Connie Shin

And when I told him about the hearing, because I was just curious what he thought about it, all he said in an email was, don't say any of this to your grandma, and this guy needs to serve the remainder of his sentence.

I wasn't surprised by his response, but it was hard to sit with, because I had started to feel differently that year.

In my mind, I was thinking, my dad's been dead for nearly three decades.

Why should this guy remain in prison?

And there were moments of the walk that felt equally mentally fatiguing.

I remember as we were coming down Harlem River Drive and I was thinking to myself, like, what am I doing?

Why did I tell all these people about my dad?

Like, what am I trying to prove with this walk?

But even with moments of self-doubt, I couldn't stop walking.

One, I'm a pretty competitive person and too many people knew I was doing this walk, so I couldn't quit.

And two, I was trying to make sense of my life through this walk.

I had somehow linked in my mind that walking 32 miles would help me process my dad's death, as if every mile I walked, it would give me a year back where nobody talked about him.

Doing this walk was my way of forcing the people in my life to acknowledge that he had existed.

And in my mind, turning 32 felt like something that I could share with just my dad.

I'd always wanted to do some sort of a legacy project in order to get to know my dad better.

But I never knew what questions to ask.

I didn't know what medium to use.

So I chose to walk.

I walked because I wanted to talk about my dad.

I walked because I didn't know how to talk about my dad.