WHAT DO YOU SEE
What do you see when you look back? Sometimes I can describe it but mostly the deep black ache has no name. How can I communicate the feeling of a shrinking peer group, of the survivors wading through life weighed down by ever greater loss, and trying to make sense of experience once-shared but never again to be shared, and the reciprocity of love cut short, life cut down, killed? Oh, dear anger that once sustained me, where have you gone? Why did you leave me alone in silence, without guidance, stripping me of my shield? You left me with nothing but empathy and that gives me no protection.
I never imagined the pace would increase, that death would come more frequently, and swiftly, leaving no time to adapt to the new, reduced landscape before another life would be taken and change that view forever. I used to think of it as that, the view, my perception and appreciation of the world, but now I realize that with each life lost my entire world is shrinking. And daily, nightly, I ask myself how we will preserve them, how will we manage their contributions, the love we felt, the impact they had, and their very legacy?
I understand now that emotional self-preservation has guided the climbing community's relationship to those once-vibrant and now extinguished lives. We don't do legacy. We don't make lasting monuments because that would be a full-time job, and an emotional anchor. We cry, we nod, we acknowledge and we move on. Because if we ourselves want to keep breathing and living and creating, and justifying our own pursuit and action, we must insulate ourselves from death when we should, in fact, integrate it into every moment, every thought, every goddamned breath.
Immerse, don't evade. That's what I wanted to tell a young friend recently when he asked for guidance on this topic. Look at the images and reread the texts to remind you of what you shared, and how those experiences shaped you, and will affect you for the rest of your life. Tonight, when I couldn't write but was searching for the emotion that might allow it I wrote to an old, dear friend with whom I've had no contact since 1993. I could finally thank her for having shaped me as a writer, for giving me the dexterity to handle my emotions, for steering me in the direction that brought me here. I could do that because she is still alive. Because I am. I should have thanked her a decade or a lifetime ago but we were an ocean apart, with culture and language making that gulf even wider. And back then, when she couldn't say yes, I promised not to chase, but also not to forget. I kept my promise and that taught me lessons as well.
It took years and many, many deaths to understand that I walked the earth holding fast to words I never said but should have, and emotions I never expressed. That weight change my gait and sometimes held my head down, pointing eyes at a ground that will one day (too) accept my physical remains. Sometimes the unspoken merely suffocated, and other times it paralyzed me. In those moments, having pushed everyone away, I could only hug myself and try to find warmth in that. Gazing up from there, skyward, towards whatever future I will live into takes strength I sometimes do not have. In those moments I look to my friends, to the shoulders I have stood upon and fallen upon, to the strong muscles that accept and support me.
I say that I don't know what I would do without them. But I do.
Those shoulders and hearts keep me alive when I cannot do so on my own. I see them when I look back, and I spy them ahead as well. They block the obstacles that would deter me. They protect me from outside threat, and also from my own hand. I will never take them for granted.
This is what I see.
Banner: The south face of Nanga Parbat from below the north face of Shgiri
Climbing BW: Jeff Lowe on the south pillar of Nuptse
Climbing COLOR: Jeff Lowe approaching the south pillar of Nuptse
Portrait: MFT by Thurk @mthurk
