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The photo of the man prone on the mountain is that of myself—taken three decades ago by my best friend at that time.  The picture was taken as I died of pulmonary and cerebral edema on the North face of Mt. Kenya in East Africa. 

But the picture is not the end of the tale.  There is much more to it than the finality of death….

Mt. Kenya North Face: July 28, 1978

I became conscious and was instantly afraid that I had gone insane as death whispered in my ear that morning.  I couldn’t remember who I was.  I looked at my climbing partner attached to the rock wall below Firman’s Tower and could not remember who he was, either.  I saw everything as if I were looking through the wrong end of binoculars—everything impossibly extended.  And everything moved in slow motion—moving through a dirty and killing Jello.  Death whispered in my ear as I struggled to tie the laces of my climbing boots.  I slowly tried to stuff my sleeping bag and bivouac sack into my rucksack.  I was ready to begin a crippled retreat down the face—afflicted by a profound and unknown illness. 

I could not stand.  No balance.  Vision constricted.  I laconically got into my climbing harness and started the first of many rappels down the face to the base of the technical climb.  I passed out with a half mile of air beneath my heels.  I slammed into the wall and was rudely revived.  The basalt and feldspar rocks were inches from my face as the wind whistled through my helmet.  Despite my passing out, my right hand still held the rappel rope tightly in the consummate….death grip.  The death whisper seemed everywhere around me.

In a cramped and wet chimney, I was nearly out of rappel rope when I spied the old piton.  It had obviously been placed there years before and it was dangerously loose.  I could wiggle the pin back and forth in the crack.  Without any other alternatives, I clipped my body into the old, loose piton and waited for my partner to follow me down.  Crowded together in the narrow chimney, I clipped my partner onto the piton, as well.  I then took the rope and ran it through a carabiner which I clipped onto the lone piton.  My partner’s weight and my weight on the rappel rope was held by an ancient piece of hardware that moved freely within the crack.  If the pin pulled out, we all would both fall a half mile to our deaths.

I remember my partner’s look of disbelief as I started to rappel off the piton.  Mustering my last bit of energy, I offered my partner a dark-humor comment: “What?  We aren’t going to make it anyway.”  I rappelled down the face.

Life was beyond desperate.  My lungs were filling with blood and fluid due to the pulmonary edema.  My head felt like it would explode and I could barely balance enough to sit upright due to the pressure on my brain from the cerebral edema.  Through a nightmare of white exhaustion and indescribable fatigue I found myself hanging ten feet over the terrace that was at the base of the technical climb.  No longer able to even hold onto the rope, I fell in a heap on the scree.  I lay there spitting blood and lung tissue, the death whisper everywhere about me—within me.

Unable to stand, I began to….crawl.  Down through the boulder fields, and sliding down steep rock ramps on outstretched arms….I crawled.  I began to cough up and spit blood.  I would spit the bloody phlegm on the ground between my hands.  I crawled.  Hours later I intuitively knew that I should not be spitting my blood fluid out, but instead, shoud retain it.  I began to swallow gouts of blood as I . . . . crawled.

Have you ever crawled for a day?  I still wonder at how I could have done it.  I have been back on the North Face of Mt. Kenya.  I have gone up and down those same boulder fields.  Up and down the North face.  And I have no idea how I did that. 

I crawled down to high camp and smelled the burning Kerex of mountain stoves and heard the soft metal sounds of cook pots being washed.  I looked up at another man who addressed me with a British accent.

“Are you okay?”

“Okay?  Hell, I’ve got pulmonary edema.  You can hear my lungs from there.”

“Can you carry on?”

Such a British thing to say.  Without answering I pulled myself to standing and leaned on a boulder to try and pack up our high-camp equipment.  I was hopelessly ineffective.  With a lightened pack and my partner carrying a huge load, I got between my unknown friend and the Brit and, in the best British hard-man tradition….carried on.

