Afterword

I want, by understanding myself, to understand others.
I want to be all that I am capable of becoming. . . .
This all sounds very strenuous and serious.
But now that I have wrestled with it,
it’s no longer so. I feel happy—deep down.
All is well.

Katherine Mansfield, Journal

Near the end of the summer of 2000, six months after Guy’s suicide, I attended a local production of Strauss’s opera Ariadne auf Naxos. In the climactic moments Ariadne and the god Bacchus evoke in a duet of musical flight the transformation: the step across from life to death.

Strauss’s soaring outpouring of golden notes transports me up to the Franconia Ridge. The temperature plummets below zero, and the air turns jagged as the sun’s warmth flees the earth, lifting last of all from the high mountain ridges and leaving behind an unsurvivable arctic cold. I see Guy, crouched among the hoar-frosted boulders in the alpenglow, the sole audience in the front-and-center seat, star in his own performance witnessed by no one.

At that moment, in the grip of Strauss’s music, I feel Guy’s transformation.

During the past months I had tried to imagine what embracing death was like for him. I had hoped that at the end, as the unstoppable cold seeped in, he achieved a oneness, a final revelation that his mind, attuned to the nineteenth century’s perception of the sublime in nature, could grasp. Especially I had hoped he sensed that absorption into the wild that meant everything to him in life.

In the course of writing this book I have come to see that I wanted more. I wanted Guy’s burden—the grief and guilt and blame, all the shame—to lift like mist on a summer morning. I wanted Guy to forgive himself.

On the heels of Guy’s death I received hundreds of letters. Most of them were from friends, but some came from people I had never met who had read about Guy’s death in the newspapers and magazine articles. I answered them all. I wanted to respond to everyone who was reaching out to me. His suicide provoked a spectrum of reactions. “Guy was my hero,” a friend wrote.“I hope I can be that brave when the time comes.” Another said: “Oh, Laura, his death was such a waste. He was so talented, with so much still to offer the world.” The big question—“How could you let it all happen?”—was never voiced. At that time I could not have guessed that was what everyone was asking themselves but did not dare to ask me. Back then I was very far from asking it of myself.

In the first month of 2003 I traveled to Boston to visit a Shady Hill School classmate of Guy’s, Gil Murray, who I knew wanted to talk about Guy. After I returned home I received a note from Gil, dated, by coincidence, February 6, 2003—three years to the day after Guy walked up the wintry path to the summit of Mount Lafayette. Gil wrote: “Yes, it helped so much to talk to you about Guy’s life and your ongoing life. I think part of my dilemma was in feeling alone with my questions. Was I being disloyal—too critical? I think now I can put Guy away with fondness for his humor, drive, and style, and sadness at his vanity and egocentrism contributing to his death.”

This conversation with Gil had helped me too, though even three years later I was surprised, and a little disturbed, that Gil would use words like “vanity and egocentrism” in describing Guy. But I was willing to pass them over for his description of feeling fond of Guy’s “humor, drive, and style.” Those were the words I entirely agreed with, the words I wanted applied to Guy.

So I was especially grateful for my friend Lou Cornell’s letter of May 27, 2003:

Guy’s nobility of spirit, combined with an extraordinary force of character, gave him the power to lead a good life—something that many of us resolve to do but fail to accomplish because we lack the qualities that Guy so eminently possessed. We muddle through taking life as it comes, and, if we’re lucky, succeed to some degree in inhabiting the world without messing it up too much. Guy was different. He planned his life carefully, carried out his plans with force and deliberation, and took responsibility (too much truthfully) for what he considered his failures. His end was therefore much closer to tragedy than anything I’ve ever encountered.

Though Lou wasn’t exactly saying it, I liked thinking of Guy as the tragic hero. Others had written me along these lines, and I had taken comfort that people were saying such nice things about Guy. I told myself that he would have liked being seen this way and would have handled it with appropriate modesty. It wasn’t until much later that I began to realize that while a part of Guy might have relished being called a hero, he would have turned the phrase against himself because he, unlike everyone else, knew that it was utterly false.

In 2003 Chip Brown published a book on Guy’s life and death called Good Morning Midnight. Chip’s visits and our conversations about Guy had all been very positive, even moving, experiences for me. The year before, an ardent group of mountain friends had established a memorial fund for Guy that continues his vision and work of stewardship in the alpine world of the Northeast—the Guy Waterman Alpine Stewardship Fund (www.watermanfund.org). The Good Life Center, the group that Guy and I had donated our land to, was ready to take over at Barra, and as soon as I got settled in my new house I began work on this book. I’m trying to find out what happened to me, I told friends who asked why I was writing a memoir.

As I worked I thought about my friend Annie Barry. I had betrayed Guy’s confidence by telling Annie what Guy was going to do. She’d elbowed her way rather dramatically onstage at the last moment. I was still mad at her for this, and I still thought she didn’t understand. If she had understood, I repeatedly told myself, she would never have acted as she did.

