I had only been home from the Grand Canyon a few days when Mark had another relapse, and we pushed him into his third rehab program. This time, he walked out early, saying he had it under control, but the journal Mark kept during the program expressed much more doubt. It was titled “Anita, My Love.”
Anita was my first love. Anita Drink was her full name. It was a powerful love. I had my first drink at 13 years old. She made me feel invincible. She took all my fears and inhibitions away. With her, I could do no wrong. I was funnier, stronger, the life of the party. I could have anything I wanted. I charged through my 20’s, working hard, playing hard, partying hard. I did some crazy things. Lots of girlfriends. Some I cared for, but they all lost out to Anita.
In my 30’s, I tried to settle down. I became a parent to a beautiful amazing little girl, and I felt deep satisfying love, like nothing I’d ever felt before. By experiencing this new kind of love, I knew what I felt for Anita was false. So I tried to split up with her. I’d go for a few months without seeing her, but I’d always find her again, or she’d find me. Finally, I made up my mind to leave her for good. I realized that everything bad in my life, bad decisions, hurting others, shame, self-hatred, pain, regret, was all because of her. But she was having none of that. She wouldn’t let me go. If she couldn’t have me, no one could. Now I hated her and wanted a divorce. More than that, I wanted her gone for good. I needed to bury her in a coffin with five strong padlocks that could never be broken. I would lower the coffin into a twenty-foot hole and fill it in with concrete. I know this may sound drastic, but Anita has been known to escape like Houdini. To be honest, I hated to see her go, but I knew with every fiber of my body, she deserved to go where I was sending her.
So I told her she was finished, but she changed right before my eyes. She went from a beautiful woman to a heavyweight boxer, and not just any boxer. She was the world champion, and we were in the title fight. She kicked my ass and sent me sprawling and bleeding in the corner, but I keep crawling back for more. I know she’s not my love anymore. She’s my enemy. I’ll probably get my ass kicked again, and I don’t know if I can ever win this, but I’ll never stop crawling back into the ring to fight her again and again, because I know real love now, and for that, I want to live.
Eddi, my dad, and I got the doctor on the phone, and he spoke bluntly. “Mark is a really tough case. His disease is profound. I’ve seen it before, and I hate to tell you this, but he is either going to wind up in jail or dead.”
After another family huddle, it had finally sunk in; this was becoming life or death. Eddi offered to have Mark come up to live with his family—his wife and four kids. Mark was great the first several days, putting the kids to bed and helping cook and do dishes, even vacuuming and dusting the house. Mark and Eddi spent each evening at the end of Eddi’s dock, fishing for catfish and reliving old stories late into the night, cans of iced tea in their hands instead of beers. On the fourth day, however, while Eddi was at work, Mark went to the cash drawer, walked three miles to a convenience store, and got some bottles of wine. When Eddi came home, Mark was floundering around the living room, incoherent and belligerent. “You can’t do this here,” Eddi said, angry and disappointed. “I’ve got four little kids now, and I’ve got to keep them safe.” So with tears pouring down his face, Eddi drove Mark to the bus station and gave him sixty bucks for a bus ticket. “There should be fifteen left over for food,” he said. Mark didn’t use the money for a ticket. He hung out on a bench in the station for two more days, drinking the money away with a few bums. One of the attendants finally called Eddi. He drove back and this time bought the ticket for Mark and put it in his hand.
A few weeks later, I flew to Orlando and met my dad. Together, we drove to Mark’s house, and when we arrived, his door was locked, and the electricity had been turned off again. We pounded on his door, but he didn’t answer, so we went around the back and knocked on the windows. Finally, after a long time, he came shuffling to the door. He was in bad shape. I hugged him, and he shuddered a little. His face and hands were crusted with dried blood, and I felt a homemade sling around one arm, from a wrapped ACE bandage. He was a frightened and withdrawn shell of his former gregarious self.
“What happened, Mark?” I asked.
He’d been in a car accident. A couple of nights before, he’d been driving and had seen shadowy people on the road. He swerved to miss them and crashed his truck into some trees. On the side of the road, he looked again, and they weren’t there anymore. It was just an empty road. “I think they were spirits coming to get me,” he said. “But there’s no way they were going to catch me. I took off running through the woods.”
