‘Mama, You Can Do It’: Adoptive mother, birth mother unite on walk through Europe in tribute to daughter

When Anne West decided to undergo the 500-mile Camino de Santiago — a walk from France across northern Spain — for her daughter, she knew it would be a deeply personal experience.

“I never imagined that I would one day need to make this pilgrimage without her,” West said in an email to The Record prior to embarking on the Camino April 7. “So, I am walking it for Emma (Katzman) and in memory of her. I know I will feel her with me, especially on the hard days. I can already hear her voice in my head saying, ‘Come on, mama, you can do it!’”

West, a former Wilmette resident of 16 years, turned the nearly six-week trek for Emma into a walkathon, posting daily Facebook videos about her journey and raising money for The Hidden Opponent, a nonprofit dedicated to breaking the stigma around mental healthcare for student athletes.

For a significant portion of the walk, West was alongside Emma’s birth mother Davaughn Conrad. 

To date, West and her husband, Ed Katzman, have raised more than $22,000 from 151 donations to the GoFundMe, named “Camino de Emma,” and intend to match every dollar raised. 

Emma

Emma Katzman, a New Trier High School graduate and hockey player whom her parents describe as a compassionate, goal-oriented and talented athlete, died by suicide in 2023 at the age of 22.

She had talked about one day walking the Camino with West.

“Emma was very excited because she loved big challenges like that,” Ed Katzman said of his daughter’s response to the prospect of completing the Camino. “But she was still in school, in college, so she couldn’t take the time off to just go and do it.”

In the interim, with Emma still in school, West ultimately completed a more abbreviated, 10-day walk in early 2023, prior to her daughter’s death.

She later became determined to embark on the journey she and Emma would have taken together. As an added bonus, she felt her goal-oriented, hard-working daughter would have been impressed by the accomplishment. 

“My daughter always set very hard goals for herself in life, just things she wanted to accomplish, and she worked very hard to accomplish them,” West told The Record following her return from Spain on May 17, having completed the Camino on May 15. “And I thought this would be a hard goal to walk 500 miles, and she would really be proud of me if I did that.”

The Hidden Opponent’s mission, too, is of profound significance as Emma was a student-athlete and cared deeply about giving back.

She played hockey at the University of Vermont for one year before she went abroad to the Netherlands, where she took to speed skating. Her parents said they were always amazed by the goals she set for herself — ones so high West shared she and Ed Katzman sometimes thought, “Oh, she’s never going to be able to do that.”

But then she would. 

“This is one of these where we said, ‘You’ll never be able to do this’: She got herself onto the [Olympic] Development Team for U.S. speed skating,” Ed Katzman said as an example of Emma’s uncanny ability to set and reach enormous goals.

Not only did Emma go after her own goals, but she encouraged others in their goals,  which is one reason why West could imagine her daughter cheering her on along the Camino.

“She was very supportive of the people around her,” Ed Katzman said. “That was important to her, to help other people. She felt bad when she’d see somebody sitting alone who looked like they were lonely in a cafe, and she’d want to go over and talk to them, and we used to do that when she was a teenager and we were on a hockey trip.”

West added that her daughter constantly tried to bring joy to others.

“She would always stop,” West said of Emma, whether it was to compliment a cashier’s nails or check on someone she didn’t know. “There was a disabled veteran that would hang out in front of the grocery store asking for money, and she would always take the time to go over and talk to him and ask him how he was doing, and then she’d go in and buy him a sandwich.”

A special partner

West, who is Emma’s adoptive mother, spent the first few weeks of her journey in the company of Emma’s birth mother, Davaughn Conrad. 

“I had planned to do it, and I got this idea, and I really wanted to spend time thinking about Emma and all that kind of stuff, and almost talking to her, if you will,” West said, explaining how she and Conrad came together for the journey. “And I thought [of] Davaughn, [and] I had this idea that maybe she would want to go with me, and together we could celebrate Emma and remember her and honor her.”

While she anticipated Conrad might decline as she has three young children, two dogs and a husband at home, and had never been away from her family for such an extended period of time, Conrad assented.

West and Conrad bonded as they began the journey together; though Conrad left a couple of weeks prior to the end of the walk to return to her family, whom she missed. 

During the solo portion of her experience, West said she was “much more solitary than a lot of people are,” but that’s how she wanted it so that she could reflect and spend time in her own mind.

“I would be walking along, down a path by myself and I’d just start crying,” West shared. “But it was cathartic in that way, because I felt like I could do that and it was OK, whereas usually in your day-to-day life you can’t just go around and sort of lose it.

“It was a very healing journey for me,” she added. “I sort of got to indulge my grief and just think about my daughter, and I spent a lot of time thinking about, how would she have experienced this walk if she had been on it? And I kept thinking she would have loved every minute of it.

“She would have loved the physical aspect of it, because she was a very physical person; she would have loved just meeting all the people and talking to them and asking them about themselves; and she would love the animals and the Spanish people and just would have loved everything about it, and that was kind of bittersweet.”

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