Night Into Light E-Book

Diane Esguerra

• Herausgeber: Eye Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 343

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

A deeply personal memoir about recovering from bereavement, by a professional therapist and grief counsellor A mother's journey of grief and transformation Can a parent ever survive the death of a daughter or son? Drowning in grief and with her life in pieces, psychotherapist Diane Esguerra asks herself this question as she sets off for Peru to scatter the ashes of Sacha, her only child, at the sacred Inca citadel Machu Picchu, a place he loved. Every step of the journey triggers memories of the young man's troubled life of abuse and addiction. As Diane makes connections with other bereaved people in the unlikeliest of settings, she also has mystical encounters that affirm her Buddhist faith and put her on a path to acceptance and healing. The fragments of her life gradually reassemble – in a more meaningful pattern than before. By turns funny, engaging and moving, this richly coloured account of one mother's physical and spiritual journey shows it's possible not only to survive every parent's worst nightmare, but to experience growth and transformation along the way.

Leseprobe

Praise for Night Into Light

‘An inspiring and uplifting book about finding infinite value in the most intense and painful experience of profound loss’

Sandie Shaw

‘This beautifully written memoir charts Diane’s personal anguish as her son Sacha – once a powerful and vibrant young man – is lost to the full-on white-knuckle ride of heroin addiction. In essence it is a book about finding value in profound loss’

Marina Cantacuzino, author ofForgiveness

‘A heart-wrenching and uplifting story of one woman’s tragedy, transformation and, ultimately, triumph, made all the more powerful because every word is true – and because Diane Esguerra is a very fine writer’

Edward Canfor-Dumas

‘Takes you on a geographical and spiritual journey to a place of healing and ultimately to a place of peace in mind and heart. For anyone going through the grief journey of losing a loved one to addiction, I highly recommend this mother’s story. Ultimately, you will feel uplifted and strengthened by sharing this journey with her’

Elizabeth Burton-Phillips, author of Mum, Can You Lend Me Twenty Quid?

‘Diane Esguerra’s eloquent writing and self-deprecating humour make this a surprisingly rewarding and uplifting read. The journey is a courageous one; so too is her willingness to share raw emotion with her reader and her determination to create both meaning and value out of some truly heart-breaking life experiences’

Therapy Today

DIANE ESGUERRA is a writer and a psychotherapist. She studied English at University College, London, followed by a stint at drama school, and later trained as a psychotherapist at the University of Sussex. For a number of years she worked as a performance artist in Britain, Europe and the United States.

Diane has written for both theatre and television and is the recipient of a Geneva-Europe Television Award and a Time Out Theatre Award. Her books include The Oshun Diaries (Eye Books, 2019) and Buddhism and Loss (Mud Pie Books, 2023). A previous version of the present book was published as Junkie Buddha by Eye Books in 2015.

The founder and director of Greenlight Counselling Consultancy, she lives in Dorset with her husband David and dog Chico.

www.dianeesguerra.com

Published in 2024

by Eye Books Ltd

29A Barrow Street

Much Wenlock

Shropshire

TF13 6EN

www.eye-books.com

ISBN: 9781785633911

Copyright © Diane Esguerra 2024

Diane and Sacha photograph © Ali Zaidi www.alizaidiarts.com

Maps © 2014 mapsofworld.com

A previous version of this book was published as Junkie Buddha by Eye Books in 2015

Cover design by Nell Wood

Typeset in Horley Old Style and Brandon Grotesque

The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

For Sacha

contents

Map

Foreword

Lost Treasures of The World – Why Me?

Señor Ruiz – Finding the Courage

In the Desert – The Fear Factor

The Witches’ Park – Who Can I Trust?

Crystals and Crusties – Extreme Highs

The Skeleton Families – Heroin Hell

Astronaut and Dog – Good Grief

The White City – The Voice Hearers

Staying Afloat – A Carer’s Life

Devils and Dust – Rage

Jesus Dolls – Surviving Christmas

The Sacred Valley – Solstice Solace

Two Hundred Coca Leaves – A Moving Encounter

Gringo Bill’s – Another Mother

In Hot Water – Holocaust Memorial Day

Scattering Sacha – Soulmates Never Die

Empty Rucksack – Free at Last

Back Home – Grief: The Early Years

As Time Goes By – Challenge and Transformation

Photo

Acknowledgements

Related Links

foreword

Have you ever had to face your worst fear? If the answer is ‘yes’, I assume you survived the experience or you wouldn’t be reading this. Was it traumatic? Did it change you? In 2005 I faced my worst fear – or rather my worst fear ambushed me; I had no choice in the matter. My son Sacha, my only child, died. And yes, it was traumatic and it also changed me.

