We were lucky to catch up with Niki DiGaetano recently and have shared our conversation below.

Niki, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

Two years ago, I was shocked when my partner in a half-a-decade-long relationship asked if we could “take a break.” Since we were living together at the time, this break made me effectively and instantly homeless. So, I decided to spend that summer hiking 900 miles along the northern half of the Appalachian Trail, even though trekking over mountains is not, I was told, something one does in the wake of a fresh “break” with a long-term partner.  It was a huge risk for me, since I worried I wouldn’t be here if my partner changed his mind, and I worried for the state of my job. But really, I was scared to put a toe outside of my comfort zone, even when I knew that comfort zone was actively making me miserable. I’ll share more about my hike later in our interview.

Even the choice to put my life on pause for the three months of my hike wasn’t as scary as the choices I made once I returned. After trying and failing to reassimilate into my old pre-Trail life, I decided instead to move to the mountains of Utah, uprooting – once again – everything in the process.

My partner and I had been trying to repair our relationship, but for a number of reasons, it wasn’t working. This was partially due to him hurrying me to  “get over ” the (many, unnamed) things he had done, including asking for the break (pppshh, thank you, next). Still, I felt like a failure: failing at rejoining society after living in the woods; failing at my grad school work, which I was halfheartedly plodding through; failing with my depleted finances that refused to replenish no matter how much I saved.

Deep down, I knew why I felt like a failure: because I was trying to force myself back into a life that I had outgrown. I had spent three months living in pure freedom, surrounded by the most natural beauty I had ever seen. Out there, I reconnected with a sense of self that I had unknowingly and long-ago buried. Yet here I was, back in the concrete jungle of Baltimore, trying to salvage a dead relationship and make myself like this city that I had hated from the moment I moved here for my partner. So I let myself explore a dream I had buried since I was a teenager: the desire to move out west among the mountains. Since my hike, that urge to chase mountains had only grown stronger. I knew this was my next move. I knew I wanted this the moment I dared to admit it was a possibility.

It didn’t make sense on paper. I had built a life – albeit, a tiny one – here in Maryland. My partner was still here. My friends and routines were here. And I was about to throw it all away and start over again. For the first time, maybe ever, my choice was not influenced by the job I had. It was not influenced by someone else’s life goals or dreams. It was not even influenced by whether or not this was a good idea, or one that would advance my career in some way. Instead, it was based purely, wholly, on happiness.

So I did the damn thing. I severed the relationship with my partner. I signed a lease on a place in Utah, sight unseen. I spent thousands of dollars I didn’t have so I could simultaneously put in the deposit for my new apartment while buying out the lease on my current apartment. And I packed everything I could into my little car and drove for three days across the country. I took a risk on a new and beautiful relationship that reminds me every day what real love looks like.

I was scared to death of doing any of it. I second-guessed myself hundreds of times in the process. I worried that I would never find love again. I worried that I was going broke and I’d never make the money back. I worried I was being rash. I was simply worried.

In the end, all these risks have paid off. Of course, the story isn’t over, and I am still ever changing and growing. But it’s been a wild, incredible ride, and none of it would have happened if I hadn’t taken the leap.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am a death doula and writer based in the Salt Lake City area. I founded Numbered Days, an organization that offers resources on living, dying, and backpacking through the woods. After my long section hike on the Appalachian Trail, I moved across the country to chase mountains and to lean deep into this thing called Life – for me, this includes the hiking, adventuring, and climbing that Utah is known for. As a death doula, which is a non-medical helper at the end of life, I provide death work services, including logistical preparations such as paperwork and legacy planning, or merely a space to talk through all things death and dying. As for my writing, my work focuses on the complex interplay of both life and death, and how we might use a study of our dying to better inform our living. To further my education in death work and to prepare for an eventual career shift, I am halfway through my master’s program in hospice chaplaincy where I remotely attend Loyola University Chicago.

It kind of staggers me to re-read that paragraph. A couple of years ago, nothing in that description would have been remotely true; I never would have dared to dream of any of it, let alone embrace titles such as death doula, founder, or aspiring chaplain.

