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Wen
Trad climber
Bend, OR
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Topic Author's Original Post - Oct 16, 2017 - 05:06pm PT
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Some musings given recent events. I'm not sure where to put them, I guess this is as good a place as any.
The Collective Grief of Being a Climber
I was teary all day. Another one of those heart breaking days, a huge loss to the climbing community, and it feels so sad. I didn’t even know Hayden Kennedy, I met him once in the parking lot at the Squamish Chief as he and his dad were gearing up for some sort of impressive mission. It was right after his dad penned the letter to him in Alpinist, and I remember commenting to Michael that his piece really resonated with me; it’s possibly the most impactful piece of climbing literature I’ve ever read. I was giddy in the 2 minutes I talked with Michael and Hayden, and off they went to experience their shared climbing passion, leaving me dreaming of the day I could do the same with my kids.
I’ve often lived in fear of raising children who climb. What if they rap off the end of their rope? What if all the reminders in the world aren’t enough for them to wear their helmet and prevent that final mistake? What if they trend toward alpinism and seek the mountains that might take them away? Because it happens, over and over and over, and I’m not sure how I’d handle it if my love of the sport guided my child to that fatal moment. Michael was the first person I knew who talked about this, grieved openly about it, and yet made it through the other side of his thoughts, to the place that said climbing was worth the sadness it might engender.
These are the days that make me question even being a climber. What is it all for? How can it possibly be justified when people just keep dying? I don’t even know most of these famous people, Kyle, Micah, Jack, Dean, Steve, Jared, Alex, now Hayden, I could go on and on since there’s too many to name and I’ve never met most of them, and yet I feel like their deaths keep taking a chink out of my armor. Where does it all go? How do you do it Werner, and Jim, and Christian, and any of you? How do you maintain your optimism when you see your tribe leaving us?
We don’t talk much about it, but there is great sadness in identifying yourself as a climber. It means you submit yourself to a process of regular loss. These are people we may not know personally, and yet I feel like I know them through their writing and stories, their friends on Supertaco, and that makes me feel like they are in my heart. I’ve spent time thinking about them, integrating their views into my own, changing my perspective because of the perspective they’ve offered me. It’s not enough to say they are in my thoughts and prayers. It’s not just trite, it feels wrong, because they were there in some capacity already, even before they died.
So I’m sorry to Julie and Michael Kennedy, and to all the many friends and family of Hayden and Inge. And I’m also sorry to the thousands of climbers out there because we have yet another loss in our tribe. It makes no sense, and it makes me want to run away from our sport. How much loss can a heart take? How much loss can a community take? Because this one feels bigger somehow. Hayden had an intimate understanding of grief, and his response to it was that there is a breaking point.
Thank you Kennedy family for acknowledging Hayden’s death as a suicide. It must have been painful, and yet I feel it was so generous of you. Its helps me “get it.” I get it because Hayden’s grief makes sense in the face of so many losses. And for me, it’s why his action was so powerful. I have great respect for you and the final decision you made, and for your parents and the way they phrased their response in the media. Thank you Kennedy family for encouraging me to think differently.
If there’s a breaking point, why do we keep climbing? Why do we encourage our children to climb? Hayden recently wrote, “Climbing is either a beautiful gift, or a curse.” Can it really be both at the same time? Can these chinks in our armor build us to a better place, or do they take something away from us?
I guess I’ll go back to reading Supertaco, and climbing literature, and climbing magazines, and hope that these things are enough to heal my heart, which feels especially sad right now. Because what else can we do but share our sadness, explore these concepts, and grieve together? Our tribe is beautiful. Our tribe is powerful. But once again, our tribe is wounded.
Wendy Laakmann
October 10th 2017
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johntp
Trad climber
socal
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Oct 16, 2017 - 05:15pm PT
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We climb or climbed because it pulls us. There is no grief, just a sense of loss. People die. That's the way it is. At least climbers know they have lived.
edit 10/21: I hope these words are not too harsh. Lost my mom to cancer when I was 26. Old enough to understand she was better off than the hell she had been living through. I was not sad and did not grieve. Maybe it is just my make up; I never expected to live past 25, to me every day since is a blessing no matter how crappy. Now I'm 59 (the age my mom was when she passed) and see life as a continuum. Some times it can be overwhelming. Life provides us with an amazing ability to adapt.
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Loco de Pedra
Mountain climber
Around the World
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Oct 16, 2017 - 05:26pm PT
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We are all walking towards the same end goal, which is the coffin. How we do it is what counts the most.
"Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold." - H. Keller
Best wishes and love for those who are left behind.
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jeff constine
Trad climber
Ao Namao
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Oct 16, 2017 - 06:05pm PT
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can't have any fun if death is on the back of your mind worrying about it while doing anything in life. Cherish the good times keep the memory of the fallen alive. No Grief needed at all.