‘Trauma’ has become an overused label to describe the fall-out from a plethora of unwanted events in our lives – from losing a smartphone to being in a serious car crash. I can assure you that the trauma I experienced followed the Cambridge Dictionary definition: ‘severe and lasting emotional shock and pain caused by an extremely upsetting experience’.

At the time I had to face my worst fear I was (and still am) a psychotherapist, but any coping tools I may have acquired up to that point in my training – and, for that matter, in my life – were useless in the face of the ferocious onslaught of this genuinely traumatic event.

What I have come to understand, however, is that worst fears, when realised, can also open up entirely new vistas – if you feel brave enough to look around you. Sure, some of those landscapes are bleak, suffused with pain and despair, but others can prove transformational, illuminating parts of yourself that you never knew existed.

I decided to go on a healing journey. At first this took the shape of a physical journey to another land, but my journey didn’t end there. It segued into a quest to discover how to survive and thrive in my new reality. This journey has given me a deeper understanding of what it means to be truly human. I’m still on it and probably will be for the remainder of my life.

Diane Esguerra

2024

lost treasures of the world

why me?

I never thought it would happen to me. It happened to other mothers – yes, and fathers too. I’d seen them on the evening news, puffy-eyed, bewildered, blinking away tears. The camera zooms in to the photograph of the son as they like to remember him, in his school blazer (eyes still shining then) grinning toothlessly at the school photographer. Or the daughter as a teenager, astride a mountain bike in the Pyrenees, tanned and ponytailed.

I never thought it would happen to me. But in 2005 it did. I discovered my child Sacha, a man now, a man who had never practised yoga, slumped over in child-pose on a beer-stained rug; his alabaster back cold to my touch; a half-empty syringe at his side; daytime television drowned out by the weeping of his dogs and the howling of police sirens.

My future ambushed.

These mothers on television – clutching handkerchiefs or their husbands’ hands – I used to think they put themselves through this ordeal in order to draw the public’s attention to a pressing social issue, start a campaign, establish a foundation to honour his or her memory. But then I understood they do it to avoid waking up in the morning with the feeling that the very heart of their lives has been surgically extracted without anaesthetic. Although they yearn to escape to the realm into which the beloved has made an untimely entry – without their permission – they’re too considerate to inflict this same agony on their living loved ones. So what do they do instead? They search for meaning; for a purpose to rein themselves back from the lurking abyss.

In the weeks that followed Sacha’s death I duly busied myself applying to a charitable trust for funding to set up a project to help teenagers who had been abused in childhood and who would, more than likely, go on to self-harm, harm others or abuse substances. But my burnt-out heart wasn’t really in it. I needed a break from that all-too-familiar world, and it was a relief when the funding didn’t come through.

The void continued to terrorise me. As a Buddhist I believed in the preciousness of life and the concept of ‘turning poison into medicine’: that suffering – however deep – could ultimately prove beneficial. But what value could possibly be created from this?

My daily mantra had become ‘Why me?… Why me?’

‘I’m not a junkie, Mum,’ Sacha used to say. ‘I’m someone with a habit.’

And I’d convinced myself I could help him break that habit. Defeat wasn’t an option I’d allowed myself to consider; too much was at stake.

My son wasn’t the archetypal junkie you see in the movies with hollowed-out, shifty eyes, greasy hair and thieving, nicotine-stained fingers. Yes, he smoked roll-ups, but that was as far as it went. More than he loved heroin, Sacha loved ancient Hispanic history and climbing mountains.

For Christmas, the week before his death, he’d given me a large, glossy, illustrated book called Lost Treasures of the World. I read how the Conquistador Francisco Pizarro captured the Inca emperor Atahualpa in Peru and promised him his freedom if his people were able to fill a ‘ransom room’ full of gold. For months the Incas laboured day and night to bring gold and treasure from all over their empire. But once the ransom room was full, Pizarro killed Atahualpa anyway.

How I empathised with those Incas who, like me, had done everything, everything in their power, to save the person in danger. How cheated they must have felt after his death.

How cheated I felt.

