End of Immortality, The

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2004 by Mason, David

He knew Doug was dead but tried to give our mother and Doug's wife some hope by telling them he might be able to survive the night on the mountain. he told them Doug was wearing his wool trousers.

When I got the phone call that night in Rochester, Art must also have guessed Doug was dead, but we all wanted to keep hoping, and he let me hope that my brother was lying out there, perhaps badly injured but waiting for someone to find him. I spoke to that image in my mind all night, as if I could will my brother to live.

The next day I couldn't work in the garden but paced up and down the shore of Lake Ontario, periodically checking in with my family by phone, trying to keep Doug alive in my brain. A continent away from my family and the mountains I loved, I felt more a foreigner than ever. My father, meanwhile, drove up from Seattle with Claire and stationed himself with Don at the rescuers' base camp, listening to reports on their radio. Late that day one of the search crews spotted Doug's body in such rugged terrain they were unable to get to it before dark. They could only confirm he was dead.

"We lost him," Art told me on the phone. My in-laws arranged for Jonna and me to fly west in the morning.

From a small commuter plane, heading north out of Seattle, I pointed out the mountains to Jonna. First Rainier, then Glacier Peak, Baker and Shuksan's rock pyramid. My face already felt bruised and pummeled from sobbing, and I remember the look on my mother's face as the family met us on the tarmac at Bellingham. Doug's body had just been brought down from the mountain. My father said he would take me to see it.

He must have felt numbed as he drove to the mortician's. He had seen plenty of death in World War II, more when he practiced pediatrics before becoming a psychiatrist, but this was his oldest son. They had fought hard when my father left the family. Now Doug was dead and our father must have felt the Furies closing in on him. We tried to talk, but our words were strange, as if real feeling had been exhausted and now we had to manufacture it for each other's benefit.

"Once again," the mortician said, looking especially at me, "I don't advise viewing the body."

But I wanted to see.

He took us into a back room where the black body bag lay on a table. He unzipped the bag part way down so we could just see Doug's head and shoulders. Except for the large bruise under the skin of his forehead, he looked like he was taking a nap. His hands were held close to his face as someone sleeping might do, though of course that might have been a futile shielding gesture-estimates of his fall ranged from six hundred to a thousand feet. His eyes were only slightly open. Blood smeared one of his fingers. It was all so subtle. I had seen him fall asleep on the sofa at home looking almost exactly like that, a book fanned open beside him.

I was afraid to touch him. I was also aware of the twist in his body from a broken spine and the fact that the mortician had elected not to show us everything.