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mikegrai
climber
ON
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Oct 16, 2017 - 06:13pm PT
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I think of climbing as a form of addiction. There are benign aspects to this addiction - self-discovery, personal development, excitement, fitness, camaraderie, but if I am honest I have to admit to the dark side of the climbing addiction/obsession as well. In some ways it is an intensely selfish act, where we pretend that the risks we take will affect only ourselves, and close our eyes to the impact our accidental death would have on those closest to us.
I have come to the conclusion that climbing appeals to a deeply imbedded streak of egocentric narcisssim that exists in my character. There are worse personality traits, and worse ways to spend your time, but I think we sometimes are naively uncritical of the climbing enterprise.
Rationalizing and denial are powerful coping mechanisms - I expect they will be greatly in evidence in many of the responses to this thread.
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aspendougy
Trad climber
Los Angeles, CA
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Oct 16, 2017 - 06:22pm PT
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Inge Perkins died in an avalanche; Hayden Kennedy took his own life, so climbing per se played no part in the death of either of them.
Personal safety is largely illusory; one minute you appear to be safe; the next moment you are in danger. Homicide takes about 13,000 lives per year in the U.S. Car accidents, gun accidents, opioid overdoses, heart disease and cancer claim huge numbers. Climbing fatalities are still quite rare, especially considering the larger number of climbers. If you keep a gun in your home and are careless about how it is handled, you put your kids at a greater risk than if they climb.
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ruppell
climber
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Oct 16, 2017 - 06:27pm PT
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Ghost
climber
A long way from where I started
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Oct 16, 2017 - 06:59pm PT
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Wendy
I don't know if this will help you sort out your feelings, but for whatever it is worth, here are some thoughts from a climber who was a son of parents who would have been devastated to lose him, and also a father of a son who has grown into a man who also climbs.
Should I have launched into whitewater as a teenager, and then begun climbing when I moved to where there were rocks and mountains? Or was that a burden I should never have placed on my parents? Should my wife and I have continued climbing when our children were born? Should we have introduced our boys to the outdoors? To climbing? Should I now fear that any phone call might be the one that informs me of my son's death?
Like most of the long-time climbers here on ST, I have had more friends than I want to think about go into the mountains and not come home. Should they not have gone to the mountains?
Finding the answer to all these questions requires me to ask another: What is the alternative?
For me, and for many climbers I know, climbing was far more a way to survive than a way to die. If I hadn't gone paddling, and then climbing, I'd have been dead or in jail long ago. And I can't begin to count the number of friends who have said the same thing.
Some of us simply didn't fit in to the space we were allotted in the Betty Crocker world we were born into. Those of us who found a home in the climbing community were the lucky ones. Yes, some of us died in avalanches, rockfalls, rappelling accidents, whatever... But most of us survived, and when we look at our brothers and sisters who didn't find what we did, the ones who turned to alcohol, drugs, and crime... Well, the answer seems clear to me.
The best way I can sum it all up is to think back to when my children were very young, and remember that yes, when I went climbing for a day, a week, or a month I took the chance that I would not come home, and they would grow up without a father...
...but to me, that seemed a far, far better outcome for them than to watch their father drink himself to death.
David Harris
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johntp
Trad climber
socal
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Oct 16, 2017 - 07:42pm PT
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David- Well written.
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jstan
climber
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Oct 16, 2017 - 08:22pm PT
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Because what else can we do but share our sadness, explore these concepts, and grieve together? Our tribe is beautiful. Our tribe is powerful.
The tribe can't bring you back to life or make you walk again. Don't fool yourself with such thinking.
Your well written post clearly says you question whether the benefits you receive from climbing justify the risk.
Now you have to act.
You can find climbing personalities all over the place. Out of the blue yesterday a trash picking friend said to me
"After you are dead I want your truck."
Just what I would expect of a climber.
Have to put that in my will.
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Kalimon
Social climber
Ridgway, CO
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Oct 16, 2017 - 08:38pm PT
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With all due respect Wen . . . To be human is to suffer, we have been doing it for millennia. Don't worry yourself with fears of mortality and loss . . . Things you should not be sorry for, by the way, as they are inevitable.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Oct 16, 2017 - 08:48pm PT
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I don't have anything to add, after a life of climbing I always thought that my imagined climbing autobiography would be a take off of Galen's title: "High and Mild."
But we all travel to those places and undertake the risks, choose to undertake the risks with full knowledge that we might not come back. And after climbing for more than 40 years, I can count the times for which I came close to not returning, even with wife and child and responsibilities. More, I know there were many times uncounted. After I had been climbing for a few years I asked my Mother if she wasn't worried, "no, I trust you," was her answer. She died young, but her confidence in my judgement certainly helped me achieve much more than what I have done in climbing.