It was, he said, the best Christmas he’d had for years. We had tears in our eyes as Sacha played the blues again on his harmonica. Finally on a decent drugs programme, he’d turned a corner at last, I thought. Then, after some crazy partying on New Year’s Eve, one last fling resulted in what the coroner recorded as ‘accidental death from a heroin overdose’.

And I lost my treasure.

Peru stayed with me, though. Sacha’s ashes sat in a wooden urn – not on the mantelpiece but, out of respect for his shyness, tucked away in a corner of the living room under the voluminous palm tree he’d bought me many Mother’s Days ago. The ashes wanted to be scattered – but where? I already knew. I’d known all along.

For the last few years of his life, all Sacha had wanted was to go back to South America. Brought up in England but half Colombian, he’d travelled the continent extensively and had hiked the Inca Trail before it became a popular gap-year thing. He often recalled the moment when, dead on his feet with hunger and exhaustion, he reached the end of the trail and felt his spirit soar as he watched the sun rise over the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu.

‘One of the coolest moments of my life, Mum. When I’m better I want to see that sunrise again, and I want to take you with me.’

I had the feeling he still did.

But the perilous, futile trail of recovery we’d been limping along together for years had left me depleted and confused. I’d morphed into an auto-pilot-crisis-management zombie with no time to process where and why it had all gone wrong, or head-space to write about it. Some form of reflective, healing journey might be the answer.

But was Peru, with its Conquistadors, Shining Path Maoist guerrillas and heartbreaking poverty a sensible choice? It had never been on my tourist radar. The country was, however, home to that most sacred – and visited – site in Latin America, the site that Sacha most loved. So it would, quite simply, have to be.

Already, it was almost a year since he’d died, but was I brave enough yet to make the journey to Machu Picchu to scatter my son’s ashes? I’d spent the last few years fending off my terror of death; now I was afraid of life. The tectonic plates of my world had imploded. I was in fragments. There was a permanent knot in my stomach – the severed umbilical cord.

All I knew was that I had to go soon. And that I had to go alone.

The funeral parlour was conveniently situated at the end of my road. Lee, the bulbous, balding undertaker who ran this 100-year-old family business, was expecting me. In our dealings to date, he’d shown a concern above and beyond the call of duty. Today there was a silent understanding between us: we both knew that, for me, what was about to take place would be deeply disturbing. Lee showed me into his office and pulled out a chair. I handed over the wooden urn and he left the room.

It’s neither easy nor cheap to take the ashes of your beloved abroad. I’d had to send Sacha’s death and cremation certificates to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London to be signed and stamped, at a cost of twenty pounds each. They kept all the money but returned only the death certificate. After hours of trying to get through to them on the phone, I finally learned that they hadn’t stamped the cremation certificate because it wasn’t signed by the crematorium registrar in person. I had to grit my teeth and return to the crematorium. Once the Foreign and Commonwealth Office had finally stamped and returned the new certificate, I was required to forward both certificates (and another forty pounds) to the Peruvian embassy to be stamped yet again.

That, however, proved to be the easy part. Because my flight would take me via the United States, I also had to contend with US regulations. After spending what seemed like a lifetime trying to get hold of the relevant official in the US embassy in London, I was told I couldn’t take the casket containing the ashes through US security because it had a metal plaque on it; I’d have to take the ashes in an unsealed bag. This was what I had come to the undertaker’s to collect.

Five minutes later, Lee returned, watery-eyed, and apologetically presented me with a nondescript plastic bag containing all that remained of my beautiful son. Had that powerful, vibrant energy that once constituted Sacha really metamorphosed into nothing more than a bag of gritty, grey dust? Even if I were a seasoned agnostic I’d find that hard to believe. Surely, such energy could never die?

Starlings circled overhead as I stumbled back up the road to my house, clutching the plastic bag to my chest, tears splattering the pavement. The postman who had delivered our mail for years propped his bike up against the wall and stared at me curiously. If he only knew that inside the plastic bag were the remains of that friendly young guy who kept a firm hold on those lively German Shepherds of his when he answered the door – drum ’n’ bass blaring out from behind.

Once home, I knelt down on the living room floor. Steeling myself, I transferred the ashes into a hand-embroidered orange silk pouch and placed them inside the small, expensive, black leather rucksack I’d purchased for their transportation.

David, my partner of ten years, was in tears when he dropped me off at the airport.

‘You don’t have to get on that plane, you know. There’s still time.