The Brit was a doctor on a team that had just got to high camp.  They had a radio and called out a message to park headquarters that a sick climber was coming down the Sirimon route between two other climbers.  In 1978, the only treatment of high altitude pulmonary or cerebral edema was to just get the victim down the mountain—lose as much altitude as possible.  A helicopter rescue was not an option since only jet helicopters could function at that altitude.  Kenya owned no jet helicopters.

Propped between the doc and my friend, I stumbled down the mountain in a nightmare of exhaustion, dehydration and a deep spiritual fatigue.  We walked….and walked.  The death whisper was everywhere about us.

I remember my death quite clearly.  Shipton’s Caves—about 13,000 feet and my breathing center is erratic and in danger of shutting down.  Morphine injected.  Liquid fire courses through my veins and my breathing relaxes….and stops.  No heart beat.  No breathing.  I lay there in my bivouac sack in the sun.  Surrounded by elephant grass and basalt boulders—I see myself as though I were ten feet above my body.  My face turned a dark blue.  My friend takes a picture of a familiar corpse, as the French climbers looked at my body and without speaking, go on and up the mountain.

One doesn’t find death.  Death finds you.  And you are rotten glad of it.  It is a wonderful thing.  A gentle thing.  Contrasted to the hell I had suffered for days, death was peace and an immense happiness.  I was so….safe.  The desperate nightmares of surviving were washed away by the safety of death.  Without benefit of a body, I am certain that my spirit smiled as all of reality was severed….and floated away on silent manta wings.

I had left an infant daughter and a wife back home in Lincoln.  And suddenly, like a speck of dust in the eye of the Godhood, I realized I must somehow come back.  I faced the impossible job of having to….dream myself back to life.

The first thing I remember was hearing the religious singing.  At first I was pleased with hearing the psalms of my bible-school youth.  Hearing that angelic singing and not feeling the heat of eternal damnation, I had obviously made the cut.

Then I was immensely angry at myself for leaving my daughter without a father and my wife without a husband.  I had broken my commitments.

Upon opening my eyes I saw the African nuns standing around my hospital bed, singing.  I looked over to my left and an impossibly wrinkled Mother Superior said in a thick, French accent, “We pray for you.  We sing for you.”

I passed out again and a day later woke to see my friend staring at me, anxious and with concern on his face.  I was in a mission hospital outside of N’yere.  We were both deeply wounded men.  We had each been through our own personal hell on the mountain.  His eyes were older than they were a few weeks before.  He says that my eyes were dead and it seemed as if I were someplace very far away.

For years after that, I did not trust the permanence of my dreaming—my creation of a life and of a history.  The world sometimes seemed fleeting and translucent.  I would often see myself in the third person. 

One time when on a night hike with Malindi, my daughter, she found her echo off the dam of Holmes Lake.  She giggled and would shout and laugh at the echo.

“You try it daddy!”

I shouted.  No echo came back.  Malindi stared at me with a puzzled look.

Many wonder but are too polite to ask the questions.  What is it like to die?  Did you see the tunnel of light?  Did you see anybody there?  Did your life flash in front of you?  My death is a very personal thing, and it totally changed my life.  And as I grew older, I realized how powerful that change could be—and how death could manifest such good things in a life.  I have grown to see my death as a great gift.

Imagine a kind of peaceful fearlessness.  Being tempered by death itself, I am no longer afraid of death.  Without that primal fear, other fears seem to have also disappeared.  As well, my death and dying experience has given me a unique perspective on life, and the metrics of problems and challenges. 

I have done the hardest thing that I will ever have to do.  That offers me a uniquely relaxed confidence.  Everything is, as my daughter used to say, “Easy side down now.”

Also, people will come to me and say, We really have a problem, or This is really bad.  As I reflect on crawling down through the boulders, spitting my own blood—dying, I rarely find any real problems and the situation is never that bad.  I have seen really bad, and it is just never that bad.

And when faced with my own personal challenges— my divorce—past business difficulties—illness and injury—along with the flotsam and jetsam of life’s disappointments….I have only to retrieve and look at that old photo to realize that, no, it really isn’t that bad—and no, it isn’t really that hard.