On a cold Saturday morning, about 50 people showed up at Hennops Hiking Trail for our first Keep Hope Alive Wellness Walk. They came wrapped in jackets, holding flasks of coffee, some still half asleep. By the end of the morning, something had shifted in the group that none of us could have planned for on paper.
The scenery did some of the work for us. People kept stopping to take in the hills, the water, the quiet. But it was the walking itself, side by side for 5km, that opened people up. Conversations started easily out there in a way they rarely do in a room with chairs in a circle. People shared pieces of their stories as they moved, without the pressure of having to perform grief or explain themselves fully.
Many of our walkers admitted the route was harder than they expected. More than one person said they simply had to keep telling themselves to hold on until the end, to keep hope alive that they would make it. That sentence, repeated by different people in different ways, said everything about what this walk was really about. Grief asks the same thing of us. You do not always know how you will get through the day, you just keep going because there is something on the other side worth reaching.
There was a bridge along the route that tested a few of our walkers, particularly one woman who struggled with a fear of heights. What happened next stayed with everyone who saw it. Other walkers, some of them strangers to her an hour earlier, slowed down, stood close, and walked her across. No one was asked to do this. It simply happened, because that is what community does when it is working the way it should.
Our founder, Mme Snoekie, spoke about her own relationship with fear. For much of her life, fear ran the show. It decided what she did and what she avoided. That changed the moment she watched her husband take his last breath. In that instant, the things she used to be afraid of stopped mattering in the same way. She has not lived the same since.
We started Keep Hope Alive because grief should not be carried in isolation. This walk reminded us why that matters. Healing rarely looks like a straight road. Sometimes it looks like 5km of uneven ground, a stranger’s hand at a bridge, and a group of people who decided, together, to keep going.
If you are walking through your own season of loss, we want you to know you do not have to do it alone.