He was worried I wouldn’t be strong enough to see it through – or worse, that I might not come back.

He looked exhausted. David worked in television news, and had been up all night editing. The last few years had been almost as testing for him as they had for me. Our marriage had been tested too, but it was the third for both of us and from its outset we were determined to make it work. Our Buddhist practice helped. I was grateful to David for never putting me in the position where I had to choose between him and Sacha.

‘Promise you won’t go mental on that motorbike,’ I said, trying to deflect the threat of danger from myself. He nodded unconvincingly. Conscious that grief had made me more selfish, I hugged my husband goodbye and walked away.

On the flight from Gatwick to Atlanta, the stewardess insisted that my precious cargo be placed in the overhead locker. I tried to distract myself by wondering, as we flew over the wilderness of the Arctic, whether Sacha, too, could see the glaciers, the fjords and the intricate patterns of light dancing above Greenland’s ice sheet. He’d had such a love of nature and, for that matter, of life. Strange really, as at birth he’d not wanted to make an appearance and had to be induced. A few weeks after he finally slid out, calmly and contentedly sucking his thumb, the health visitor made me take him to the doctor for a check-up because he almost never cried. I guess he was saving it up for later.

‘Well, maaaam?’ the American immigration official growled. ‘Why are you travelling on your own to Peru?’

His glare remained fixed. To avoid further invasive questioning, I lied and said that my husband would be joining me at Christmas.

‘That all your luggage?’ he asked, pointing at the rucksack.

‘I checked in a suitcase at Gatwick.’

He leafed through my passport.

‘Employed?’

Again, I hesitated. Years earlier, when I worked as a performance artist, I’d been strip-searched and had my hand luggage torn apart at JFK International Airport for no apparent reason other than my unconventional occupation. Anxious that ‘writer’ might arouse suspicion, and not wanting my beloved son’s precious ashes to be callously manhandled, I opted for ‘psychotherapist’ instead. He grunted and let me through. It can be useful, sometimes, having two professions.

For the world’s busiest airport, Atlanta’s cavernous concourse was surprisingly devoid of passengers. As if to compensate, a regiment of television screens blasted out CNN in all directions: a trauma expert was explaining that the victims of Hurricane Katrina were still reeling from shock and would need counselling for years. News footage from the summer showing desperate New Orleanians bobbing up and down in the water, clutching their pets or clinging to the sides of rescue boats, uncomfortably mirrored my own inner landscape.

On the television screen above the red Formica bar, Condoleezza Rice was busy trying to convince the world that the CIA weren’t engaging in torture off US soil. I ordered a large, expensive glass of Pinot Grigio.

Condoleezza was replaced, a few soundbites later, by John Lennon and the announcement that today was the 25th anniversary of his death. Archive footage of John and Yoko came on, accompanied, predictably, by the song ‘Imagine’. I felt a pang of envy for Yoko. She got to share her grief with millions of empathic others, and collective global grieving had helped to keep John’s memory alive. But perhaps she would have preferred her grief to be private and hidden away in a body-bag like mine.

‘I’m sorry, but he has to remain in the bag in the chapel of rest,’ Lee had gently explained before the funeral, handing me a box of tissues. ‘Your boy was a user. It’s Health and Safety who won’t permit it, love, not me.’

I sipped my wine and imagined that ‘my boy’ was perched on the bar stool beside me, complaining, as usual, about American beer and George Bush. I ask him whether Peruvian beer was any better. He raises his glass. ‘Sí Señora, muchísimo!’ He chuckles, and starts to brag about all the really cool pre-Columbian sites he is going to take me to…

A tannoy announced my flight to Lima. ‘Get a grip!’ I ordered myself as I gulped back the wine and headed for my gate. At the security barrier I was instructed to remove my shoes and join a short queue. I placed the rucksack in a tray and watched as a wheelchair-bound octogenarian lady was ordered to vacate her chair, remove her beige sling-backs and hobble through the security door. She was hardly your typical shoe-bomber. My paperwork was in order but my paranoia that they might want to examine the ashes – or, worse still, confiscate and test them for concealed drugs – resurfaced.

I began fighting my own war against terror: the thought of a stranger sifting through the delicate remains of my beloved son made my stomach heave. Fortunately for me, the old lady’s distress distracted the guard monitoring the security screen. He barely glanced at the interior of my rucksack and the ashes made it through.

