Living and Dying

I have an old file on my computer, which runs to almost 20,000 words, on lessons learnt while leading groups and recreating with friends in the Canadian backcountry. This document covers dozens of trips with multiple different groups, some friends who I knew well, others participants on trips I was leading who I met for the first time on the day of the trip. There are common themes that repeat again and again: communication, navigation and expectations are the three most frequent. Some mistakes I repeated again and again no matter how many lists and plans I made to avoid them.

On multiple occasions, we skied back to the cars in the near dark when we had either got turned around (aka a little bit lost), or, more commonly, my plans had been too ambitious for the group. These trips I remember well, chivying along the slower members of the group to keep moving even when they wanted to rest. Trying to impress upon people who just wanted to put their packs down and sit for a moment that doing so was not going to make an increasingly dire situation any better. I hated the fact that I made the same mistakes again and again, and the only way I could see for those errors to not be an indictment on my character was if there was a lesson, however small or seemingly unimportant, which I could prise out of these mini-epics.

I’m older now and more forgiving of myself and have been dragged, unwillingly, to a grudging realisation that simply living means making mistakes, some of which you may repeat multiple times despite your most fervent affirmations to “never do that again.” I might accept mistakes more easily, but I still want them to count for something, for there to be some lesson, inspiration or enlightenment that comes from encountering troubles that could have been avoided had you heeded the lessons of the past.

These days, as more people I know battle with incurable illnesses and walk hesitantly and despairingly towards death, I want there to be lessons we learn from the dying. I do not want these to be random events, unpredictable, unknowable, meaningless passages from all that was to what will never be again. There must be something the dying can teach us about living, or at the least that is what I want fervently to believe.

When my friend Rick died in 2012 in a massive rock fall on Mount Geike¹ there was no time to learn the lesson of a life lived large and without compromise. One moment Rick was there, the next he was gone. But Rick’s life was a lesson to all of us. Walk your own path, even if it is lonely, have strong opinions, but don’t push them onto others, when everyone else steps back, step forward – you are as strong as you believe yourself to be; if your joy comes from movement and exploration, as Rick’s did, keep moving, no matter what, it will be risky, but there is no reward without risk. If you can find companions for the journey, welcome them, but do not cede your goals simply because you must travel alone.

G passed at a time of her own choosing in early 2025. Not long before, we had walked the Munjip Track together. It was Anzac Day, and we talked the entire way, unusual for me as a confirmed introvert. But you could talk about anything with G and we did, our topics ranging across health and sickness, world politics, and local movements. We agreed on little except our determination to treat others with respect. G went gracefully, as deliberately and intentionally as she lived in life, the great lesson of her life was simply that: intention.

When I was young, like the young, I was swayed by motivational posters and self-help books. “Live every day as if it is your last,” a popular mantra of the late 20^th century. It was only as I got older that I realised that a life well lived can not be lived as if each day is your last. Eating chocolate chip ice cream for every meal and blowing all your money on one big trip is not commensurate with a life blessed with meaning and courage. We must forgo some pleasures, embrace some difficulties to truly live a life that brings joy. And, although I want to find meaning in every challenge faced and pain endured, I’m no longer sure every dying has a grand meaning that reaches beyond the end. Perhaps we can only truly find meaning in how a life was lived, from beginning to end, the pattern, rhythm and flow of a life, brushed broadly across a lifetime, long or short, sweet or sorrowful, with eyes wide open or firmly closed. Maybe, in the end, how you live is how you die. Like Rick, on a crazy wild adventure, or simply moving forward with blind tenacity.

1The editors of Accidents in North American Mountaineering classified Rick’s accident as “inadequate protection, failure to test holds” which makes it seem as if Rick was reckless and blasé. Rick, at 71, and a veteran of five decades in the mountains – much of it in the notoriously loose and rubbly Rocky Mountains, was anything but reckless. He was bold, driven, opinionated, strong, courageous, and forthright, not always easy to like but always the best man to have on a big trip. The reality is that Rick was in terrain that is notoriously difficult to protect and the block that released was the size of a small car. Sometimes, accidents are just that, accidents.