Navigating the Wilderness of Grief

LES SILLARS, HOST: From WORLD Radio, this is Doubletake. I’m Les Sillars.

BILL BECKWITH: I’m going to say some numbers. Listen carefully.

JENNY ROUGH: Okay.

Bill Beckwith is a clinical neuropsychologist. A memory care expert. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska.

BECKWITH: Because when I’m through, I want you to say them in the same order.

On a Wednesday afternoon last January, he met with WORLD reporter Jenny Rough to give her a memory assessment. An evaluation to see if he could detect signs of dementia.

BECKWITH: 5, 8, 2.

ROUGH: 5, 8, 2.

SOUND: Ding!

Jenny had noticed her memory seemed to be losing a bit of sharpness. And she does have some family history with dementia. A portion of the test focused on short-term memory.

BECKWITH: 3, 9, 2, 4, 8, 7

ROUGH: 3, 9, 2, 4, 8, 7

SOUND: Ding!

Like reciting a list of numbers after hearing them only once.

BECKWITH: 5, 9, 1, 7, 4, 2, 8

ROUGH: 5, 9, 1, 7, 4, 2, 8

SOUND: Ding!

Most people can retain about seven digits in their short-term memory. A phone number. But much more than that—

BECKWITH: 7, 1, 3, 9, 4, 2, 5, 6, 8.

—and our memory tends to fail.

ROUGH: 7, 4, 3, 9, 1, 4, 2, 6, 8.

SOUND: Buzz!

He tested long-term memory, too. The ability to retrieve information Jenny learned decades ago … in grade school.

Certain facts sprang right to mind.

BECKWITH: How many minutes does it take for sunlight to reach the Earth?

ROUGH: Eight.

SOUND: Ding!

Others … didn’t.

BECKWITH: What’s the circumference of the Earth at the equator?

ROUGH: Uh, bigger than Mars but smaller than Jupiter. … I have no idea. Buzz!

BECKWITH: It’s about 25,000 miles.

The “checklist of concerns” asked things such as, do you have trouble balancing a checkbook? Or making a snack?

ROUGH: No.

But one item did cause concern:

ROUGH: Trouble finding his or her way around familiar places. No. Trouble finding his or her way around unfamiliar places. Yes! I have a terrible sense of direction!

Impaired navigation skills appear to be closely linked to dementia. Researchers are exploring the association. We’ll hear from some of them later in the episode.

Genetics, of course, plays a role in dementia, too. Beckwith always takes a family history.

BECKWITH: Are your parents still living?

ROUGH: My dad is still living. And my mom died in 2021.

From complications of Parkinson’s disease.

ROUGH: She was 75. Young.

Parkinson’s disease is a brain disorder that affects movement. Although it’s not a type of dementia, over 50 percent of Parkinson’s patients will become demented. It’s also hereditary.

Today on Doubletake, we’re going to navigate—metaphorically and literally. We’ll travel the pathways of the human brain, hiking trails in the Rocky Mountains, and the road of grief. Jenny Rough brings us the story.

JENNY ROUGH: My mom died —

ROUGH: For the longest time, I couldn’t say that. My throat would lock up and block the words. Even thinking it would cause my eyes to brim with tears.

I can say it now.

My mom died in the winter. A few weeks before Christmas 2021. By that summer, I was still in the throes of grief. Walking in the wilderness helped. The quiet beauty. The scent of evergreens. The crisp air.

I walked alone in the Rocky Mountains. I wanted time to think, to pray, to grieve. My first hike that June … a gentle, scenic trail… was 7 miles round trip.

As I followed the dirt path, my mind wandered back to the spring of 2021 … the spring before my mom died. My parents lived in Tennessee, and I was in town for a visit.

ROUGH: Hello? Hi, Mom. Oh, you look good. I like your shirt.

MOM: You like my shirt?

She’d been living with Parkinson’s for four years by then. And she’d advanced through the stages quickly. Tremors. Trouble walking. The occasional fall … and bone break. Three or four times a day her body became rigid. The stiffness scared her, which triggered panic attacks. She felt like she couldn’t breathe.

Mornings were better than evenings.

ROUGH: How are you feeling, Mom?

