Amy Lu's View

October 22 is the twenty-fifth anniversary of my mom’s death. 

I don’t know what to do with that. 

Obviously, this anniversary stirs up many feelings–simple, yet deep sadness, as well as more complicated emotions. This anniversary may be a time of reflection and reminiscence. (It will definitely be a time for me to keep thinking “Holy Sh*t how has so much time passed and how am I so old?”).

But I don’t just want to feel and think. I want to do something. 

It could have been cool to have a big party to honor my mom, or maybe have a benefit event to raise money for a charity in her name. Cool, but not practical or feasible, at least not now (maybe I’ll come up with something like that next year when her 90th birthday rolls around–a birthday feels like a good time for a celebration). 

So I’m giving myself a bit of a challenge…(drumroll)…The 25 Miles for 25 Years Hiking Challenge! I am going to try to hike 25 miles in state parks between October 17 and October 22. I even realized that I could set up a little fundraiser for Save the Children using Go Fund Me: https://gofund.me/808a2b021. Save the Children seems like a good choice as children were certainly important to my mom, a teacher for over 40 years. (I also sent donations to them that we received from people when she died). 

Ideally, I would do the hiking on two consecutive days, with one of them being October 22, but weather and my schedule just didn’t align for that. Hopefully, I’ll do the hiking on October 17 and October 20, but stretching it out to the 22nd gives me some wiggle room. 

Why hiking? There isn’t a direct connection between hiking and my mom (in fact it’s hard to think of something further down on my mom’s lists of things to do) but it is something that I like to do that I can quantify. I can’t really envision 25 other things that I can do in a short frame, or that I could document. 

I’m giving myself lots of leeway for what I count as hiking and how I track it. Ideally these will be miles on different trails and at least some of the hiking will be moderately challenging…but I may end up walking an easy trail a couple of times, and/or counting mileage I wrack up on my multiple trips to the bathroom. I did consider using a special hiking app like AllTrails to document my hikes, but I think I’m going to just stick with my Garmin watch and my best guess because I don’t want to drain my phone battery by having too many apps running at once. 

I think my biggest challenges in meeting my hiking goals will just to be getting my food provisions assembled and ready and deciding what to wear–and these are concerns my mom could definitely relate to!