on Earth. It felt right, like it would ease the pain or even deliver closure.

In the planning stage, everything had seemed straightforward, but the previous weeks on the trail have overwhelmed me. I’m bruised by the fierceness of the trail and ground down by the intensity of the heat and my own fragility. I’ve been sick for the last three days, and my body is depleted. It is now mid-October, and 100 miles north, violence has erupted. The region is on a knife’s edge.

~~

Earlier that month, on October 7, I stood on a high ridge, the landscape wild and colossal, pitching almost straight down to a distant body of water: the Dead Sea and Jordan’s neighbour, Israel, rising from the opposite shore. My phone vibrated.

“Please tell me you’re not in Israel?” the text read.

I tensed as I read the message. Frantic, jumbled accounts of Hamas’s assault began flooding media outlets. An age-old conflict reignited.

I had no choice but to press on, taking a high path along a ridgeline flanked by a terrifying drop. The tiny trail weaved progressively closer to the precipice until my juddering heart and panicked footsteps could no longer take it, and I sat down. On this steep, loose surface, if I lost my footing, the weight of my backpack would sweep me off the edge.

“You are walking through two worlds at the same time.”

Eventually, I located a safer route off the ridge, furious with myself for even getting into that situation. But the end of the day’s walk brought no respite or even shade. There was simply sun-baked earth, barbed rock, and stray dogs roaming menacingly nearby.

Suddenly, a roar of hooves echoed along the canyon wall. A man on a donkey was galloping toward me, his face covered with a keffiyeh and aviator sunglasses.

I backed up against the rock face as he vaulted from the donkey and stormed forward, screaming and gesturing wildly with his whip. I could only make out a single word: ‘iisrayiyliun.

“British, British,” I tried to soothe, holding up my hands. He took out his phone and began frantically texting before grabbing my GPS.

“Walking,” I added, attempting to explain the map of Jordan on the screen. He pointed at my bag and then my diary, which he snatched. As he tore through it, a picture of my mother I had been traveling with drifted to the ground. Another venomous volley of words erupted, and he tossed the diary at me before jumping onto his donkey and galloping away, leaving me with a final snarl.

Shaking, I grabbed her photo and my bag and started jogging down a dusty path I knew would eventually lead to a small town. Ten minutes later, a kind duo in a car stopped and offered me a ride. I sagged into the back seat.

~~

“Grief is a heart-wrenchingly painful problem for the brain to solve, and grieving necessitates learning to live in the world with the absence of someone you love deeply, who is ingrained in your understanding of the world.” – Mary-Frances O’Connor, The Grieving Brain

~~

Despite death being one of our few unifying experiences, so many of us are inherently awful at dealing with it. We comprehend the abstract, but it remains a distant hypothetical until grief arrives and drags us into darkness.

The year and a half from terminal diagnosis to death had gone as well as it could have. My mother faced death with her head held high and a 1960s LSD-backed assurance that there was something more to come.

We spent considerable time together during this period, which saw me move back in with her for the final six months. She was a single parent, and I was an only child. We holidayed in Cornwall and Wales, ate too much cake and cheese, watched the birds come and go, revisited our favourite movies, and walked through the forest, discussing trees. We often talked about death and acceptance.

“I’m ready to die,” she once told me as we enjoyed an evening aperitif of wine and cheese in the garden. It was a warm late August. The neighborhood swallows circled rhythmically above — an occasional woosh as they passed overhead.

“They’re training the young,” she liked to say.

My mother was classically French. Her hair now a riotous mix of black and grey — ruffled and nonchalant. She sat with her legs crossed on a deck chair, her body small, frail, drained, but her face warmed by the late evening glow.

“They’ll be gone soon,” she nodded towards the swallows before dispatching a large slice of Port Salut and a cracker. We didn’t know it at the time, but she, too, would soon be gone.

~~

One evening, I make camp between two aging olive trees outside the small town of Beit Idis and slump to the ground, exhausted. It has been an astonishing day of walking, but my mind is whirling — a battle of emotions threatening to boil over. I close my eyes and try to steady my breath. My heart begins to slow.

The next moment, I’m lashed by a memory. Not a specific time, place, or event but an echo of pain that cuts into me. A rapid slideshow of violent emotion.

I wince and quickly draw breath. My eyes fly open; my heart is again pounding. The world beyond is falling deeper and deeper into chaos. And the chaos inside me isn’t easing either.

~~

In many movies, death seems to come peacefully for those with cancer. Breathing gradually slows, family members gather — and light eventually dims.

