Walking

By Kelsey Leach

Issue Issue 51 • Spring 2025 • Nonfiction

This essay won third place in the Spring 2025 Contest Issue judged by Jenn Shapland, who wrote: “The author of ‘Walking’ reflects on a small, private moment of grappling with their father’s dementia, hewing closely to their own experience and inquiry without appropriating someone else’s story. Weaving a lyrical description of a hike with a more clinical account of their father’s later escape from a care facility, the author asks questions about freedom and what makes a relationship whole and alive, and what parts of a person are necessary to be present for that connection. I found it quite moving.”

“The first thing to do is to lift your foot. Breathe in. Put your foot down in front of you, first your heel, then your toes. Breathe out.” – Thich Nhat Hanh

At one time, when the insipid creeping of the disease was still in its middling phase, my sister and I would spend every weekend trying to find activities for Dad to do. He was still living independently but no longer working. There were only so many times he could fill the birdfeeder and sweep the porch, and his ever-changing range of ability exhausted us. As soon as we thought we had found something that would keep him engaged, active, and blessedly distracted from his own disablement, we’d see him falter, and within a month we’d have to find something else.

In early summer, he was still able to bike and led us on a short ride into town with so much zeal and confidence we could barely keep up. But by early fall, he struggled to buckle his helmet and waited for us to take the lead. A month or two after that, the weather forced us to opt for walks instead. The bike sat in the garage, gathering dust after a winter from which it would never emerge.

In the spring, desperate to get him outside, and with biking no longer an option, I found a small local mountain peak, a family-friendly hike that we could summit in less than an hour. If Dad was able to. We simply never knew. I diligently checked his footwear, making sure it was sturdy and comfortable. Packed snacks, water, and layers. I made sure he had his sunglasses and made sure he had them again when he put them down right before we left.

It seems the experience of caring for a parent with an illness is evocative of a parent’s experience caring for a child, one phase of life reflecting the other across a span of time, like the decades-long development of a photograph from a negative.

Being a caretaker is beauty and weight and frustration, tenderness and trepidation, internal screaming and eternal patience. It is tiring, both the act of giving and the maddening knowledge that no matter how much you give, it will never, ever be enough to escape the thing you fear the most. Then again, perhaps you could say that about any kind of love.

And so, sunglasses and water bottles in tow, we arrived at the base of a small mountain on the first beautiful day of spring. The hike included some small areas of rocky outcroppings that required the briefest scramble. Dad and I shed our layers, and the dappled, warm sunlight fell on our skin, tired and pale from a long winter. I was glad for the sun, glad for my dad to be out of his armchair, glad for the hikers who didn’t give him strange looks as he made awkward small talk with them along the way. I was glad that I was still hiking some semblance of a mountain, still walking alongside some semblance of my dad. Still, as in, we had not been beaten yet.

At the top, a well-trod path. Dad suddenly felt confident enough to lead; the path was flat and easy to follow around the top of the summit. I let him, nodding him onward if he looked back to ask which way (which he did, frequently, though there was only ever one way).

In about two years, he would carry the same confidence while walking out of his supervised senior living facility, Spring Haven, in the middle of a hot summer day, the alarmed door clicking shut behind him, the caretakers oblivious for at least another hour or two, by which point, his whereabouts would be entirely unknown.

We stopped in front of the best view from the summit. The wind, more assertive now across the mountain’s exposed, rocky skull, blew my hair into my face right as we snapped a photo. We both laughed. We took another, and then one more. I always wanted one more, bracing myself for the day when “more” would not be an option.

On the way back down the mountain, we stopped to sit on some flat boulders to eat a snack. We caught our breath and noticed the silence. I looked around me in all directions–not a soul to be seen. The forest enveloped us in green, curling toward us from all sides with soft, overlapping slopes of fronds and vines; the sun streamed through the leaf cover and illuminated mounds of ferns bowing gently in the underbrush. The green, green space cupped us in its hand, pressing around us so close and mossy I could almost hear its hum.

