To Travel Hopefully

journal of a death not foretold

Plot

When Christopher Rush's wife died suddenly of cancer, leaving him with two young children, his world fell apart. He not only stopped writing, he also lost faith in everything that had informed his existence: literature, the arts, his role as teacher, his love of nature, the society of friends. Nothing could cure his almost suicidal depression. At last he decided to try to reclaim his sanity in the least expected of ways. A confirmed non-traveller, he went to France, bought a donkey and disappeared into the mountains of the Cevennes. Like a fellow Scot, Robert Louis Stevenson, who had made the same journey over a century before, he hoped to find a new reason to live. To Travel Hopefully is a memoir of grief and recovery, expressed in an intensely private but universal language, which records a compelling journey of the spirit from defeat to victory. Anyone who has had to confront bereavement will find in these pages an understanding, experience and expression of the human predicament which go far beyond mere sympathy.