Finally, I finished writing.After I decided to look over the manuscript for the last time before turning it in to my publisher, I pulled Annie’s letter—the one I asked her not to write—out of the file and reread it. I had already read it twenty, maybe fifty times and always ended up stuffing it back in the folder, feeling certain once again that Annie was wrong, just plain wrong. She had urged me to think about why I was keeping Guy’s secret. She had wanted me to get help, if not for Guy, who didn’t want help, at least for myself.At the time, I didn’t understand what Annie meant by secrecy because, after all, wasn’t Guy, by telling me his plan, being honest with me? And I didn’t need help either, I told myself, certainly not from a psychiatrist, a breed Guy thought the worst of, and right then I was living entirely in Guy’s world. This time, when I read her letter, I had reached a point in my own process of discovery where I understood what Annie was saying. Through the journey of writing this book, I was at last able to answer for myself that burning question: How could I have supported my husband in his plan to commit suicide? I had finally reached this point, the destination, the last stop where I could step off the train.

But before I could properly savor this victory, another question appeared. If I had known then what I know now, could I have helped Guy? Could I have made a difference in the outcome? First, I told myself, I would have had to come to grips with that underlying terror of my father’s alcoholism. This was the same terror that I could feel around Guy and that could hold me immobile. Perhaps, I told myself, if I had been able to understand that terror before Johnny’s descent into craziness and death . . . then. . . . But Guy would have had to want my help. He would have had to ask. . . .

On July 9, 2004, I received a letter from my friend Doug Mayer, a letter he had written to someone else who had written with questions about Guy. Doug wrote:

Guy was extremely tough about taking personal responsibility for one’s actions. I found that admirable, in an era when everyone seems to be passing the buck. This is an especially interesting aspect to his personality, because I think it was also his downfall. He was unable to open up to Laura and friends, and never really found true love in this sense. In the end, that inability endears him to those of us who knew him best, creating a permanent sense of loyalty and protectiveness. In a sense this quality makes him a tragic figure, which only creates a tighter, sadder, more heartfelt bond.

Doug, a close friend, had helped to carry Guy’s body down off the mountain, and I knew he had been struggling to make sense of Guy’s suicide. Reading Doug’s words, I was reassured that some of us had come a long distance toward understanding this complex and intriguing man who had kept so much of himself beyond our reach and about whom much, we knew, would remain mysterious. I knew also that in spite of these personal struggles with the meaning of Guy’s death, we still loved him. I, for my part, would have married him all over again.

How do I feel now about how we lived at Barra? This was a life that embraced an extreme. Most people, I imagine, saw us as living with a degree of privation that was probably not necessary. And I can see now that our life, so stripped as it was of “modern conveniences,” probably looked strange to the outside world. Many visitors said to us: “We’d like to live like this, but. . . .” Often the sentence was never finished. What they meant was that some parts of our life were wonderfully compelling (the garden, being outside so much), but other parts (hauling every drop of water, using the outhouse at twenty below) were decidedly not.

But I can still say that nothing about our life felt like hardship to me. I had embraced Guy’s vision of Barra because it gave me the freedom I needed too. Freedom to create a life, freedom to learn, freedom to be myself. Freedom to share a life with Guy in the only way he could live. This was especially true at the beginning.As Guy’s depression deepened I put restraints upon myself. And then the way we chose to live at Barra became even more important to me. Our life lived on the land was full and whole. We fit into the seasonal round. What we did there was all of a piece, not fragmented, and we found peace of mind as we performed the daily routines, the rituals of fetching water and working up wood. By placing ourselves in a spot that made us work for our nourishment and comfort, we put ourselves in direct touch with what was elemental. Through our physical work, we eliminated,as it were, the middleman and plugged into a life that more fully embraced the natural world and the land. Without realizing the implications, we had forged a hot-line connection that did as much for our bodily health as it did for the health of our spirits. Guy needed this or Barra never would have happened, and I came to need it too.

Has living with plumbing and electricity now changed my life? Oh, yes! I have lost by gaining these conveniences. I live further now from the essence of things. But a few conveniences fit my circumstances, and I have picked and chosen what I need in my life without Guy, which is a life more about writing and less about working up wood. There is some of that, however, as well as growing vegetables and flowers, blueberries and fruit trees, and reading books—though none aloud.

But in some ways very little has changed. The values I learned by living all those years at Barra will never leave me. “It is good to take care of a piece of land” was how Guy put it. We learned by living on the land how to care for it. We learned to live lightly. We learned to love the land. If future visitors to Barra can take away one thing, I hope it may be that.

If I want to visit Barra today, I put on my boots and make the two-mile walk up through the village, past the church and the library, across the bridge, and onto the dirt road that narrowly twists and turns as it enters the woods. When it reaches the crest it drops steeply and becomes a path leading to a clearing—still its own contained world. Here is the cabin sheltered by the rock ledge hillside on the north, and the garden dreaming in the afternoon sun.