Her death, quite unexpected, also underscored that thing we all know, that life is uncertain, we cannot foresee when ours might end, or of anyone elses.
We should grieve, it is a part of a great human cultural practice of celebrating the end of a loved one's life, even the abstraction of love we hold for each other, our climbing family. And while those places we go and risk so much seem impersonal, I for one prefer it that way.
A well known physicist said:
“If there is no point in the universe that we discover by the methods of science, there is a point that we can give the universe by the way we live, by loving each other, by discovering things about nature, by creating works of art. And that—in a way, although we are not the stars in a cosmic drama, if the only drama we're starring in is one that we are making up as we go along, it is not entirely ignoble that faced with this unloving, impersonal universe we make a little island of warmth and love and science and art for ourselves. That's not an entirely despicable role for us to play.”
― Steven Weinberg
If that art is the one we perform when moving in those high places far from our normal life, we make that art for ourselves, and for our friends, and family and we always intend to return to that little island and share our experience.
That is not an entirely despicable role for us to play.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Oct 16, 2017 - 08:55pm PT
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A very touching commentary, Wendy.
(and thank you for telling us who you are - there are many on this forum who hide behind avatars)
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SalNichols
Big Wall climber
Richmond, CA
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Oct 16, 2017 - 08:57pm PT
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Everyone dies. We might not like the timing, but NO ONE gets out of this upright. I've lost friends climbing. I've lost friends to accidents, and I've lost friends in combat; and I lost 5 friends in one afternoon racing sailboats. I'm not even sure how to feel anymore. People just die, and I miss them...and nothing at all changes.
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cat t.
climber
california
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Oct 16, 2017 - 08:58pm PT
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It's easy to point to the risks of climbing, skiing, driving--but I'm left with the feeling that the biggest risk of all is loving other people, given the inevitability of loss. That, at least, is a risk that seems worth taking over and over, even in the face of tragedy. Maybe these losses hit sooner or more expectedly for climbers, but everyone has to face it eventually.
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10b4me
Mountain climber
Retired
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Oct 16, 2017 - 09:07pm PT
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I don't know if you meant to do it, but it seems that you are putting climbers on a pedestal. I climbed for over thirty five years, but have also been involved in the skiing, and mountain biking communities. Trust me when I say that when one of those tribe members passes on the sense of sadness is just as real.
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Wen
Trad climber
Bend, OR
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 16, 2017 - 09:33pm PT
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So many thoughts running through my head, I so appreciate the myriad perspectives. I'll just say thanks to all so far for helping me think through things.
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neebee
Social climber
calif/texas
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Oct 16, 2017 - 09:49pm PT
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hey there, say, wendy... thank you for sharing your heart...
we all, at times, share what hurts...
share what we wonder about...
and share, for to learn, as well-- more about ourself, or others...
sharing also unburdens your heart, so you are not so weighted-down,
that you can't get through your sorrow, sadness or grieve...
happy to meet you, here...
welcome...
may you be strong, for all your trails, ahead...
and for all that you meet and enjoy-- time is short,
as to our 'mortal' lives... thus:
let's enjoy the treasure of each other, while we all can...
:)
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neebee
Social climber
calif/texas
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Oct 16, 2017 - 09:55pm PT
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hey there say, as to that quote, that locker shared...
as to that risk-- thus the treasure, again, from daring to, are so much worth it...
i know TWO folks in my inner-circle, that passed-on, and it was
a very very hard thing for them, to risk 'loving' ...
yes, it can hurt--and--they were dear-folks, but, i am sure now,
that they just couldn't bear to hurt... if they got 'too deep'
:(
things hurt, either in the emotional realm, or the physical realm...
yet, to grow, enjoy life, and learn, and love:
we 'risk' ...
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nah000
climber
now/here
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Oct 16, 2017 - 10:16pm PT
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thanks Wen for putting words to some of the things i've been feeling...
this very recent and publicly played out accident has been unspeakably brutal and was heartbreakingly exemplary of something that i have found to be intrinsic in being a part of the mountain climbing/skiing community [and i don't experience it to the same depth with any of other endeavours/groups i'm involved in]: the semi-regular loss of some of the most elite, as well as an in general semi-regular loss of a few of those in their prime.
and i think your title quite succinctly captures the emotional reality that the above physical reality manifests.
and so while i'd never thought about it this way before... i do think you have touched on a truth that i had never put words to/seen words put to: there is a collective grief to being a climber.
while it's also true that there is a "collective grief to being human", it seems to me that the heat in the frying pan that is mountain climbing/skiing is turned up just a little hotter than is in general the case... [at least at "this" point/place in history/space]
i also want to thank Ghost for his response.
he said everything i might have hoped to say about my own relationship with these endeavours... but much more succinctly and eloquently.
peace all.
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