After finalizing her divorce from Paul, Cheryl decides to do something dangerous, new, and unthinkable: she wants to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave desert to Oregon, hoping to confront the mistakes and transgressions of the past several years and achieve some measure of peace, healing, and redemption along the way.Ĭheryl prepacks several care packages herself containing money, supplies, and guidebooks for different parts of the trail and leaves them with her friend Lisa in Portland, asking her to mail them out as Cheryl makes her way along the trail. Cheryl’s best friend Lisa and Paul try desperately to intervene, but it isn’t until Cheryl realizes she is pregnant with Joe’s child that she is able to shake herself from the depths of her self-destructive new life. There, Cheryl falls in with a man named Joe-a heroin addict who soon gets Cheryl hooked, too. Cheryl pinballs around the country with Paul after he drops out of a graduate program in New York, eventually deciding to stay in Portland while Paul returns to Minnesota for a job. Over the next several years, Cheryl struggles to keep her life together in the face of her overwhelming grief, her ever-distant family’s apathy towards the prospect of staying united, and her crumbling marriage to her loving husband Paul. By the time they return to the hospital in the morning, Bobbi is gone, and Cheryl feels an animalistic grief take over her. One night, as Bobbi’s condition worsens steeply, Cheryl leaves the hospital to track Leif down and bring him in to say goodbye. Karen visits only once, but Leif remains difficult to get a hold of. Though they love their mother, they cannot bear to see her in such a state.
Throughout Bobbi’s decline, Cheryl tries time and time again to get her siblings Karen and Leif to come visit the hospital. Cheryl and her stepfather Eddie stay by Bobbi’s side through her illness-though her doctor has given her a year to live, she makes it only thirty-four days after her diagnosis. A nature-loving non-smoker who has raised her children in the rural Northwoods of Minnesota, Cheryl’s mother’s illness is a sharp blow to the rest of her family. In March of 1991, Cheryl Strayed’s life is forever fractured when her beloved mother Bobbi is diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer at only forty-five years old.
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