MOM: I feel good.

DAD: She’s really doing well this morning. Had a terrible night last night going to bed.

MOM: Oh, yeah. I listened to Andrew Peterson.

Andrew Peterson’s worship songs soothed her anxiety. So did a weighted blanket. And a lot of Klonopin, a sedative. Too much, I feared.

ROUGH: Ready to go boxing?

MOM: I guess so!

DAD: Do you want to take your pills with you?

My mom couldn’t drive anymore. So I drove her to class. Boxing for Parkinson’s patients.

To find the gym, I did what I always did in a car: Punched the address into my smartphone’s navigation app and mindlessly followed the blue line.

GOOGLE MAPS: Turn right onto Cool Springs Boulevard.

My mom seemed confused about where we were. I assured her over and over we were on the right route.

MOM: I feel like my brain is going.

JENNY: Why?

MOM: Well, I can’t remember things. … Dad drives everywhere so I don’t pay any attention to where we are.

I didn’t pay attention either, really.

We had a fun morning. After class, we ate lunch at the Factory, an old industrial complex renovated into a retail venue. I didn’t know it then, but that would be the last day we’d spend out and about together. The next time I’d visit my mom, she would be bedridden. And by December, she would be dead.

I thought about all of this on my hike in the Rocky Mountains.

At the end of the outbound trail, I reached a lake. Nobody was around that day, not even a fisherman. I sat on a log and pulled out my notebook. But I didn’t feel like writing. I felt like screaming. I wanted to cry out for my mom.

I can’t stand euphemisms for death. But I understand why people use them, especially the euphemism lost. I couldn’t shake the distressing feeling that I’d lost my mom.

If God’s promises are true, she didn’t cease to exist. But was she with God now … and conscious? Or was she asleep in the Lord … not to be awakened until the day of resurrection, as First Thessalonians implies? And either way, where exactly is her soul? How does a soul exist without a tangible body? And how does her mind fit into all this? Her physical brain was now a pile of dust in a blue urn in my dad’s apartment.

I was lost, too. It felt strange to exist on the planet without my mom. I looked at the distant mountains and was immediately overcome with a disorienting sensation. I scrawled one line in my notebook: How do I navigate the world without my mother?

And there was something else bothering me: Out of all the ways to die, a slow decline from dementia scared me the most. Believing family and friends are strangers … forgetting how to use a toothbrush or what toilet paper is for … not understanding what’s happening around me … being locked in a room by others who fear I’ll wander off and get lost … sounds like a horror movie.

That’s why, at age 50, I scheduled the meeting with Dr. Beckwith to undergo a memory assessment. I felt sharp and happy to be able to answer “no” to those risk-factor questions … except for the one about navigation and finding my way around. I usually can’t remember how to get from Point A to Point B with directions that involve more than a turn or two. Did that mean I was going to develop dementia? Was I going to navigate old age with a healthy brain or spend my later years feeling … lost.

For perhaps the first time in my life, I had a desire to pinpoint myself on earth. Improve my awareness of my whereabouts. And I wondered if improving navigation skills might lessen my chance of developing dementia. And maybe, I thought, maybe learning how to navigate in the physical world would also help me navigate my grief.

When it comes to orienting to our surroundings, and understanding where we are, the human brain uses two main navigation strategies.

MICHAEL HORNBERGER: We use both of these systems all the time.

Michael Hornberger is a professor of applied dementia research at the Norwich Medical School in the United Kingdom.

HORNBERGER: One is a map-based system where we see the world as a map.

Meaning, how different landmarks relate to each other. The way a cliff, a talus field, and a lake fit together in a particular place … independent of our viewpoint.

HORNBERGER: And the other one is more how we view the world from our point of view, which is much more landmark-based.

Meaning, how we are positioned in relation to the cliff, or the talus field, or the lake.

HORNBERGER: And it’s usually the people who are more landmarked based who say they have poorer navigation skills than the people who are map-based.

Researchers suspect navigation and dementia are connected.

HORNBERGER: The memory system and the navigation system, they overlap very strongly.

But the relationship between the two needs more attention.

HORNBERGER: Seeing people with dementia and symptoms … most people talk about memory, but not about navigation when they talk about dementia.