But my mother’s death is unscripted. We spend the final five weeks of her life at home as the disease ravages her. It is a traumatic ending that carves me apart and leaves scars I don’t know how to heal.

The world turns methodically, but I spin out of regulated patterns. Time slows, jolts, sputters — barely moves. My mind lurches between the gaping emptiness of present reality and the familiar warmth of cherished memories. In the months following her death, my dreams sometimes degenerate into dystopian nightmares where a global Armageddon looms. Unable to comprehend a world without my mother, my subconscious feels like it is turning on itself.

Eventually, the chaos begins to subside. Apocalyptic nightmares disappear and are replaced with quests where I search for my mother. Sometimes, I find her, and sometimes, I don’t.

This cognitive dissonance is the crux of O’Connor’s “Gone-But-Also-Everlasting Theory.” My mother is gone, but my brain has a lifetime of memories that tell me she’s here and will reappear. The grieving process requires me to resolve these two conflicting storylines and, ultimately, free the latter.

It’s a process without a manual, one that each of us must navigate in our own way. For me, I thought a 400-mile trek through Jordan would be the answer. But I wouldn’t make it to the end.

~~

At the end of another day, near Wadi Malaga, I once again let my bag slip to the ground under a scraggly excuse for a tree. No sooner have I sat down I feel a lump rising in my throat.

The landscape around me is vast and lonely. It seems appropriate for how I feel. A sense of weakness gnaws at me. The crumbled remains of a Roman mine stand nearby, abandoned for nearly 2,000 years. A surge of pain rushes up from deep, and tears arrive. Everything hurts. My muscles. My pride. I miss my mum.

As the sun drops, I walk up a nearby rise and watch the sky as it burns a glorious pink, then red, before settling into a deep ocean blue. Behind me is an ominous wall of rock — tomorrow’s challenge — but ahead, the world stretches to infinity.

~~

The path weaves steadily upward through the rocky wilderness. I pass an isolated tree just as the sun breaches the canyon wall and the world warms. It’s a cool, pleasant temperature to walk in — a teasing prelude to a day that will top 40℃ (104℉).

The incline increases, my muscles burn. I reach a cairn topped with a white rock, signaling the way forward. Wadi Araba sweeps back down below me. Small hills that seemed dramatic as I passed yesterday are now molehills, tiny bumps littering the Mars landscape. I can see the end of the world; I’m sure of it.

Four days after leaving Dana, I enter the fabled city of Petra via a dusty backdoor trail. Crawling with the afternoon tourist horde, of which I am admittedly a part, the site is a far cry from what I had always dreamed it would be. Immediately, I’m overwhelmed and scamper out as quickly as I can.

The mood in the region is darkening by the day. After Hamas killed more than 1,000 Israeli civilians on October 7, bombs are now crushing Gaza. Thousands are already dead. In the middle of an afternoon nap in my hotel in Wadi Musa, I wake to an angry barrage outside. When I tiptoe to the window, I find a large protest in the center of the town.

That night, I sit with a beer in a hotel bar. A TV in the corner shows the mangled carcass of what was yesterday a hospital in Gaza. The report states that at least 300 have been killed and that the conflict might soon widen in the region.

A realization I have been running from slowly settles. My plan to triumphantly enter Jerusalem and end my arduous voyage in its hallowed Old Town is untenable — perhaps it always was.

~~

“If someone close to us dies, then, based on what we know about object-trace cells, our neurons still fire every time we expect our loved one to be in the room. And this neural trace persists until we can learn that our loved one is never going to be in our physical world again. We must update our virtual maps, creating a revised cartography of our new lives. Is it any wonder that it takes many weeks and months of grief and new experiences to learn our way around again?” – Mary-Frances O’Connor, The Grieving Brain

~~

I return to England with a gaping sense of failure, the ashes now a weighty reminder of all that had gone wrong. The cinematic ending I imagined is now a persistent yolk of disappointment. Would things have been different upon reaching Jerusalem? Perhaps. But there is a gnawing sense — one that becomes more obvious with hindsight — that overcoming the loss of my mother was far more complex than putting one foot in front of the other for 400 miles.

Around 10% of bereaved people will develop prolonged grief disorder, which O’Connor and others equate to an inability to release the notion that our loved ones are everlasting. Detachment from emotions and memories further exacerbates the problem. We instinctively shy away from what makes us wince, but while that may help us in that fleeting moment, we are delaying the healing process.