As the Lima-bound plane took off into the funky gloom of Georgia, the atmosphere started to feel lighter. Spanish was being spoken all around me. Keen to refresh mine, I eavesdropped on conversations, but struggled to keep up. The seat next to me was empty. That’s Sacha’s seat, I thought to myself. I closed my eyes and pictured him sat beside me, his warm arm, with its neat Celtic tattoo and tarnished silver bracelets, nestling against mine.

As we approached the southern hemisphere, a slender magnolia moon appeared above the wing of the plane. Beyond it, a smattering of stars lit up the indigo sky. I remembered Sacha telling me the Incas believed each star was the protector of a particular species of animal or bird, and that, for these mysterious people, the dark shapeless voids which existed between the constellations held more symbolic meaning than the constellations themselves. I pressed my face to the window and examined the night sky. Would I ever be able to find meaning in the dark, shapeless void which had engulfed my own life? I wanted to get closer to my son on this trip, closer to his world. Wherever and whatever it was now.

We landed in Lima around midnight. As the queue inched its way towards immigration I chatted with a woman from Alabama who was on my flight. She’d been working for the Internal Revenue Service (the US tax department) for more than fifteen years, she told me. Dressed from head to toe in denim with a badge-strewn straw hat pulled tightly over her chilli-red hair, she was, she said, intending to spend the night in the airport before taking an early morning flight to Iquitos. There she would meet up with a group of like-minded travellers and continue for several more hours by bus and boat deep into the Amazon jungle for a week-long inner journey where they would ingest ayahuasca at a shamanic retreat.

Ayahuasca was, she explained, a concoction made from hallucinogenic Amazonian plants. She hoped it would purge her of a toxic relationship from which she’d recently escaped and revamp her stagnant life.

While admiring her courage, I couldn’t help wondering whether quitting her job and exploring Peru itself might be a better way of achieving the life change she was seeking than this week-long quick fix with, perhaps, a dose of dengue fever thrown in. But I kept my mouth shut. Deep down, I was hoping that Peru would fix me.

Reunited with my suitcase, I found myself in yet another buttock-clenching airport queue. A customs official with an elaborately coiffeured beehive presided over a barrier above which there were two lights. I watched as she scrutinised each passenger then paused for several moments, like a sadistic game-show hostess, before pressing the button to illuminate either the red or the green light. On the other side of the barrier I could see the unfortunate ‘reds’ having their luggage torn apart by guys in military uniform.

It was my turn. Might all that remained of my darling Sacha be pawed, prodded around or even taken away by those stern-faced soldiers? Fear rampaged inside me as I looked her in the eye. She stared back and pressed the green light. Dizzy with relief, I lurched through the barrier. The taxi driver, sent courtesy of my pre-booked hotel, ran over and grabbed my suitcase.

As we sped along El Paseo de la República in the early hours of the morning, Lima was as wide awake as me. As for my skinny young driver – well, he too was clearly adrenaline-fuelled, his driving frenzied and haphazard. Pizarro had daringly constructed his sprawling Ciudad de los Reyes – City of the Kings – on a quake-prone desert. I wound down the window and breathed in the sultry night air; I could smell the Pacific Ocean. Already I sensed that Peru would prove to be a land rich in culture and mystery.

The lively driver chattered incessantly, turning the car around to point out tastefully illuminated palaces, basilicas, fountains and haute cuisine eateries. I admired the mixture of stately colonial and ultra-modern architecture that he pointed out in this impromptu whirlwind tour, but turned down his offer to drive me around the barriadas (slum districts) which, he informed me, had been euphemistically re-named pueblos jóvenes (young towns).

He eventually dropped me off outside my hotel, El Balcón Dorado, collected the complimentary pick-up fare from the weary-looking proprietor and accelerated off into the night. I suspected that his frenetic driving and effervescent commentary might have been fuelled by a touch of the indigenous joy powder.

The Golden Balcony – to render my hotel’s name in English – was yet another of those scruffy establishments that had looked great on the internet. But I was too tired to care. A sleepy-eyed lady holding a wide-awake toddler welcomed me. She introduced herself as Martha, the proprietor’s wife, and handed me a drink which resembled a Margarita. It was, she explained, a Pisco Sour – a white grape brandy from the port of Pisco, mixed with lime juice, egg white and Angostura bitters. It tasted divine.