Mark climbed over chain-link fences and concrete walls and found a strip mall. He stole a bike from a rack outside a restaurant and rode it all the way home. As he pedaled, he looked up and saw hooded demons reaching down from the trees with long arms to grab him and pull him up. He weaved and dodged their shadowy hands. “It was the most terrifying ride of my life,” he said. “But I was flying, going so fast, they couldn’t catch me.”
That night, the ghosts had come for him again. “I saw them sneaking up in the backyard,” he said, “and I ran out and smashed them with a baseball bat.”
Outside the window were the fractured remnants of these nightmares. I walked around his backyard crunching over the decorative ceramic statues, fountains, and garden gnomes, now all shattered to pieces. Finding his abandoned truck, the police had come to his house. “They banged on the door, but I hid, and they eventually went away.”
We didn’t know what to do, but he hadn’t eaten since the accident, so we took him out to dinner to what had been his favorite restaurant, Steak and Ale. In happier days, he had said, “It’s the best salad bar you’ll ever eat, with giant plates that are prechilled, shredded cheese, cloves of garlic, and real bacon bits.”
Mark had loved being in charge of making my salad. He’d bring the plate back to the table and slap it down, heaping tall with all the fixings. “How’s that for a salad?” he’d say proudly, but this dinner was somber, with none of the past chatter. The only words spoken were my father’s as he laid out the plan to get Mark’s electricity turned back on.
I sat there desperately trying to think of solutions. Maybe I could drop my upcoming climbs and move down there. I could keep his house clean and make sure he wasn’t drinking. We could take taxis to the grocery store to get food. I bet sometimes his friends could drive us too. But almost as soon as these thoughts crossed my mind, the plan disintegrated as I recalled all the previous failed attempts at help: the multiple drives back and forth to Orlando my dad had made, the dozens of late-night phone calls, all the rehab treatments from which he’d left early. Eddi had even tried having Mark live with his family. All had failed. If I moved in with him, it wouldn’t be a week before I was trying to wrestle the beer cans out of his hands and being abruptly booted out the door. Mark Weihenmayer would not be taking orders from his little bro, I realized with a heavy heart.
After dinner, we drove him home. Mark got out of the car, and I gave him a hug. He didn’t hug back. His one arm lay in a sling; the other hung limply at his side. I just couldn’t stand it anymore. “Mark, man, you know I love you,” I said, “but I think you’re going to kill yourself.”
He took a few steps up his driveway toward his house and then turned around. When he did, he was crying. I was crying too. “I never gave up on you,” he yelled with anger and pain, “so don’t you give up on me! Don’t you ever give up on me!”
* * *
Just two weeks later, I sat with my family squeezed into couches and chairs at Eddi’s house near Pensacola, watching old Super 8 videos of our family adventures around the world. One was of my Denali summit back in 1995. As I listened, I allowed myself to relive the experience, filled with crushing exhaustion and suffering, mixed with steep pinnacles of elation. Denali is the tallest peak in North America, my first of the Seven Summits and one of the hardest. At 4:30, after nineteen backbreaking days in the Alaska Range, we’d reached the summit. I hadn’t known at the time, but it turned out it was Helen Keller’s birthday. And the best part of that thirty-below-zero summit was getting to share it with my family who were there with me, in a way. As we took our last plodding steps, circling above us was an Otter plane containing my father, Ellie, Eddi, and Mark. As we heard the plane engine approaching, my team and I cheered and waved our ski poles. We had timed it perfectly by radioing down to base camp operator Annie, who radioed out to the four Weihenmayers waiting in Talkeetna on a dirt runway. They’d been hanging out for four days while we sat through a storm up high. The video is priceless. Ellie, who was on the couch watching beside me, described the cloudy image, the lens pointing downward through a dirty cabin window, toward seven little red dots on a lump of snow in space, with a sea of white all around.
Behind the camera was Mark, narrating as always. His voice ramped with energy as he yelled against the roar of the engine, “There they are! Unbelievable! There they are! Ellie, you see ’em down there?”
The camera turned toward Ellie, all bundled up, with a furry fleece hat, headset over her ears, and oxygen mask covering her face. Her eyes were wide with awe and amazement.
Mark continued to shout, “You see ’em, Ed Boy? Do you guys see ’em? I think they’re waving. That’s my little brother down there. He did it. He’s on the summit. That’s my bro. Taught him everything he knows.”
