Courage, Dear Heart: Walking the Fault Lines of Life.
We don't talk enough about the fear that comes after the fall, Gran, or the quiet courage it takes to rise again.
Dear Gran,
It's Sunday in Labuan Bajo, and I've come back here to breathe slower. The sun is already high. Chickens cluck in the alley. Laughter drifts from open windows, wrapped in music and spice. For the first time in months, I feel still enough to remember.
You'd love this chaos, Gran. The way life spills out of doorways here, uncontained and unapologetic.
This morning, I found myself thinking about the earthquake in Lombok on August 5th, 2018. A single violent shift that cracked the ground and, with it, everything I thought I was building. You were still here then, still receiving my letters about this strange new life I was trying to create.
That earthquake didn't just break buildings, Gran. It rearranged my life.
When Everything Shifts
I'd planned to leave Indonesia, come home to England, settle down somewhere quiet with a view of the Cardiff marina. Maybe retrain. Maybe finally belong somewhere you could visit easily.
But my heart wasn't finished here. My Gili island family was still waking each day to tremors and fear. I couldn't walk away from that. You'd understand - you never could turn your back on people who needed you either.
So I didn't. Not immediately.
I did come back to the UK for a while. Three weeks with family, friends, and my best friend's 50th birthday in the Derbyshire hills - the kind of rolling countryside you always loved. We gathered in a rented farmhouse. Old friends, new stories, laughter stitched with grief.
One guest, the cousin of my friend, was living with terminal cancer. Her name was Emma.
She listened as I spoke about the earthquake. I felt like a fraud telling my story beside hers - what was my little crisis compared to what she was facing? But she took in every word like it mattered. Maybe it did.
Maybe it reminded her, reminded all of us, that we're all walking on fault lines, seen or unseen. None of us is immune to endings. You knew that better than anyone, didn't you, Gran?
A Teacher in the Darkness
Emma passed away not long after, on the 11th January 2019. But before she left, she gave us something precious - a poem called Riding the Waves of Cancer. Not a cry, not a farewell, but a call to live. To stop waiting in the cave for the last wave. To feel every single moment - love, joy, pain - fully, deeply, while we're here.
It sounds like something you'd say, Gran. That fierce insistence on living, really living, right up until the end.
Here's what she wrote:
Her final line has stayed with me, Gran: "The journey in the middle is the only part that actually matters."
You lived that truth, didn't you? Right up until your last letter to me in February.
The Wisdom That Changes Everything
That weekend changed me. In quiet ways. I started saying "I love you" to people I'd never said it to before - including you, more often. I sent messages I'd been too proud or scared to write. And I let go of the idea that home was a postcode, a mortgage, or a tidy ending.
Home, it turned out, was wherever I laid my hat. And I'd laid mine in Indonesia.
My return surprised you all. It surprised me. I researched teaching, imagined a neat little life closer to everyone, walks to school with my nieces and nephews. But the universe had other plans - or maybe you did, Gran, nudging me from wherever you were watching.
I didn't get what I thought I wanted. And that turned out to be a blessing.
The Dalai Lama once said, "Not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck." You used to say something similar, in your own way: "What's meant for you won't pass you by."
So I booked the flight. Packed the bag. And said goodbye again, this time for longer. A six-month visa and a quiet knowing that I wouldn't be back for a while.
Since then, I've built a different kind of life. It isn't always steady. It's rarely predictable. But it's rich in the things I used to long for: stillness, connection, and the courage to start again. Again. And again.
What Emma Taught Me About Courage
I wake up most mornings in the mountains and sip coffee on the terrace that overlooks the pig farm. The pigs play in the mud baths. Papaya trees and aloe vera plants grow in my garden, and the dogs constantly cause chaos with the chickens.
I never take it for granted, Gran. Because I know what it means to have the ground pulled out from under you, literally and metaphorically.
And I know that inside all of us is someone we haven't met yet - the version of ourselves who rises quietly and powerfully when everything else falls away. You showed me that version of myself, in your letters, in your steady love, in the way you faced your own endings with such grace.
Emma said it better than I ever could. But if I could add one whisper to her legacy, it would be this: Courage isn't a roar. It's a decision. A choice to keep going, even when the road doesn't look like the one you pictured.
As I sit here in Labuan Bajo again, watching the same chickens cluck in the same alley, I can feel Emma's words settling into my bones alongside yours, Gran. Two teachers who understood that life isn't about avoiding the fault lines - it's about learning to dance on them.
The laughter still drifts from open windows. The spice still perfumes the air. And somewhere in this beautiful chaos, I'm still learning what it means to choose courage over comfort, presence over perfection.
You're still walking beside me now, aren't you? With your quiet strength that carried me through everything for so many years.
Here's to the fault lines and the friends who hold us through them. Here's to laying our hats where our hearts have already settled. And here's to the journey in the middle - the only part that actually matters.
From the quiet of the mountains, walking beside you.