My room, I was surprised to discover, came with a reasonably sized ante-room stuffed with Euro-posh repro furniture, including a fake Napoleonic chaise longue and a pair of Swiss mountain prints, framed ornately in gold plastic. I couldn’t help but smile. At the very least I’d expected a print of the High Andes or an adobe Inca ruin or two. But never knowing quite where you might sleep or what you might be sleeping on was, for me, an intriguing – and challenging – aspect of travel.

The room itself was pretty basic. A narrow partition led to a minuscule en-suite, comprising a rusty hand shower, a tiny basin and a creaky old loo. Compared to some of the mosquito-ridden bucket-bath lodges in Africa in which I’d stayed over the years, this was luxury. And situated on the corner of Lima’s Plaza Mayor, the historic heart of the city, El Balcón Dorado was about as central as I could get. After a tepid shower I flopped onto a lumpy old mattress and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

señor ruiz

finding the courage

Over breakfast the next morning I dipped into my Peru guide but, flickering through its pages, the weariness of indecision descended upon me. Until two days earlier, this trip was going to be simple, so very simple. In November, I’d booked my month-long, non-refundable ticket, flying out to Lima in early December. I’d intended to go directly from the capital to Cusco, the launch pad for Machu Picchu. Once I’d scattered Sacha’s ashes, my plan was to collapse in some tranquil, grief-friendly resort near the sea for the remainder of my stay, and chill.

Then Roberto called.

Roberto was my ex-husband. To my surprise, he told me he wanted to attend the scattering – but insisted he couldn’t make it to Peru until the end of December. His trip, he pointed out, would coincide with the first anniversary of Sacha’s death on 2nd January. Roberto was the last person in the world I felt like meeting up with. But he was also Sacha’s father, and I couldn’t deny him the right to be present.

I hadn’t seen him since the funeral – nor had I wanted to. Although he loved his son, I suspected that Roberto, the partner in a Franco-Colombian architectural practice, had deliberately chosen to run its Africa office from Lagos to maintain a convenient distance between himself and Sacha’s troubles. I was still angry with him for that.

In my heart, however, I knew the timing made sense. Perhaps Sacha himself wanted his ashes to be scattered on the first anniversary of his death by his mother and his father.

The prospect of being holed up in a hotel for nearly a month waiting for Roberto to arrive was grim, but did I have the courage to hit the road – with the ashes in tow – and explore Peru alone? In a complete quandary, I ventured out to change some traveller’s cheques.

Ten minutes after leaving El Balcón Dorado, I was lost. The street names bore no resemblance to those on my map and Friday’s bank queues were snaking around the plazas. I was thirsty, but without any sol – the local currency – I couldn’t even buy a bottle of water, let alone grab a taxi back to the jet-lag sanctuary of the hotel. With its loud Latin jazz, traffic horns and growling street dogs, daytime Lima was certainly as lively and chaotic as I’d anticipated, and scary too: my guide book warned of ‘strangle muggers’ who roamed the streets, throttling and robbing unsuspecting tourists.

A robust young policeman strode over and asked me if I was lost. He offered to escort me to the Plaza Mayor where, he claimed, the banks weren’t so busy. I didn’t like to tell him that the Plaza Mayor was where I’d just come from.

When I’d last visited South America I was constantly quizzed about the Queen, but this young man showered me with questions about that new British royal: Wayne Rooney. To keep him at my side for as long as possible, I dredged up all the superlative adjectives about Wayne and the Premier League my wobbly Spanish could muster, until we arrived at the end of his patch – and back at El Balcón Dorado.

An hour later I plucked up the courage to venture out again. Wandering down a narrow pedestrian side street, I stopped to admire a Spanish colonial building of glistening white marble. Amazingly, it was a bank; a cool, empty, queue-less bank with a good exchange rate. Sunlight streamed in through the glass-domed ceiling. I felt a quick pang of excitement as the friendly cashier counted out my sol: I’d actually made it to Peru.

The cashier volunteered advice on what to see in Lima. Sightseeing was a great idea: it meant I could delay having to make a decision about what to do next.

The yellow stucco façade of the baroque Monastery of San Francisco was almost obscured by the sea of pigeons that swarmed around it – courtesy of the vendors selling bags of seed at its gates. To avoid the grungy flock I headed straight down a flight of steps and into the crypt.

