Walking with Cancer, Walking with my Father

Engaging in leisure practices whilst living with chronic and terminal health conditions has been identified as providing important spaces for people to challenge sickness narratives of infirmity and incapacity. Instead, leisure is increasingly positioned as an important site of resistance and opportunity to such medically driven models. Employing ‘walking with’ as a conceptual and methodological approach, this chapter shows how the everyday centrality of a chronic health condition can be undermined and resisted through daily walking. Instead, walking reveals a body that is active, embodied and living well. These tensions between dying/living are negotiated and mapped through daily interactions with nature, weather, non-human actors (dogs, birds, clover) and the physicality of the body as it walks familiar paths and shares much-loved views in rural Scotland. The chapter argues that ‘living well with dying’ should be given greater attention and significance in health and social research contexts.