My fear of developing dementia increased after my mom got sick. Especially because I seemed to be forgetting things. So much so, I made a list. One: Rattling off my cell phone number, I blanked on the last four digits. Of my own number!

Two: I made myself a bowl of soup for lunch and walked to the table with a fork in my hand instead of a spoon.

Three: I couldn’t remember my athletic trainer’s name. I go on Wednesday mornings. It starts with a B. It’s not Barbara. Becky? No. Brenda? No. Not Bonnie.

At least I remember that I’m forgetting.

When I mentioned these things to Hornberger, he reassured me.

HORNBERGER: Yeah, I think memory lapses are completely normal.

They tend to increase when we’re stressed.

HORNBERGER: There’s just an overload of information.

Grief and depression also affect memory. Like the death of a loved one.

HORNBERGER: If we’re very emotional, it can make a difference. … But then if you treat the depression, the memory gets better in those people.

But most of the time, we experience memory lapses because we’re simply not paying attention. We’re distracted with other pressing matters.

Researchers aren’t sure … BETSY! My athletic trainer’s name. It just came to me. Hornberger says when we forget a detail like a name, it often comes back when we relax and stop trying so hard.

Anyway, what I was going to say is that researchers aren’t sure whether being a p oor navigator indicates that a person is more prone to developing dementia. It’s one of the areas they continue to study.

But they do know that the decline of any navigation skill you do have is a red flag. Hornberger says if you have problems navigating to places you’re familiar with, it’s time to see a doctor. As dementia progresses, many lose their ability to navigate areas they hadn’t struggled with before.

HORNBERGER: Even if they’re going for a walk with the dog in the same neighborhood they have done for the last 30 years, then one day suddenly they don’t return from the walk.

The family starts to look for them. The neighbors get involved, the police.

HORNBERGER: And this person might have taken a wrong turn and couldn’t find their way back. So this is a very, very common occurrence of dementia later on in the disease.

Being lost can be terrifying. Especially in the wilderness.

When you lose your way in civilization, you can stop at a gas station or find another person and ask for directions. But in the wilderness, you’re on your own. The mountains … beautiful just moments ago … suddenly feel like a death trap.

The day I got lost, I hiked a trail in the in San Juan National Forest … 1.8 million acres of mostly untouched wilderness.

These days, most hikers rely on hiking apps, like All Trails or Far Out. They work just like driving apps except on footpaths … again, doing all the thinking for you. But because smartphones run out of battery, I don’t tend to use them. I prefer guidebooks.

Guidebooks also give you information about what you can expect. Such as “climb eight switchbacks to the top of the slope” or “you will reach a beaver pond at 2.9 miles; be sure to stop and take a look.”

Before I left, I’d taken precautions. I told my husband of my plans. I brought the 10 Essentials in my pack … that includes things like an emergency shelter and waterproof matches. Solo hiking isn’t for everyone. I like it. But I’d gotten a late start that day. And the deeper into the woods I hiked, the sketchier the trail became.

I can feel my stomach getting tighter ... And the deeper into the wilderness I get, the more afraid I get. ‘Cause if something goes wrong it’s going to be a lot harder to get back to the car. Especially alone ...

I climbed over blowdown after blowdown … large pine trees that had fallen across the path. Each time, I checked for snakes that might be hidden on the far side.

ROUGH: Scaring them away with my poles. [banging poles on tree] And then I’ll climb over. Or under.

I rock-hopped across a creek.

And then at a trail junction … my turnaround point … I finally saw another person. A man sat against a sign post, resting. He wore a bright yellow jacket and was eating a banana. The combination made me think of the children’s book Curious George and the man with the yellow hat.

“Nice day,” he said, when I approached.

“Beautiful,” I agreed.

He had plans to backpack overnight. “I’ll probably continue that way.” He waved his hand in the direction of some far-off hills. “I’m still debating,” he said.

“Well, I’m turning back,” I announced. I said goodbye and began to retrace my steps, leaving the man in the yellow jacket at his resting spot.

When I reached the creek again, I crossed back over. But then … I couldn’t find the trail on the other side of the water … the one I’d come from earlier.

I mean: I. Could. Not. Find. It.