This was a big mistake: skulls and femurs, meticulously arranged into neat concentric circles, reminiscent of the worst excesses of Pol Pot, gazed back at me. Over the last few centuries, these bone-filled, candlelit catacombs had witnessed some 70,000 burials. Someone coughed. I gasped. They jumped. A woman emerged from the shadows. We both laughed, relieved not to be alone in this subterranean cemetery. The woman, who was Dutch, told me it was her last day in Peru; I replied that it was my first. She said she envied me. I smiled and made my escape.

Blinking away sunlight, I hurried through a terracotta passageway lined with red geraniums into a cool, verdant courtyard surrounded by white, arched cloisters. My eyes alighted on a fading wall mural of a 16th-century monk in the act of licking the leg of a leper. Perhaps this reckless gesture of humility explained some of those dry old bones down below.

Heavy with tapestries, the monastery also housed a library of antique texts dating back to the Conquistadors, and its mainly Peruvian art collection also included a Rubens and a Van Dyck. I stared, transfixed, at an 18th-century Pietà image of Mary cradling the body of her dead son. Jesus! How that iconic image resonated. My mind flitted back to a summer in Rome three years earlier. I had been in St Peter’s, staring at Michelangelo’s version of the Pietà. The image of a mother holding her dead son was my worst fear crystallised in stone. Back then, it was still only a fear.

My eyes welled up yet again. Over the preceding year, man-size Kleenex and waterproof mascara had become my constant companions. The thick, curly, luxuriant hair, pale skin and large, soulful, grey-green eyes of the Christ in this painting bore a striking resemblance to my handsome son. Sacha was no Jesus, and I’d been a Buddhist for over twenty years, but I couldn’t help thinking that Mary and I had quite a bit in common.

As I walked out of San Francisco’s gates, a couple of shoeless street boys ran over. The elder of the two was wearing a torn, faded Manchester United shirt several sizes too big for him. They wanted to sell me a dog-eared postcard of Lima. I gave them some coins and told them to keep the card, but in a touching display of dignity they insisted I take it. These lads tore at my heartstrings. Instead of flowers at Sacha’s funeral, I’d asked for donations to be made to a foundation for Colombian street kids.

I realised, too late, that the nearby restaurant I’d dived into was full of wealthy Chinese who could afford its astronomical prices. I ordered a beer and the national dish of ceviche, a concoction of raw sea fish marinated in lemon and lime juice. Sacha had told me that Limeños took their food very seriously, and claimed it was the best cuisine in Latin America – if not the world. I found myself wondering what he’d made of the ceviche when he had been in Peru eight years earlier.

Sacha had to spend several weeks in Lima because his passport and traveller’s cheques were stolen. At the time, I was in the Czech Republic, where there was no phone signal. American Express refused to replace the cheques until I’d verified his identity. I didn’t pick up Sacha’s calls until two weeks later.

He’d managed to survive, he later told me, because friends he’d made in Lima held a benefit for him. Whether it took place in an upmarket eatery like this or in a corrugated shack in the barriadas, I hadn’t a clue. It could have been either. He befriended people from all walks of life (unless they happened to be an authority figure or wore a uniform). For Sacha, being with almost anyone was preferable to being alone and at the mercy of the voices inside his head.

Back at El Balcón Dorado later that evening, I was in for a heart-stopping moment when I opened the door to my room. The bed had been made but my suitcase, containing my valuables, was lying brazenly unzipped in the middle of the floor. Trembling, I looked inside. Everything was still there, untouched, including my traveller’s cheques. What an idiot! It was so unlike me, a seasoned traveller, to be so negligent. An early night was imperative. I hurried to a scruffy-looking café around the corner. Under cruel fluorescent lighting and the deafening screams and applause of non-Premier League football, I feasted, this time, on fried chicken, chips and Coca-Cola.

Prising open my hotel window I stared down at the stationary, toxic traffic below. The weather was damp, cloudy and cool – an unwelcome change from the sunshine of the day before. After waking up from a grief-laden dream and still incapable of making a decision about what I should do for the next month, my most sensible option, I realised, was to grab a cab and head for the Buddhist centre.

Hernan, the affable driver of the battered old Ford taxi I hailed, looked devastated when the vehicle conked out thirty seconds into the journey, at a ferocious rush-hour junction. I had the feeling that this happened to him many times, on a daily basis, and that he was more concerned about losing my fare than with the deafening crescendo of angry horns. I got out and helped him push-start the car.

We managed, at last, to locate the Buddhist centre behind a high wall in the leafy, posh ambassadorial neighbourhood in the suburb of San Isidro. I pressed the entry phone. No answer. I glanced at my watch. It was still only eight o’clock.

