When someone you loved died a long time ago, reminders arrive unannounced, unexpected, in ordinary life. An old song plays on the radio and you are jolted back to a long-forgotten time and place. Mention of a subject out of nowhere sparks a deep memory. This is why the anniversaries of deaths are solid things in our lives to hang on to. They are reliable buoys that help us to bob along when the past threatens to overwhelm.

Until recent years, one particular date would loom ahead of me bleakly every New Year. My father died on 11 January 1984, during a hip replacement operation to ease his ankylosing spondylitis, a condition that inflamed his spine and joints. He was 33, my mother 32; I was five, my brother one. I remember seeing him for the last time at the front door of our house; the last question he asked me was to find out what was number one in the pop charts (our mutual love fed my early obsession with music and eventual career as a music journalist).

When I was young the anniversary of Dad’s death always passed as quietly as possible; something to get through in the dark days of winter. The timing was annoyingly unfair: I longed to feel the excitement of the new calendar, the hope of a clean slate, a fresh start. I didn’t admit to myself that each 11 January offered a comfort of sorts. After all, it was the date he would have looked at on his digital watch before he went down to the operating theatre wondering what would happen when he came out the other side. As the years pulled away from that extreme moment of loss, the seasonal reminder of where he was then and where I was now gave the day a much needed weight. My grief still needed that connection.

But in 2017, something significant changed. I had had a child myself, which made me think profoundly about what I had lost with my father. What was I was missing exactly? A chance to talk to him, certainly. A chance to share moments, definitely. I couldn’t do the former but could I do the latter?

Rogers with her Dad. Photograph: Provided by Jude Rogers

Not long after, I read an article about DNA that made me think about the connections between people, biological and otherwise. It struck me that my father had given me life, which meant that his life was in me. So perhaps I could continue his existence through mine, in a new way. What would someone who loved you very much want you to do after they were dead? Live life to the fullest.

Since then, Dad’s anniversary has fundamentally changed in its shape. It is no longer a day to mourn but a day to celebrate. I had intimated from recollections that my father was an adventurous soul, who enjoyed discovering new places: my mother described their honeymoon travelling in Holland, as instigated by him, and said he talked of visiting the Dead Sea. Wanderlust was an instinct I shared, so our day would be about amplifying that union. It would involve going somewhere that felt out of the ordinary, somewhere magical that would provide joy.

It helped that my husband and I had just moved with our son to the Welsh borders, a very different place to our previous home in London. The first year we celebrated my father, we went to the Malvern hills, an hour away in Worcestershire. I had been captivated by their long, jagged peaks out of the corner of my eye from nearby motorways. The drive towards them felt dreamlike: we rarely took time out to do things like this. We arrived and up we went; I felt them under my feet. On the ridge, I felt new.

The year after, we drove to another place that pops up like an apparition from different vantage points on the Welsh borders: May hill, a small collection of trees on a high peak in Gloucestershire. From afar, it looks eerie. Up close, the tree trunks pull upwards, slim-spined, magnetised to the sky.

This change has transformed how I deal with grief in regular life. To be able to access something so magical on the day, it being there to touch, to breathe in – this feels like everything. It also helps that I pick each place at the last minute in the New Year: I go with my gut, jump in the car. It means these experiences don’t hang in front of me heavily too, offering a disquieting connection with sadness and absence. They offer a gravity founded in the power of human connection, new experiences and love. Dad and I are together in that beautiful moment, in that gleam of a clean slate, the glow of a fresh start.