I’d dealt with death all day. It seemed so close that morning on the edge of a mountain, and here it was again on the other end of the phone.
“Hey, Mamaw,” I said, willing my voice to sound natural.
“Hannah?” she asked.
“Yeah, it’s me,” I said. “How are you feeling?”
Her response was a series of unintelligible words and sounds.
“Mamaw?”
I pressed the phone hard against my ear and walked to the window hoping for a better connection.
“Hello?”
More words and noises. I couldn’t understand her. Then it was quiet.
“I love you, Mamaw,” I said.
There was silence for a moment until my mom came on. She explained that Mamaw was a little out of it. She started talking about what was going on at the house and who was there. But she sounded muffled like we were talking through tin cans.
She didn’t say the words, but I knew what she meant.
Mamaw was dying.
“Do you think she heard me?” I asked. “Did she hear me say I love her?”
My mom assured me that Mamaw knew I loved her and that she loved me too. I felt a knot of fear and sorrow pressing on my stomach.
I had a similar feeling that morning on a hike. I was vacationing with my friend and her family in Colorado. We got up early and hiked one of the highest lakes in the Rocky Mountain National Park.
For miles we climbed through pine trees and over angular rocks. Finally we got past the tree line where the views were sweeping and the air was thin.
We walked along the edge of a gorge, and I could feel the terror in my throat. I loved being up high, but I shook at the thought of tumbling into open air and shattering into a million pieces on the rocks below.
The path ended in a blanket of snow cloaking the trail. There were footprints across where someone had walked one foot in front of the other earlier that day. The snowdrift was huge, spilling down the mountain. At the bottom were black, knife-like rocks.
I thought about a book I’d purchased called Death, Despair and Second Chances in Rocky Mountain National Park. It was by a former Chief Ranger at the park and detailed stories of people throwing themselves off the tallest mountains in the park or slipping to their deaths from narrow trails.
As I leaned into the cold crystals, I thought about the hundreds of people who died every year doing stupid things like this. Then I thought about how sometimes it wasn’t their fault at all. Sometimes Mother Nature snapped her fingers and feeble humans slipped off shifting rocks or were struck by lightning. Sometimes Mother Nature asked Death to take things and never gave them back.
When I finally made it across, I was shaking and crying. Most of the group opted to finish the last part of the trail to the lake, but I couldn’t move. I sat at the edge of the snow cursing that we had to cross back.
The mountains reminded me of Mamaw. They were wild and strong, full of beauty and independence. They’d withstood decades of torrential rains and ruthless winds. But they were unwavering, faithful. Mamaw was the matriarch of our family. Just like the mountains, we revered and adored her.
My favorite photograph of her was old and weathered. She steered a powder blue speed boat across a lake, the wind snapped back her hair, her lips pressed into a smile. That was Mamaw — always smiling. She wore red lipstick and a string of creamy pearls. The spine of her black Bible was flimsy and the margins were full. She had a big family and a big laugh.
She was absolutely everything I wanted to be.
I wrote her letters and called her about everything. She was enthusiastic no matter how small the news. The ladies in her Sunday school class knew my GPA, what clubs I was in and which photos hung in my locker.
“I just wish I could see you all more,” she said at the end of every conversation.
I thought about that as we climbed through thick pine forests. All I could smell were pine needles in her backyard. When I inevitably tripped over roots in the trail, I thought about the patches of red clay in her front yard. Everything reminded me of Mamaw, reminded me that she was losing the battle to broken bones and cancer.
And yet, for the first time in my life, I felt alive. Even as my legs burned and my heart pounded, even as my lungs fought to breath and my ankles wobbled, the struggle to conquer a mountain set a fire inside me.
I was a stranger to the order of the mountains. They tested my stamina and my will. They called me to climb and beat me down every inch of the way. By the end of the week, I was exhausted. I’d given everything.
The final blow came early Friday morning. When my phone lit up, I saw my mom’s name on the screen. I knew what she was going to say.
My friend stood near the door watching my face turn from granite to furrowed to shattered. When I hung up the phone, I was sobbing. Mamaw was dead. My friend said comforting word. We ate breakfast and talked about “better places” and “no more pain.”
Then we drove to the foot of a mountain and like every day that week, we climbed. I cried intermittently, stumbling through the sobs that wracked my body. It was the longest hike of the week, past three alpine lakes with more than a 1000-foot elevation gain.
At the most difficult point, we had to climb a near-vertical series of boulders next to a raging waterfall. I couldn’t tell if my cheeks were wet from tears or the spray of cascading water. Either way, my eyes stung and my hands reached for something solid on the slippery rocks.
I missed Mamaw. I would never see her again and I felt like screaming. I let out a frustrated, tortured grunt. But my muscles were already there. They shuddered around my bones, weak and tired. I thought for sure they’d give out and I would fall backwards into rock and water.
When I crawled over the last boulder, there was a short path to a lake. The water was perfectly still and deep blue. Scraggily peaks jutted up from its shores, a severe interruption to the still beauty.
All at once, there was finality. This lake and those peaks would never move. They’d stood like that for centuries ignoring human things like love and death. And Mamaw was never coming back.
I tried to imagine if a mountain suddenly disappeared. How the landscape would look empty and broken. How everything that grew and depended on the mountain would suffer. How would people know what heights could be reached if the mountain wasn’t there to point to the heavens?
That little place was called Sky Pond. The mountains soared and the sky stooped and they met at a jagged peak. Maybe if I lifted my hands and stretched, she could reach me too.