To kill time before the centre opened we drove to the Huaca Pucllana – a massive pre-Inca adobe ruin nearby – but that, too, was closed. We drove on to the coastline at Miraflores, where the sea mist was so dense I couldn’t see the sea. A wet, listless hour later we returned to the centre, only to find it was still closed. I felt a powerful surge of frustration; I needed to ground myself in Peru.

Hernan tried his hardest to convince me, as we headed back towards the city centre, that (for a substantial number of sol) I should let him spend the rest of the day driving me around the sights of Lima. We passed a vast concrete heap of a building, so hideous it made London’s National Theatre look like the Alhambra Palace. I feigned interest when he told me it was the National Museum, and asked him to drop me off there. He smiled at me wistfully as we went our separate ways.

Once inside, I headed for the top floor where there was an exhibition of ancient Peruvian gold artefacts. The spacious room I entered was completely dark and empty apart from a few illuminated exhibits of gold masks and trinkets. A museum guard in a green uniform insisted on following me around so closely I could feel his breath on the back of my neck.

When the Conquistadors arrived in Peru, Quechua was the official language of the Inca Empire which was, at that time, the largest empire in the world. The guard told me his name was Ernesto, and that he was of Quechua descent – and proudly so. We chatted away in Spanish for a bit, then he asked me how old I thought he was. Ernesto was forty-five if he was a day – so I said thirty-five to be polite. He informed me – in all seriousness – that he was twenty-seven, and insisted on accompanying me all the way down multiple flights of stairs to the ground floor. We shook hands and he asked me for uno besito (a little kiss). I laughed and exclaimed,‘Hombre! No!’

Downstairs, along with a handful of Latinos and Gringos, I was coaxed into joining the guided museum tour led by a Señor Ruiz. This bilingual, bespectacled thirty-something guide had an extremely commanding voice – and no arms. He operated a torch with his teeth to illuminate designs on ancient Chavín and Nazca ceramics, and used his foot to draw explanatory diagrams of Moche pyramids and Wari sand settlements. His fascinating archaeological observations were interspersed with bouts of boyish, high-pitched giggling.

A couple from Ohio with teenage kids drifted away from the group when he told us that the Incas saw nothing wrong with having loads of sex, and then accused the Catholic Church of messing people’s heads up over the centuries with its repressive morality. So he was brave, too. From what I’d heard about Peru, it was a deeply religious country. An outspoken comment like that could cost Señor Ruiz his job.

I was riveted by the sheer energy of his performance – and by his humour. If he could triumph so cheerfully and unselfconsciously over his disability, surely I could summon up the nerve to get out of Lima and see something of Peru?

Over lunch in the museum café, I made a few calls and managed to get hold of the number of the Buddhist centre in San Isidro. A warm voice answered the phone and assured me that the centre was now open. I quickly finished my food and hailed a cab at the museum entrance.

Behind the impenetrably high wall at last, I was greeted by Oscar – a chubby young mestizo (a person of mixed Spanish and Quechan ancestry) with sparkling brown eyes. He showed me around the spacious centre, where the utilitarian vibe was partially redeemed by an elegantly paved courtyard decked out with purple bougainvilleas and dwarf palms. The centre was part of the priest-free, socially engaged movement known as Soka Gakkai. Based on the teachings of the 13th-century Buddhist teacher Nichiren, the movement believes in the universality of Buddhahood, and is a powerful peace movement and a United Nations NGO. As in all its centres around the world, there wasn’t an orange robe or a shaven head in sight.

At my request, Oscar led me to the large, high-ceilinged chanting hall, which contained several hundred fold-up chairs – and not a single person. For two hours I sat alone before the altar and chanted to the Peru Gohonzon: a mandala inscribed in black ink on a golden scroll that depicted in Sanskrit and ancient Chinese all the workings of life and the universe.

As I chanted, I remembered some of Sacha’s fearless – and foolhardy – exploits in South America, such as travelling into the FARC guerrilla region in Colombia, a hotbed of kidnapping, to look for ancient Mayan ruins. Then I thought about the monks who never strayed from the cloisters of San Francisco monastery, and of all the dried-up old bones lining the catacombs. And in my heart, I knew that Sacha would want me to see Peru. In fact, with his love of the continent, he would smile and pronounce it ‘wicked’ that his ashes would be travelling around the country with me.