His voice continued through a string of commentary and on-the-spot interviews with the family. As our grandmother always said, his jaw never stopped flapping in the breeze. “How about a cheer?” he yelled. “You guys ready?”
The four all erupted into a hip-hip-hurray, and Mark then let out a loud roar of pleasure, pure joy, pure emotion. Not to say my oldest brother was innocent in most ways, but at that moment, his voice had a childlike love and, yes, even innocence that I’ll always associate with Mark. We rewound the DVD player and listened again and again to Mark’s voice shouting down on me from the window of the plane. He was right. Mark had never given up on me, and that made the pain a thousand times worse, like a knife stabbing into my heart. I had gotten a team of Tibetan blind kids to twenty-one thousand feet on Mount Everest and another team of blind kids safely down the Grand Canyon; I’d carried a paraplegic on my back for over a mile, and I’d climbed to over twenty thousand feet on Denali with my family looking down, but in the end, I couldn’t save my big brother. A neighbor had found Mark lying peacefully on his couch. This time, Mark hadn’t been able to pound his heart back into beating.
A plate lay on the coffee table next to him. An empty package of ground beef lay on his counter next to a spatula and a dirty skillet on the stove. It looked like he’d just eaten lunch, then settled onto the couch to take a nap. There wasn’t any beer in the refrigerator either; he must have been on another dry spell. He was forty-six years old. I reviewed the evidence like a detective: the dirty skillet, the spatula, the empty plate, all seemed trivial on the surface, but somehow felt like clues. Maybe it was because they symbolized that he hadn’t planned to die that day, that he was still hoping to beat this thing and return to being a father again. Despite his yearning, he hadn’t been able to break through the brick wall, but, instead, had beaten his head against it, over and over, until his body had failed him. But the burger in his belly was the indisputable proof that he was still fighting. It was the fuel he planned to carry him forward into his future.
Nobody ever expects to bury their own brother, but my dad, Eddi, and I stood together in the cemetery on a steaming July day in Jay, Florida. We passed the shovel around and dug a hole. Mark had been cremated, and I held the heavy bag, having trouble comprehending Mark being reduced to ashes and bits of bone. I placed him in the hole. Gabbi, now a tall, beautiful nine-year-old with wavy brown hair, had written a note for her dad. It simply read, “Remember me.” She placed it in the hole next to the ashes. We threw dirt on top and packed it down. He was resting right next to our mother, who’d also died at the same age of forty-six.
After the funeral, we returned home to Colorado, and I tried to move forward. Checking her e-mail, Ellie rushed over to me. I was on the living room floor playing with Emma, who was six now. “We got a picture today from the agency. They’ve connected with an orphanage in Kathmandu. There’s a little boy.”
“Well, describe him,” I said, bursting with anticipation.
“His name is Arjun Lama, and he’s four years old. He’s wearing an orange winter parka that looks way too big for him. He’s barefoot, and his feet are a little dirty, and they must be so cold. His face is kind of round, and his eyes are not looking straight ahead, but off to the side. He’s not smiling. I think he looks like a poet, about to tell us a secret, something so profound that it may change our whole world.”
As I listened, my daughter, Emma, and I were playing Polly Pockets. My job was to dress the little plastic people. I was attempting to put the little shoes and plastic pants onto Polly, which required immense patience and dexterity. As I tried to get a pair of groovy bell-bottom pants onto Polly’s rubber legs, I split the seams. Emma reached for it. “No, Daddy,” she squealed. “Not like that. You broke it.”
I must have been channeling Mark, because I laughed and said, “Ripped jeans are the rage these days, Emma. Don’t worry. Polly will love them.”
“No, she won’t,” Emma protested, about to cry.
Ellie, looking down at the chaos, said, “I think you need someone you can climb with, wrestle with, someone you can have burping contests with. Maybe a little boy, as active as Mark.”
A few days later, my friend and Mount Everest teammate Eric Alexander called and asked to take me on a climb. He knew I was grieving, and he had the perfect mountain picked out—Mount of the Holy Cross, a fourteen thousand–foot peak in Colorado’s Sawatch Range. It was named for the distinctive cross-shaped snowfield on the northeast face. Our route would be straight up the cross to the summit.