When I graduated college in 2018, I did the sensible, functional grown up thing: I secured a job in my major of graphic design, signed a lease on my first apartment, and started “adulting.” But about a year in, I was miserable. I had rushed through my life, never really stopping to slow down, all in the pursuit of “the next goal:” first, that goal was to graduate high school. Then college. Then getting a job. Then moving out…yaddy yaddy, you know how this goes. Once I did all that, I couldn’t shake the questions, “is this it? Is this the sum of my life? A 9-5 every day until I die? Why am I on autopilot? Why do I feel adrift and empty after achieving everything I worked so hard for? Shouldn’t I be happy?”

Despite being in the midst of these existential woes, I began volunteering through BAYADA Hospice to see if working with the dying felt aligned for me. This is when I discovered the burgeoning field of death doulas; so, in addition to my volunteer hours, I enrolled in a death doula training program with the University of Vermont College of Medicine. And I found out that I loved it.

My studies of death and dying – as a doula and through my chaplaincy program – have revealed how intertwined dying is with living. Mostly, this is because medical scenarios force us to grapple with the things we deem – or don’t deem – important. What makes a life joyful when a terrible diagnosis strips us of the ability to enjoy things we may no longer be able to partake in? How can we live – and flourish – inside such circumstances? Must we only answer these questions in the face of crisis? Why not now? These questions come into stark focus, whether or not you are ready. Thus, I seek to study death with a focus on life: how can we use the inevitable tragedy of mortality as a way to propel ourselves forward? As a way to relish in our existence? As a way to understand that our days are precious because they are numbered, and to live accordingly? What does this sort of living look like?

My work is informed by the perspective of what I have coined, “mortality philosophy,” or, the concept that contemplating our finitude helps sharpen our focus on the present day, honing our appreciation for the mundane and the now. To supplement this concept, I draw from my experience in backpacking by utilizing hiking as a metaphor for life: slow down, be grateful, AND strive towards your next big thing.

I came upon this idea of using backpacking as a metaphor while on my Appalachian Trail hike. Out there, I learned about all the things one learns when on a long-distance hike: resilience, bravery, and embracing the suck. But what really stuck with me was the profound gift of truly living in a moment. Not only that, but learning to live presently while making progress towards a goal. In this case, that goal was the end of my hike. It was possible to do both – a previously foreign concept.

Now, I’m writing a book about it all. And I do mean IT ALL: living, dying, and my hike on the Trail. I write about the liberating power to choose yourself, even when it makes no sense on paper. I write about struggling and thriving as a 20-something. I write about the subsequent lessons I learned and how I hope you can learn them too. In between working on my book, I publish pieces to my newsletter, Full of Life, which contains musings on existential dread and the nitty gritty of being alive.

Is there a mission driving your creative journey?

Absolutely. I see so many people in my age-range who feel defeated and hopeless by the grind of living. Depression rates and a pervading sense of feeling dissatisfied with life are through the roof. This, in spite of living in an age that supposedly uplifts self-care and mental health. Something is missing, and I think it’s balance. People are either too focused on “living in flow” and maintaining self-care that they aren’t pursuing what lights them on fire, or they’re doing the opposite, where they’re engrossed in hustle culture and can’t or don’t know how to slow down and enjoy the journey of the goal.

On the other hand, we live in a death-phobic society. It wasn’t always this way. Death used to be a part of every day life: higher mortality rates meant people witnessed dying more frequently and more closely. Preparation of bodies used to be done in the home, by the families, instead of whisked off to the sterility of a funeral home. So now when we as a culture brush against death, it’s for the first time and we are unprepared with how to deal with the mental, logistical, and emotional toll of someone’s dying.

