Runout #30: Grief is … OK

The author Joan Didion once observed that, “Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.”

Two years ago this week, Inge Perkins and Hayden Kennedy, who was one of my best friends, died. The news of his death was just devastating in a way that I had never experienced. I found myself thrashing, unable to stand, also unable to lie down—just sobbing uncontrollably. It was as if some unseen hand had flipped a switch and was now in complete control of my body.

This uncanny loss of my own physical autonomy continued, in spasms and waves, throughout the day—and the next day, and the day after that. Grief is a full-body experience. Upon finding out the news, my wife, Jen, and I, and our daughter, Piper, met Chris Kalous and his son, Miles, and we hiked up Red Hill, a popular hiking trail that overlooks Carbondale and provides a direct line of sight to the Kennedy household where Hayden grew up. It was the first snow of the year, which, in part, explained the circumstances of this tragedy. Inge was buried in an avalanche in the Montana backcountry. Hayden survived the avalanche, but he was so overcome by guilt and grief that his sweet Inge was gone that he went home and took his own life later that night.

As I record this, I’m looking out my window as the first snowflakes of the year are falling. Life moves in these strange cycles. Each year, I get a little older, and my list of friends who have died from climbing gets a little bit longer.

I had never really understood what grief was until Hayden was gone. It’s an emotion like love—you don’t know what it is until it happens to you. And like love, grief is the other side of that same emotional coin, which retains such incredible power over us. You cannot control or command who you love, and the same can be said of who you will grieve when they’re gone. It’s an emotion that commands awe and respect, and mostly, it’s an honor to feel that deeply about anyone.

This week Chris and I speak to Madeline Sorkin and Henna Taylor, two wonderful people, and the dynamic wife and wife duo who are behind the Climbing Grief Fund, an initiative to provide support to climbers through increasing access to mental health care as well as advancing the conversations around grief.

That we had this conversation right on the anniversary of Hayden and Inge’s deaths was completely coincidental—but certainly lucky, at least for Chris and I, because we got to talk about Hayden and grief in general. The first snow of the year may always be tough … we know that more storms lie ahead. But there is something to be said for embracing that inevitably with a certain stoic mindset, which isn’t to say a suppression of emotion, but an open embrace of it, and a reminder to just be humble to a force that can just overcome your entire being. Ironically, this can be what makes us feel most alive.

The Grief Fund at the AAC