Anywhere.

Puzzled, I consulted my guidebook. My eyes scanned the writeup until I got to the part about the creek. “The trail can be a bit confusing in this area.”

That’s all it said!

I looked around again. A meadow lay before me with woods on all sides. Had I crossed through the middle of the meadow on my way out? The left side? The right? No clue.

I tried to follow any grassy patch that looked even remotely packed down. But each one disappeared into soft mounds of earth like an illusion. Twenty minutes passed. The sun crept across the sky. My throat felt dry. Sweat stung my eyes. I was tired, hungry, and thirsty. I was also scared. I didn’t recognize a thing. It was as if I’d never been there before.

Michael Hornberger, the researcher from the U.K., says being lost is perhaps the closest thing to what it must feel like to have dementia.

HORNBERGER: It’s such a horrible feeling. … You don’t know anymore where you are or where you’re going.

It’s dangerous to be lost. Some dementia patients don’t survive.

HORNBERGER: It’s dehydration or hypothermia. … So I always say you don’t die of your memory problems. But you can literally die because of your spatial disorientation.

It’s the same with hikers. One bad decision often compounds into another and without realizing it, your body quickly wears down.

Getting lost takes time. I didn’t leave myself enough time on the trail that day to find my way back if I did get lost. Grieving takes time, too. And I hadn’t had enough time with my mom at the end. Or to grieve her loss.

That day on the trail, it all caught up to me.

I shut my eyes and was immediately drawn back to my mom’s final months. Her downturn happened so fast. It began with a seizure. My dad called to tell me: “She began to shake all over. Every part of her body. She slid off the couch to the floor. It scared me to death,” he said.

Me too.

More seizures followed. My brother sent a picture from her hospital bed. She looked like Medusa because green, pink, and blue wires spilled from a bandage around her head and snaked their way to a machine.

I boarded a plane to Tennessee. When I arrived, she couldn’t even stand on her own. A nurse had propped her up in a wheelchair. “Hi, Mom.” I hugged her. She wore a blank expression on her face, a common symptom of Parkinson’s. But this time, I wasn’t sure she recognized me. She was definitely confused. She thought she’d been in a bus accident. Finally she lifted her gaze. “They put me in a diaper,” she said.

My heart wobbled, as if I’d tripped. I mourned all that she was losing … and had already lost.

Eventually, she moved to a rehabilitation center. There, a health professional administered a memory assessment.

“Name eight items that are white.”

She could only think of two, well, sort of two: a duck … and a duck feather.

I tested myself silently, making a list in my head: Snow, sheep, polar bear, marshmallow, cloud, notebook paper, teeth, and a wedding gown. OK.

At breakfast she didn’t know what to do with her food. She pulled her bread apart and turned her sausage upside down.

The rehab center did my mom no good. She got weaker instead of stronger … then she entered hospice.

My life came to a halt. Work. Grocery shopping. Morning runs. Routines. Everything stopped … except time. What once seemed to be in abundance was now suddenly scarce. How many hours did we have left together?

In the wilderness, the moment you feel like you’re not where you’re supposed to be, you should STOP. S-T-O-P. It’s an acronym. S, sit down on the ground, sip water, eat a snack. Sitting will slow your heart rate. Eating and drinking will nourish your body. Next, T. Think through your options. O, observe your surroundings, and P, plan. Plan your route out. Or perhaps, plan to stay the night.

The afternoon I got lost, I watched the sun’s color ripen. The tree shadows grew long and skinny. I actually did remember what to do … finally! But just as I was about to stop and sit, I remembered something else … the man in the yellow jacket!

Forget S-T-O-P. I decided to G-O. And that’s when I panicked.

Frantic, I plunged back across the creek, soaking my shoes and socks. I dashed toward the junction. God, please! I prayed as my shoes squished and squashed. Please make the man in the yellow jacket still be sitting at the wooden post!

With every bounce, my pack slammed against my back. I barreled around a curve … and right at the bend, I tumbled into the man in the yellow jacket.

“Thank, God!” I yelled. Relief flooded my body. The story spilled out of me: How I got lost at the creek. How I couldn’t find my way. How I had searched and searched. I was so happy to see him!

