Lilly read slowly and methodically and forced herself from one sentence to the next. The accident was described in enough detail to make it clear a loose bolder on a hairpin turn was responsible. One climber was a local Frenchman who’d suffered no injuries. The other was a young American on his first trip to Europe. Both climbers were named. The young American was Simon. There was no mistake. But ‘Near Death’ meant still alive. She grabbed at the only hope she had and looked for the author of the article at the top of the page. That’s when she saw the piece was dated the day before. She dashed to the phone and spent the next twenty minutes being passed around the newsroom. Finally she heard the author’s name.
“I read your piece on the climber who was in the fall in France” she said into the phone as slowly as she could. “I’m family. Please, do you have any other information about him?” There was a long pause on the other end of the phone. “Please…” she begged. He could probably tell her desperation was genuine, so he finally answered.
“I just finished a follow-up article for the late addition. You can buy it on the stand already.”
“Is the climber alright?” she asked in barely a whisper. There was a longer silence.
Then the writer said to her quietly, “The injured climber was flown from the mountains to a Paris hospital where he died a few hours ago. You can read the rest of the details in my article.” She didn’t hear what else he said. Lilly knew nothing would ever be the same.
There was no way to predict the days that followed. She walked around in a haze of pain, wondering why everyone on the street didn’t look the way she did. She couldn’t believe life could be so daily when this horrendous cataclysm had just occurred. She decided to keep the agony to herself. Somehow she knew that was the best way to perpetuate and intensify the pain, which seemed like a fitting homage. She wanted to pay a heavy price for still being alive. The horrifying truth that all of Simon’s wonderful hopes and dreams for the future were over filled her with a sense of loss far greater than her own. His infectious optimism and keen sense of promise would come to nothing. His warmth and inclusiveness would have no more effect on the world. The thought of living without him and his smile seemed impossible; and Lilly was going to be alone.
In keeping with her decision to protect and nurture her private hurt, the trip to Europe had to go on. Dropping out at the last minute would give rise to too many questions and she was in no condition to answer them. She also considered it the best way to say good bye and get close to some of the places Simon had visited just before he died. The irony of his memorial service at home being held the same day she stepped off the plane in France some five thousand miles away didn’t escape her. The whole crazy summer felt like a nightmare of missed opportunities and lost dreams.
Admittedly there were signs of clearing along the way. A day spent in the heather of ‘Robert Burns Country’ in Scotland or immersed at Stratford-upon-Avon in the best of the Bard’s plays worked wonders. Yet every stop reminded her of the side trips once planned and now cruelly canceled, and much of the time she felt marginalized to the point of not existing. She was there but not there; reacting but numb; breathing but continuously fighting for air. She tried to stay upright but most of the time she failed.
The best and the worst of the trip occurred in the mountains where their travels lead them mostly at the end of the summer. Getting out of cities and towns and back to the beauty of the Alps would ordinarily have put everything right in Lilly’s life. And in many ways it still did. But smelling the heady aroma of cured leather coming out of boot shops on the main street of Zermatt stopped her in her tracks. She hadn’t thought about climbing for months. She’d never climb another mountain with Simon, and the white cloud that clung to the top of the Matterhorn every morning like a piece of loose cotton fluff seemed to taunt her. It was suggesting she was stuck to the ground (as she was) and asking what she was going to do down there with the rest of her life. She didn’t have a clue. But she could also sense that ending the trip as they were with one mountain experience after another was working some kind of cure. The medicine hurt, but she realized that the trip to Germany and the stay in the small pension along the mighty Rhine River was finally turning the tide.
The clock on the pension wall showed five; the light turned a softer gray and Lilly heard some music. It must have been the sound that had woken her earlier. Voices rose slowly in harmony and floated gently in the cool air from somewhere below the open window. Maybe she was dreaming and the effect lingered, but the longer she listened, the more she knew the voices were human and present. Only the banks of the Rhine were out there, and in a few minutes she remembered the fishermen talking about folding their nets before dawn to load on their boats for the day. “We sing to bring us together and make the work go more smoothly”, one of them explained. The strength of their male voices grew in a continuous refrain, specifically unfamiliar yet universally recognizable. Lilly wondered why she’d never heard anything so beautiful before and what kind of magic could make the song so singular.
She pictured them preparing their boats for the day’s fishing while they sang and worked. She knew their song was for her too. Waiting while the first strokes of gray and then pink brushed the sky, she heard the language without words. The song explained why life must move on like that huge river and how human existence is tied to both nature and itself. She understood it without knowing why. Thinking of things bigger than humanity, yet simple enough to bind people together as that song did, Lilly was glad she’d been given a chance to make the trip; and she was even glad to be alive, painful though it might be.
Returning home a few days later, Lilly looked out of her airplane’s window and saw the skyline of New York. She was amazed at the potential spread out below her. She’d been all over Europe for months but hadn’t seen anything to compare with the beauty and optimism bound up in the city. Forehead pressed against the window, she knew it was a good thing she’d started looking out again; beyond the horizon, where anything might happen. To be sure the anything wouldn’t include Simon, but the fishermen’s song had pulled Lilly back into life in a way nothing else could. What she’d do with that provocation was anybody’s guess. She was alone, but not lonely; and she was glad to be alive.
“Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
By Sidney S. Stark