I never thought I was included in that 10% but, back in England, I feel lower than I had before the trip. I find myself gazing out of windows, lost in time, space, and reality. The internal chaos I experienced in Jordan has followed me home, and I still have my mother’s ashes.

The anniversary of my mother’s death is fast approaching, and something has to change. A new plan settles in my mind. Another walk, this one closer to home — one that will weave into the very heart of the memories that have haunted me.

~~

A month after I left Jordan, I’m nestled snugly in a sand dune overlooking Lligwy Beach on the small Welsh island of Anglesey. The tide is out on this far-flung, lonely stretch of sand. A tempestuous sky broods, punctured by light illuminating patches of the cold, grey sea.

My plan is to walk for six days around the island before spreading the bulk of her ashes on the anniversary of her death. No doubt this is a way of exorcising some lingering ghosts from my failed trek in Jordan, but, more importantly, this is a chance to stop at several of the places Mum and I had visited six months before her death, when we spent our final holiday together here.

Despite her ailing body and the obvious signs that cancer had begun to take hold, she cheerily donned her wetsuit and waded into the chilly Irish Sea — not so much swimming as bobbing happily.

I look to my left and see her gazing intently out to sea, a thick shawl wrapped tightly around her, her bare feet dug into the sand. Her gaze is intense, deep in thought — preparation for the great unknown. A shadow crosses her face, and we both look skyward to see a dark cloud slipping across the beach.

“Rain,” we both say in unison.

“Fancy an ice cream?” she asks.

~~

On my penultimate day of walking, the wind howls in from the Irish Sea. It’s only mid-afternoon, but Porth Dafarch Beach, with its narrow inlet, is a dark, cold place to be.

The memories continue to flood in.

My mind drifts back to a warm, sunny day filled with the happy soundtrack of life at the beach. My mum and I spent most of the day here, lazing in the sun, swimming in the crisp water, gorging ourselves on burgers sold at a van on the edge of the sand.

Mum had even allowed me to take her out paddleboarding. Wading into the water behind her as she sat, I pushed the board gently through the lapping waves as she gingerly paddled. I let go, and she drifted away from me. Turning slightly, I could see a childlike beaming smile. My heart aches. The simplest of joy.

Grief is as much about rediscovering happiness as releasing sadness.

While it might be painful, the best way for me to navigate grief is to give up the fight — not by surrendering the pursuit of closure but by accepting that grief must become part of me — a scar that I will live with for the rest of my life and one that fundamentally changes me as a person, potentially in positive ways.

~~

On arriving at the house, I perch on a bench and allow more memories to swell. I look at the view we shared for hours, Mum often gazing through binoculars at the oystercatchers scurrying along the bank. A gently flowing estuary creeps beneath an old stone bridge before arriving at the rumbling Irish Sea just out of sight. Ahead, sandy grassland extends to the horizon where the Snowdonia mountains gracefully rise.

Jordan is still raw, but my mind feels calmer. On the first anniversary of her death, it feels poignant to be in a place we shared, instead of a place that might have been important to her but where we shared no direct connection.

Toward the end of her illness, Mum grew quieter, and for a time, I tried to force conversation, to keep her entertained, to try and squeeze every drop of connection I could from her fading light.

It was in this spot that I finally understood words are not the only way of connecting. Sometimes, sitting in silence with somebody you love, simply existing peacefully together, is perfect. 

A lump rises in my throat like it did so many times in Jordan, yet here on Anglesey, the emotions feel different.

~~

The difference between grief and grieving may sound purely lexical, but researchers like O’Connor tell us it’s not: Grief is the initial tidal wave that overpowers us, while grieving is the tidal cycle that comes and goes, usually weakening over time without ever entirely disappearing. Grief is as much about rediscovering happiness as releasing sadness.

A month after my mother’s death, I went on a date in the small Oxfordshire town of Woodstock. It felt too early, but also like a necessary step. As she walked into the small coffee shop and our eyes met, something rippled between us. My heart beat faster. Seven months later, I moved in with her and am now on the verge of asking her to marry me. Life can be strange.

~~

On the sedate banks of the Afon Ffraw on the morning of November 17, exactly a year after my mother’s death, I stand on the stone bridge, the purple tin and her picture beside me. I wonder if I should say anything but settle on a simple, “Hi, Mum.”

I remove the lid and let the ashes tumble into the water below, where the current sweeps them forward, past the greystoned house filled with happy memories, past the wide ark of Llanddwyn Beach, where she loved to hunt for shells, and out into the open sea.

Gone, but also everlasting.