As we started up the couloir, it was frigid and an icy wind blew down the gulley into our faces. I lowered my numb, stinging face against the wind. Finally, the sun began creeping up behind us. It’s a curious thing, that when the first rays of the sun lift over the horizon, it actually gets colder for a time. Mountaineers know this as the coldest part of the day, a window of endurance as you look forward to the warmth of the day still to come. As I plunged my axe into the deep snow time and time again, I panted hard and my calves burned. I was also feeling drained, not from altitude, but from the lingering effects of the previous week. As we reached the intersection of the cross, we stopped, drove our axes into the snow, and anchored our packs to them. We sat on a protruding rock, sharing some cheese and an energy bar between us.
Eric is my friend of faith. He’s the best kind of Christian, never beating you over the head with his beliefs and never once in our friendship exhibiting any kind of dogma. But as we sat, I broached the subject. “How does a life get taken away?” I said. “Mark had so much to live for, and now it’s all gone, leaving his daughter to grow up without him—without a dad.”
Eric was quiet for a long time until it became an uncomfortable silence, like the void of oxygen in the mountain air. “None of it is fair,” he finally said. Then more silence. Finally, he resumed, “Did you know that historically it was the custom for people in times of mourning to actually lie in ashes? Isaiah 61 says God is going to take your mourning and give you beauty, to pick you up out of the ashes and make something new. The Hebrew word for ash is epher, and the word for joy is pheer. Move one letter and ashes becomes joy. I’m not sure what that beauty looks like for you, but perhaps it’s out there.”
As we started up again, the sun climbed higher in the sky, as if it were tracking us on our ascent. It shone down and finally warmed my back, and I admitted Eric had a point: Even in the midst of pain and struggle, there was a touch of beauty.
On the summit, Eric stepped away and let me have a minute alone. I squeezed into a cleft in the boulders and tried to pray for Mark, but I didn’t seem to have much to say. I gave up, listening to the sky and the wind howling and feeling the snowflakes stinging my face. For some reason, I thought about my old friend Sabriye, standing on a cold beach on the North Sea and feeling the unfairness and sadness bubbling up from within and merging with the stormy ocean and sky. That fury had led her to Tibet. So I decided to do the same and let the rage out of the box.
“You asshole!” I yelled. “What the hell is your problem? We were supposed to get old together and watch our kids grow up. When I went blind, it totally sucked, and you were there to help me, but you never let me help you back. You closed yourself off. You didn’t let anyone in. You left us. You didn’t have to leave us. It was your own fault. I never gave up on you!”
Then I sat silent for a while, spent, as the wind spiraled the snow around me like mini tornados. I didn’t want this to be the cold, bitter ending. I wanted to believe that Eric was right, that the wisdom of the Bible was right: that out of ashes could come something else, a new beginning.
But there was no denying it or changing it; Mark was now only ashes. Once, long ago, however, his future had been like an open road, all possibilities and potential, no sickness, no dependence, no disappointment. One of my father’s favorite stories recalled when Dad was a young marine driving across country with my mom and his newly adopted children. They’d been stationed at Kingsville airbase in Texas and had been reassigned to the Marine Corps air base in El Toro, California. They were all packed between suitcases in his red-and-white Plymouth Sport Fury convertible, he and my mom in the front and five-year-old Mark and six-year-old Suzanne in the back. The two kids sat up on the body of the car with their feet on the backseat. On training missions, my dad had touched down at El Toro a few times in his F-9, and he started singing, “California, here we come, right back where we started from. California here we come, California, here we come.”
Everyone joined in, and the whole family sang at the top of their lungs as they rolled across the Arizona desert, the hot wind rushing at their faces. The scene had always seemed rife with new beginnings, and I desperately wanted that now.
When I’d brought up the idea of adoption with friends, even close ones, some had said, “You have such a great life—why would you want to bring a wildcard into your family?”
I imagined a little boy pulling Emma’s ponytail and cheating at Monopoly, or maybe Buckets. It would definitely disrupt the order of our lives, I thought. I imagined Emma and her little brother dressing up for Halloween, and afterward, furiously trading for their favorite candy, or arguing over who would get the window seat. There would certainly be some tears. I wondered what Mark would do. Surely not the normal thing, the predictable thing, the boring thing. Maybe that wildcard was just what we needed, someone to draw us in, to lift us off our feet, spin us around until our lives were dizzy with chaos and joy. So I forced myself up. I was through wallowing in the ashes. I needed to follow my heart toward new beginnings.
“Arjun Lama,” I said silently. “Arjun Lama Weihenmayer.” It had kind of a ring to it.