These problems, existing at seemingly opposite ends of a spectrum, are what drive Numbered Days, and everything I offer. It is the force behind my book, the reason I’m pouring my soul into my writing. I want others to know it doesn’t have to be like this. I want to lend my voice in the growing movement to change the landscape of how we talk about dying. I want to offer my thoughts and experience to the ways in which we are attempting to reshape mental health, especially for 20 and 30 somethings. Above all, I want everyone to know that things can change, because we can change.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

On my first day on the Trail, an old knee injury flared up. I had only hiked about ten miles, but by the time I limped into a hostel that night, I could barely bend it without searing pain. I thought, I am so utterly screwed. How could I have broken myself on day one of a hike that was supposed to last several months? How could I have told everyone I was going to do this, paused my job, paused my chance to patch up my tattered relationship, only for this to happen?

I hoped I was overreacing. I hoped I’d wake up the next morning pain-free and with full mobility restored; my knee simply needed a little rest, that was all. Of course, that wasn’t the case.

The knee hurt just as much the next day. I still couldn’t walk without a pronounced limp. I spent the next day or two growing tired of providing the same explanation of my plight to the hostel employees and the many thru-hikers who came and went – all while I couldn’t follow them. During those days, my motivation steeply tanked, along with my mental health. Being cooped up in the hostel felt like a strange, personal purgatory: I wasn’t on my way, embarking on my hike, but I wasn’t home either. I was neither. I was stagnant. I was really, really stuck.

To keep my sanity, I thought back to the circumstances that led me to the Trail in the first place. I remembered the words, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on,” that were quoted by Paul Kalanithi in his wrenching memoir, “When Breath Becomes Air.” While, unlike Paul, I was not facing down a cancer diagnosis, that phrase rang through my mind in the days and weeks following the collapse of my five-year relationship and, along with it, the neat and tidy life I had so carefully planned out. What I ended up with instead were chaos and homelessness, my partner remaining in our shared apartment while I left him to ponder whether our “break” would be permanent.

While I waited, I spent the next few weeks couchsurfing with friends and sleeping on the office floor, and simultaneously trying to work up the guts to set off on this hike, something I had long dreamed of doing, but now that the opportunity was here, I was scared as hell.

As my will to continue on with my hike grew lesser by the day, I reminded myself, “If you survived everything that brought you here, then you can make it through this too.”

And so, I did. I found a massage therapist in the area who came to the hostel to work on and evaluate my knee. To my relief, she didn’t think it was a knee injury, just a giant ball of tightness in my quad which was manifesting itself in my knee. She handed me a tennis ball and sternly instructed me to strip the muscles of my quad several times a day to release the tension. And it worked. I was overjoyed when I noticed my limp becoming less obvious and the range of motion returning.

I had spent three days stuck in the hostel at this point. When a small group of thru-hikers who I grew to admire during their stay announced they were leaving the next day, I said I would be leaving with them.

On my last night, I spoke with a former thru-hiker-turned-sort-of-hostel-employee who adamantly insisted I should not attempt to hike out in the morning. He worried that my leg was unstable, and that I would get stuck out on Trail with no plan and no way to get back out.

Though his words – and increasingly hostile tone – scared me, I already knew he was being overly cautious. The Appalachian Trail crosses more than 500 public roads, some of which are overpasses over major highways. This meant that in any given hiking day, there would be several such crossings. Even if I happened to be on a more remote stretch with no crossings, this is an insanely popular footpath, full of thru-hikers, section hikers, and day hikers. In other words, me choosing to hike on was in no way a danger to my health.

But at the time, being so untested on the trail, combined with feeling raw and uncertain of myself and my capabilities in the wake of my life falling apart, I was susceptible to his words. I felt them trying to take root, but I eventually told him I would be proceeding with my plan and departing anyway.

The next morning, as I was preparing to leave, a different hiker who happened to be a former medic in the Marines, showed me how to wrap my knee with KT Tape for extra support. I still remember his smile and confidence as he told me, “Take it easy. Take it slow, and I’ll see you in Maine.”
I think back to that moment in the hostel’s living room with him. I think back to my confrontation with the hiker who said I would never make it out of Maryland. And I think back to my relationship’s implosion and all that it lead me to. And I am deeply, amazingly grateful for all of it.

Contact Info:

• Website: nikielle.substack.com
• Instagram: @nikielle.writing
• Other: Death work: numbered-days.com Death work instagram: @numbered_days_education