“Yeah, it’s a bit confusing,” he said calmly, practically reciting the guidebook. “Follow me,” he beckoned. “I’ll show you the way.”

Later that night, showered, fed, and bundled in a blanket in the comfort of home, I pulled out my compass and unfolded a map. It was a topographic map. One that gave the perspective of the earth’s geographical features from a bird’s eye view. The map had a collection of colored patches, numbers, squiggly lines, broken lines, dots … and more squiggly lines.

At that moment, I was more determined than ever to learn how to navigate. And if I wanted to track exactly where I was when I hiked, I’d have to learn how to read the patches, dots, and squiggles. Turn myself into a legitimate explorer!

DANIEL BOONE THEME SONG: Daniel Boone was a man. Yes, a big man with an eye like an eagle and as tall as a mountain was he!

So I called up a woman named Stacy Boone.

STACY BOONE: I’m a backpacking guide. I’ve been guiding for almost 25 years at this point.

Stacy says she’s related … by marriage … to the line of Daniel Boone.

Learning to backpack takes skills. Many of which I’d mastered.

How to set up—and take down a shelter.

How to find water. How to cook food over a folding canister stove. How to properly fuel my body with meals and snacks.

How to keep my gear dry in the rain. Hang a bear bag … dig a cathole … tape a blister.

And yes, navigate. I took a class long ago. But because I relied on guidebooks, I never honed my navigation skills. The only time I took out my compass was to look in the mirror to check if there was food stuck in my teeth.

Stacy explained how to use a compass properly, including how to, quote, “put red Fred in the shed.”

BOONE: So red Fred is the arrow that moves around when you move your compass. And the shed is that little red housing unit that is normally in the northern direction.

Stacy reminded me to line up the compass, map … and myself … to all face north. That way, the landscape I’d see in front of me would line up to the images on the map. That’s how you figure out where you are and where you’re going.

Ah. If I’d done that the day I got lost, I would have seen that the trail hugged the east side of the creek. So I’d at least have known where to look for it.

Stacy also went over other symbols, like how to find water sources.

BOONE: …dot, dot, dot, squiggle line, that’s going to make it a seasonal water source…

It’s critical to be able to locate water in the wilderness. You can only carry so much with you. Every hiker is taught The Rule of Three. It outlines rough guidelines for how long a person can survive without water … and other life-sustaining necessities. Like oxygen.

Generally, a person can survive three minutes without air, three hours without shelter in a harsh environment, three days without water, and three weeks without food.

The Rule of Three brought me back to my mom. When she entered hospice, the nurses put her on oxygen so she could get enough air. She was confined to a bed. She’d whittled down to skin and bones and looked so thin. She wanted blankets for warmth. Her shelter. Her appetite disappeared more and more each day. I asked about a feeding tube, but the nurses said her digestive system was shutting down. It’s part of the dying process. Force feeding her would be cruel.

I didn’t know what to believe. I’d never seen death up close like this.

My dad, brothers, and I gathered at her bedside in the care center. The dementia ebbed and flowed. We rode the roller coaster of emotions. On nonlucid days she asked alarming questions: Did Dad commit suicide?

No, Mom, no. He’s napping in the chair. On her lucid days, we retold old family stories that made us laugh.

We held each other and cried. Confessed past hurts and asked for forgiveness. We had sober conversations about God. We read Psalm 90, the oldest psalm in the Bible.

One afternoon, I thoughtlessly chugged a bottle of water in front of her. “I wish I could do that,” she said in a moment of clarity. She must’ve been so thirsty. By then, she could only handle a few sips of water from a straw—and even that was a struggle. Soon, she could only drink from a syringe.

On Thanksgiving morning, she refused a bit of smashed sweet potato. She never ate again. The day after that, she slipped into a coma. Over the following days, I watched in horror as her face became frozen. Her mouth hung open. I wet her lips and gums with swab sticks. Gently dropped saline in her eyes. She could no longer blink. Her eyelids got stuck halfway open. We had no idea if she could hear us. But we continued to tell her how much we loved her, over and over.

I brushed her hair. Rubbed lotion on her hands. My brother read her passages from Isaiah and the gospels.

