Up to the moment I lost McKale, I had lived my life as a liar. I don’t say that just because I was in advertising. (Though that qualifies me as a professional liar.) Ironically, I was annoyingly honest in unimportant matters. For example, I once went inside a McDonald’s to return a dime when the gal at the drive-in window gave me too much change back. But I deceived myself about the things of greatest consequence. I told myself that McKale and I would be together until we were old and gray—that we were somehow guaranteed a certain amount of life before our time expired, like cartons of milk. Perhaps a certain amount of self-deception is necessary to get one through the day. But whatever we tell ourselves, it doesn’t change the truth: our lives are built on foundations of sand.

For those of you just joining my journey, my childhood sweetheart, my wife, McKale, broke her back in a horseback riding accident, paralyzing her from the waist down. Four weeks later she died of complications from her accident. During her last days, while I was caring for her, my business was stolen by my partner, Kyle Craig, and my financial world collapsed, leading to the foreclosure of my home and repossession of my cars.

With my wife, business, house, and cars gone, I contemplated taking my life. Instead, I packed a few things, said good-bye to Seattle, and started my walk to the farthest walkable distance on my map: Key West, Florida.

I suppose if I were completely honest with myself (which I’ve already established I’m not), I’d have to admit that I’m not really walking to Florida. Key West is as foreign to me as any of the towns I’ve walked through on the way. I’m walking to find what life may hold. I’m looking for hope. Hope that life might still be worth living, and hope for the grace to accept what I must live without.

Perhaps that’s true of all of us. I’m certainly not alone in my quest to find that grace. There are others I have met on my journey. Like the elderly Polish man in Mitchell, South Dakota, who took me in; a young mother I stayed with in Sidney, Iowa; the old man I met in Hannibal roaming graveyards in search of his wife; and the woman I met as I walked out of my hotel in Custer, South Dakota. This is their story too.

Again, welcome to my walk.

Chapter One

C H A P T E R

One

One can never know what

a new road will bring.

Alan Christoffersen’s diary