When sorrow walked with me…

The inspiration for the title of this site: A mile with sorrow, comes from conversations with a young father whose young son had died, and who had been referred to me for support. There is, as you can imagine, a checklist that gets covered in these types of professional conversations: How’s your sleep - are you eating - what’s your mood like? Questions designed to check how well a person is coping and what steps can be taken to help the person function better.

As our relationship deepened, we talked more about his son. I asked his name. It was an unusual name and, his dad informed me, inspired by a visit dad had taken to a city in Italy as a student. Our conversations were now full of the sights and experience of this city and it’s river, who the son was named after.

After the funeral, dad returned with his partner to the city. A pilgrimage of sorts. I imagined all the emotional threads of his life, like tributaries, feeding into the river as he walked it with his partner. The wide eyed student vowing to return one day, the imagined sharing of it with a loved one, and the pain and sorrow of later loss.

As our time together wound up, he shared a poem, which he clung to and which I would like to share with you. It spoke to me of the interior journey that people go on in troubled times and of the limited opportunities there are to talk about what has been learned. It seems to me that there is value both in speaking out our stories and of them being heard. It is this that inspires me to continue searching out and encouraging you and people like you to share your stories.

This short poem brought this site into existence and hopefully will encourage you to reach out and share your experiences with others.

“I walked a mile with Pleasure;
She chatted all the way;
But left me none the wiser
For all she had to say.

I walked a mile with Sorrow;
And ne’er a word said she;
But, oh! The things I learned from her,
When Sorrow walked with me.” 

-Robert Browning Hamilton

Be well!