She sat with her back straight and the silence of a body without breath, her eyes in the grip of something beyond my perception. If I hadn't just seen her waking from her daily sleep, I might have thought she was an oddly placed statue.
As I watched, my vision faltered - the light faded and I had the salty sting of tears in my eyes. I never expected to identify so deeply with a wild animal, but Faulu, one of the leopards living in the Masai Mara, had moved me: her mother had died when she was young. And so did mine.
That - the death of my stoic, strong and courageous mother when I was 31 years old and she was only 58 - is how I got here. Last year, after an excruciating eight months of hospital appointments, scans, operations, A&E visits, feeding tubes and daily medication regimes, she died at the calloused hands of cancer. She was too young, and so was I.
I should have been devastated, and in many ways I was. My best friend of 31 years was no longer there. The woman who dedicated her life to making mine as comfortable and easy as it has been was taken from me well before her time. I cried, of course I cried. But then I didn't. It wasn't long after her death that life got in the way. That deep-seated sadness that consumed you in the early days was bottled up and put aside, and I just carried on - just like she always did, no matter what.
However, I couldn't help but worry that I was letting it fester for too long. Letting it ferment into something much stronger that would eventually burst out of the bottle, throwing me and everyone around me into some kind of powerful chaos. I was frustrated that I couldn't cry anymore; my resolve - like hers - was steadfast. Or at least that's what I thought until I found myself ugly sobbing in a car park in the Brecon Beacons.
We had been there together for just over a year before she died. It had rained incessantly and we sheltered in my borrowed camper for three days with Chinese food and two extremely soaked dogs. It was a pretty miserable weekend overall, but she always managed to make it look sunny.
The story continues
When I passed through again, just a few months after her death, seeing those same rolling hills in a world where she no longer existed caused a massive wave of destruction so powerful that it knocked me off the road. I started crying so hard I couldn't see, so I stopped at a lookout point and let the tears flow as thick and fast as the Welsh rain we'd experienced in 2021.
Traveling - or rather, traveling without my mother - seemed to be my gateway to grief. I felt it again on the shores of Ullswater, two years after we had been to the Lakes together, and again in Bournemouth. That had been our last trip, just six weeks before she died. She couldn't eat or drink as she was being fed through a tube at the time, but she still managed to wander to the beach for an evening walk with the dog in the setting sun.
The resilience she fostered was passed on to me, but it felt like both a blessing and a curse. I wanted to fall apart every now and then, so returning to the places where we made our best memories felt like the only thing that could help. And so I went to East Africa. While most people travel to escape their grief, I raced towards mine in an A380.
They talk about how people "fight" cancer, but in reality it wasn't my mother who started the battle. It was the doctors who came with their weapons; her body was merely the battleground for their clinical conflict. They had won the first time, but the second advance was too powerful. Their forces - the radiotherapy, the chemo drugs, the harsh steroids that swelled her body - failed her, and the battlefield once again became a disease that claims 460 lives every day.
The Masai Mara is its own kind of battlefield. We, Mom and I, had learned this during our trip to Kenya in 2012, ten years before she died. We traveled from Nairobi to the Mara and then to Tanzania, where we saw some of the rarest and most enchanting wildlife fighting for their lives. We were impressed by the power of the cheetah's sprint and the elephant's slow motion pace.
With my mother reeling from divorce and layoff, and me in my final year of college, it was somewhat of a budget experience. We drove for hours between each park in a minibus with a loving guide called Edward, camped in some bedbug-infested places and shared tiny double rooms in soulless business hotels.
But this time I took the experience to the next level and took a slightly more luxurious route - something my mother would certainly have approved of in her later years, when she could enjoy the increasingly finer things in life.
My first stop was Ishara, a relatively new tented camp located on the banks of the Talek River in the Masai Mara National Reserve. 'Tented' felt like something of an undersell: my riverside suite had a wooden frame and a beautiful terrace, where one day I lay on the lounger and watched elephants making their way across the other side of the water, nibbling through the undergrowth as she strolled.
Ishara is the kind of place that attracts the rich and famous, but the real celebrities there are a little wilder than the average royal family. Faulu, that lonely leopard, was one of them.
My guide, Benard, and the camp's professional photographer, Eric, had told me her story in detail as we watched her explore her battlefield one evening. She was clearly hungry, but without an adult to show her the ways of catching big game, she had relied on a diet of young warthogs left alone in their dens while their parents searched for food.
Later I asked another photographer at the camp, Imara, if she thought the animals were grieving: "They must be," she said. "Sometimes a cheetah carries its dead young in its mouth for days. Elephants also stay with a body after death."
As a two-year-old, Faulu should have hunted with a little more ambition-a gazelle or a baboon, perhaps-but perhaps her grief had hindered her progress. She was stuck in a cycle of taking the easy way out. After a few days in Ishara, I realized that I was in the same circle, but it had started a long time ago.
My grief, I discovered, went far beyond my mother's second cancer diagnosis. For nearly four years, I mourned the failure of my last relationship, the deaths of my uncle and my beloved dog Milo, and the career I had built that had been destroyed by the pandemic. I had been piling on grief since 2020, and only now could I see that I had made my world smaller to cope, traveling less and going to more familiar places, and cutting myself off from new relationships.
In Ishara, and later in Asanja Ruaha in Tanzania, I was relieved to rediscover my sense of adventure. When Mom died, I promised to make all decisions in her honor: "What would Helen do?" became the mantra I lived by. Thanks to her I rediscovered my curiosity and courage. I said yes to ridiculous things like sleeping in the open in the middle of the jungle on Ishara's Star Bed, which was 10 feet above the ground, surrounded by trees and growling hippos.
In the Ruaha National Park, Asanja's naturalist, Prosper, took me on a walking safari straight from our camp, which I agreed to in the full knowledge that a leopard had walked past our lodge the night before and that a pride of lions had invaded the area claimed as their territory. "Don't worry, we're taking a Maasai with us," he said, as if the presence of Rafael and his modest knife would deter all powerful predators.
I had come to this East African wilderness to rub salt into the wounds of my grief, and there was an ever-present sting of sadness as I looked at the changing landscapes. But I also spent ten days finding and slowly starting to fix parts of me that I didn't know were broken.
It was the kind of trip that would most commonly be described as "once in a lifetime" - I got to watch the politics play out between lion prides, and we found wild dogs in Ruaha almost as soon as we pulled away from the airstrip. When I came in 2012, it was truly a once in a lifetime experience for my mother. She was never allowed to return. But in her spirit, and in the spirit of "what would Helen do?", I will continue to return to all the places she cannot go.
Essentials
Lottie was a guest of Ishara, Asanja Ruaha and Hemingways.
Ishara (00 254 011 535 2071) offers all-inclusive accommodation in the Masai Mara from £965 pp per night; this includes private use of guides and game drive vehicles, access to the photography studio and equipment, tuition from on-site professional photographers, all meals and most drinks, bush breakfast and sunset excursions, as well as transfers to/from Ol Kiombo airstrip.
Asanja Ruaha (0141 628 7121; asanjaafrica.com) offers accommodation in Ruaha National Park, Tanzania, from £600 per night on a double-sharing basis; including breakfast, lunch and dinner. Excluding game drives and other excursions.
For stopovers in the capital, Hemingways Nairobi and Hemingways Eden Residence (00 254 (0) 711 032 000) have double rooms including breakfast from £664 and £507 respectively.
Kenya Airways offers flights from London to Nairobi from £672 return and flights between Nairobi and Dar es Salaam from £248.