Later, we would discover what he was carrying when he ran away from Spring Haven. In his bag–a souvenir canvas tote of mine from an underpaid internship with Penguin Publishing circa 2009 which read, “I’d rather be reading,” (an activity he could no longer do)–he carried the following: a jumble of underwear, a t-shirt, a cookie from several days prior (crumbling in its white, cafeteria-issued paper sleeve), two phone chargers (his phone was dead; we had called him dozens, if not hundreds, of times), his stress ball, and three pairs of socks (none of which he was wearing on his brutally blistered feet). I uncovered all of this silently, sifting through the contents of the chaotic bundle in his temporary room in the ER after my sister had motioned to me with her eyes to look in the bag.

I pulled two farmer’s market peaches from my bag, washed and wrapped in paper towels, and handed one to Dad. We each took a bite. They were so good. The best.

My father was finally located after he attempted to get into a woman’s car at a stop light and she called the police out of fear. Severely dehydrated, lost, and dazed from the eighty-degree heat, he had a blister on the bottom of his foot the size of a peach. It’s not a precise measurement, but near enough. When I finally got to see him in the hospital, I cradled his foot lightly in my hands, the strange, swollen bubble filling my palm.

The light in the forest was technicolor, verdant and golden, with as many subtle hues of shadow and life and light as any forest in a fantasy. I thought: if I leave him here, he’ll be okay. The light and the silence of this forest will keep him safe. I’ll know where he is; I’ll visit him. He won’t be sick, then. Not in the forest.

He had finished his peach and was fidgeting with the pit, spinning it around between his fingers. He wrapped it in the paper towel and made a motion to throw it.

“No, wait!” I said, caught off guard by his sudden instinct to litter.

He turned to me, bewildered. “Why?” His face expressed earnest surprise, and I tried to hide my own.

He had always been tidy, so clean, so conscientious and concerned about trash, recycling, and the proper place of things. This wasn’t the proper place of things.

“It’s just better to pack out what we brought in,” I explained, looking back to the green.

He spun the pit in his hand. “Why?” he said again.

I caught my breath. I didn’t want him to be asking these questions that laid everything bare. He was still sick, even if he was with me on this mountain, and neither fact could cancel the other out. Well, one would, eventually.

“It’s just better for the forest if we throw it away at home,” I said, and held out a plastic bag for his pit.

“Hm,” he muttered, then looked around as if working out a puzzle. Then he made a motion to toss it again, our conversation from seconds prior gone from his head.

“Here, Dad, you can put it in here,” I interjected, stopping him before he launched it into the beyond between two birch trees.

“Okay,” he shrugged, and dropped it in the bag. The forest breathed a sigh of relief, the little ferns drooping.

The episode was his second dementia-addled elopement—the psychiatric term for running away. He had been lost for approximately 8 hours and walked for 16 miles. I lived in Somerville, Massachusetts, about 74 miles away, and he had been moving in the direction of a town called Somersworth, New Hampshire. My aunt thought he was trying to find me. Several hours prior, when my sister had called, her voice thin with panic, to tell me he was missing, I thought: if he were dead, we would know. I could not fathom that we lived in a reality where a person who brought you into this world could disappear from it without telling you, as if my father hadn’t been leaving without telling us for many years now.

We heard voices, then, and some hikers appeared on the path down the hill. The green hush receded from the moment like forgotten song lyrics. I tried to remember how it went the whole way back. Dad bobbed along in front of me and turned every so often to ask the way (down, straight down). But no matter how hard I tried, I could no longer conjure it.

Kelsey Leach

Kelsey Leach is a writer and creative director based in Pittsburgh, PA. She earned her MFA from Chatham University, where she was the recipient of the Margaret Whitford Fellowship from 2015-2016. Her creative work has appeared online in apt and The Common. Read more at https://kleach.carrd.co.

Michael C. Roberts

Michael C. Roberts is a mostly retired pediatric psychologist and professor. After publishing professional articles, chapters, and books, he now seeks to be differently creative. He painted rocks during the pandemic and dropped them around the neighborhood as inspiration and motivation. Devoid of artistry, they may not have been very inspirational. He turned back to photography and creative writing. His images and written works have been published in literary magazines and on journal covers. A photographic book with essays is available on Amazon: “Imaging the World with Plastic Cameras: Diana and Holga.”