End of Immortality, The

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2004 by Mason, David

A year later, I went with Don and my father to the spot in the mountains where we had scattered most of my brother's remains. We walked in on the trail until it seemed the view of the two peaks was about what it had been, then sat down together on a gray stone outcrop, talking about Doug. Each of us had a feeling the mountain had claimed him like a debt to be paid. The way the storm had socked in, preventing searchers from finding him-it was as if the mountain were a god calling in the weather to shroud its latest victim. Of course we also feared that such thoughts were nonsense and Doug's death was a meaningless accident.

I talked about how I had met a family friend soon after it happened. This man was a chemical engineer, not given to sentimental spirituality. He told me what he thought had happened to my brother by waving a hand in the air: "Doug's energy went somewhere. There was that energy, and now here it is-it's part of this."

My father, Don and I sat on that alpine rock for half an hour, till one of us noticed something in little crevices under our hands. We bent and looked more closely. Indentations in the rock were filled with tiny fragments of bone. We picked them out with fingertips and held them in our palms, staring. Could these be Doug's ashes even a year later? There appeared to be no other explanation.

"This isn't him," my father finally said. "I don't know where he is, but this isn't Doug." And he waved a hand at the air, signifying where Doug had gone.

In the late 1990s my father descended into Alzheimer's disease. Once handsome and muscular, he became much shrunken, in mind and body rather like a young boy. When I visited him on the houseboat he shared with Claire, we looked at pictures, sometimes the same ones over and over, and sometimes he pointed to Doug. "That guy." he nodded, stabbing his forefinger at the picture, blinking back tears. Then he made a fist and held it over his heart.

Now he does not even know who I am. Sitting next to my father, I have no doubt of our mortality. That youthful delusion of impregnability left me many years ago. It's only a matter of time, and none of us knows how much of it we've got. Ever since Doug's fall, I've lived nearly every day with the presence of my death. I become short with people who waste my time. My father lived well when he could, tried to look squarely at life and not give in to mere conventionality. Separately, my mother fought through a terrible decade and a half after Doug's death and Art's later death of a heart attack, finally quelling her own demons and achieving some peace in old age. Two good people who lost a son-not such an uncommon story, after all.

Don became a commercial photographer and, ultimately, the most accomplished mountaineer in the family, having adventures I can barely imagine, climbing all over the world, refusing to be slowed down even by the onset of rheumatoid arthritis in his forties. Just when my mother had given up hope of having grandchildren, Don married Laura Domoto, and they now have two daughters, Cameron Aiko and Quinn Midori. Cameron was Doug's middle name, the same as our father's.