On the third day of her coma, I braced myself. This is it, I thought … because of the Rule of Three. Other than the swab sticks, she hadn’t had any water.

“You know Elizabeth Kubler Ross’ stages of grief?” my brother asked.

Yes, I knew the stages.

“I’m not in denial,” he said. “This is the end.”

I agreed. She wasn’t going to pull through. It was almost over. Probably in a matter of hours.

But she lived through the third day. And the next. And the next.

By the end of the week, she’d gone seven days without water. Then eight. Nine. The Rule of Three might fit hikers lost in the wilderness, but not moms in hospice. She just kept breathing. On day 10 of no water … after more hair-brushing, hand massages, and eye drops … I kissed her goodnight. I planned to return first thing in the morning and start the routine all over again.

Back at home, my family sat around the living room. When my dad’s cell phone rang, well, I’m sure you can guess the news. But not me. Denial had kicked into overdrive.

Part of me still can’t believe she’s dead.

Grief is hard to navigate. All winter, I felt exhausted but couldn’t get a full night’s sleep. Tears seeped from my eyes like sap from a tree. I couldn’t stop the flow.

The book of Ecclessiates seemed to make a cynical kind of sense: We all die. The work we do amounts to nothing. There’s no point to anything. The condolence calls and letters were thoughtful, but none brought my mother back. She appeared in my dreams … dreams that left me aching … because the moment I woke, she was gone again.

I’m not sure grief ever goes away, but I got better at handling it. Daily practice.

HORNBERGER: You can definitely train yourself to become a better navigator.

Navigation skills can also be improved with practice. Dementia researcher Michael Hornberger is sure of it.

Hornberger has studied the navigation skills of people from different genders, ages, and countries.

HORNBERGER: So we have done very large scale studies where we looked at different populations in the world.

The top navigation performers come from Nordic countries.

HORNBERGER: Norway. Finland. Sweden.

At first, Hornberger and his team weren’t sure why. Others assumed it was genetics.

HORNBERGER: Lots of people gave us suggestions that, of course these are the descendants of the Vikings, they were expert navigators.

But he thinks it’s due to something else. A sport.

HORNBERGER: Called orienteering.

Orienteering. The sport challenges participants to move from location to location in unfamiliar terrain by using a map and compass to set bearings.

HORNBERGER: It’s a huge sport in Nordic countries. … People who do orienteering, they’re much better at navigation.

Liz Chrastil is a professor at UC Irvine. She also studies spatial navigation. And she also encourages people who want to improve navigation skills to stop over-relying on navigation apps.

LIZ CHRASTIL: There’s been some, a few studies on it showing people who are GPS-dependent are not going to be as good of navigators and things like that. So, if you are just following the turn-by-turn especially in areas that you should kind of know that’s probably not the best.

She says navigation relies on three main areas of the brain.

CHRASTIL: Sorry, I’m going to go into it…

The brain parts.

CHRASTIL: So, that entorhinal cortex, hippocampus, and retrosplenial cortex are three of the really big areas for navigation …

They let you know your location and motion. They work together to figure out where you are, which direction you’re going, and how fast.

And those are the areas that are really affected first by Alzheimer's and spatial disorientation is a very early symptom of Alzheimer's.

All of those areas overlap with memory.

I asked Chrastil: Could an MRI of my brain parts show my risk of dementia or level of navigation skills? She said, not likely. Instead, she uses virtual reality to study her subjects’ navigation abilities.

A test called path integration.

CHRASTIL: So there’s things like being able to tell how far you walk. If your eyes were closed or something—

Say you’re blindfolded and set on a straight path.

CHRASTIL: How far did I walk? And can I reproduce that distance? And that’s something that’s very different from what series of turns do I need to take to get to the grocery store?

That involves another test that measures scene recognition. The ability to perceive that you’ve been in a certain place before.

And map skills, a third test.

CHASTIL: Looking at a map and being able to see that top-down map view and putting it in your first person and being able to make that transformation so that you can know what you need to do then as you’re walking around.

ROUGH: I’m back, … in the Weminuche Wilderness. Gonna try this again.

On my next hike, I returned to a trail I’d tried once before, but never completed. I’d lost the route when I ran into a large snowfield. Now, the snow had melted, and I planned to navigate the old-fashioned way.

Set down my pack.

This time my husband, Ron, was with me. I dropped my backpack at the trailhead. And instead of the guidebook, I pulled out my map.

ROUGH: So north faces directly into an Aspen grove. … Yep, I’m going to veer left to go southeast … and then it very quickly goes due east, then I turn north. … We’re supposed to get some weather tonight, but right now I just see blue skies with those puffy clouds. Can’t remember from my fourth-grade class what those are called …

I hoisted my pack on my shoulders and snapped the belt. My hips bore the brunt of the weight. But when Ron is with me, my pack is always a little lighter. When we’re together, we can share the weight.

Grief is heavy, too. As I walked I carried that inside my body. We climbed from 9,000 feet elevation to almost 10,000.

Like my pack weight, Ron also helped carry my grief. He’s a good listener.

Anyway, on our hike, everything was great. Until it wasn’t. Around dinnertime, we got lost. Or as Stacy Boone likes to say, we misplaced ourselves. We had followed a well-beaten path to some waterfalls. But we’d planned to camp at a lake another two miles away. The trail supposedly wrapped around the falls to the other side. But where was it?

RON ROUGH: The first time doing a trail is always a little stressful. ... You just don't know where you're going and unless it's very well-marked everywhere you find places where you're not sure if you're on trail or not.

Ron is good with directions, but even he was confused. He scrambled up a place that looked trodden … but the ground was so steep, he had to kneel and claw the loose dirt with his hands. Definitely not the trail.

Then it started to rain.

Rain in the Rocky Mountains makes challenging slopes even more treacherous. The air turned cold. We were high on the rocks, exposed in the elements. My eyes darted around searching for lightning. The rain became hail and pelted our face and arms.

Suddenly, we heard a smack!

ROUGH: That was a rock falling. [Breathing heavily]

It had tumbled from the top of the waterfall. Okay, it was really time to get moving. But instead of panicking … I retrieved my map and my compass.

I placed the map on the wet ground and anchored it with rock. I spun the dial on my compass and rotated everything, including myself, north.

ROUGH: We are right here.

The waterfalls were directly in front of us … and, according to the map, to the left of the trail. I walked around the map so my body faced south … looking back in the direction we had come from. Ron and I crouched down to read the lines. Black dashes marked the trail. I traced my finger across them, following this paper path backward to our last known point … a campsite. Somewhere between there and the falls we’d missed a turn.

ROUGH: So yeah, we want to go…

I pointed my finger southeast. We both looked up at the same time …

RON: A little to our right.

ROUGH: We want to go right there.

I squinted. An obscure dirt path popped into view among the landscape.

ROUGH: There’s the trail.

It was like the scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Indiana takes the leap of faith and the unseen bridge materializes before his eyes. It had been there all along.

ROUGH: Found it! … Gosh, that was hard.

ROUGH: I got frustrated today. And I cried a little.

RON: [Laughs] Yes, but that's okay. That was a tricky part.

I don’t yet know the timetable of my life … or if I’ll develop dementia. But I’m eager to find out what researchers will uncover about the link between navigation and memory loss. And learning to navigate did help my grief … in profound ways.

Often, when I walk in the wilderness, I think of a verse from the book of Acts: “The God who made the world and everything in it … gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made … mankind to live on the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and dwelling places, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward Him and find Him.”

I believe it.

Christians often talk about our identity in terms of who we are in Christ. But the Acts verse and others like it make me think where we are is important, too. Each one of us stands in this world in a distinct place, one known and given by God. So it only seems to follow that we should know where that is.

In a sense, you can know neither who you are or where you’re going until you know where you are now.

One day, I might not know. But I’ll cross that creek … sort-to-speak … if I come to it. Today, I’m right here … still finding my way around.

SILLARS: Jenny Rough reported and wrote this episode. And I produced it. I’m Les Sillars. Please, don’t forget to follow, rate, and review us on your favorite podcast app. And let us know how we’re doing and what you thought of this episode. We really do want to hear from you. Write to us at editor@wng.org or better yet, record a message and send it to us at our website at wng.org Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.

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