Gadd’s Truth: Showing Up
What do you say when saying nothing isn’t enough, and yet no words will ever truly be right, either?
In my thirties, I started avoiding the seemingly relentless funeral services for my mountain friends. I’m embarrassed by this because it showed a lack of character on my part. I knew I was putting my own pain before that of my community, and I wished I were stronger. But I simply didn’t know how to deal with yet another loss that felt simultaneously arbitrary and as inevitable as the gravity that pulled the deceased out of our lives.
Christian Pondella
Services are for the living, and you show up to process your own grief—but also to stand with others doing the same. And to show the families that the fallen was loved and respected. When I didn’t show, I hated myself for it. But I had gone to so many events where we said goodbye to beautiful young people that the idea of sitting and listening to heart-rending words for another shining life cut down seemed intolerable. The deaths made no sense. But the worst was looking the family in the eyes and trying to say something that was remotely “right.”
Christian Pondella
I thought I had to have the right words, and I just didn’t. Words are my structure, my way of organizing life’s events. I believe in the power of words to shape situations, clarify, organize and, if used well, bring people together. But there are no words that will make a hole in the universe close. There are no words to make a parent’s heart heal, or a partner’s eyes look less haunted. I wanted to tell the parents and partners it would be OK, it would get better, but that isn’t what they actually wanted or needed right then. That’s what I knew would happen with time, and I hoped that if I said the right thing it would happen faster. But if you’re in the storm of loss you’ve got to hang on and just sail to survive. Watch the waves, feel the roar, shiver, be where you are. In fact, it’s the sailing through the storm that gets you to the other side, and the waiting sun. The sun doesn’t actually exist until you get there, no matter how much you hope it will come soon. But I didn’t know that then, I just hated the un-wordable storm of pain and I wanted it to end for everyone.
Once I understood that the storm was inevitable and that I couldn’t say anything to others or myself that was going to lessen the pain immediately, it oddly felt better. Instead of trying desperately to find the sun I just showed up and hung onto the rigging with everyone else. It is our collective presence and empathy that matters after a huge loss, not what we do or say. Sometimes what’s said is less important than being there to say nothing. When we’re severely damaged we’ll never be the same as we were, but the deep scars are celebrations of healing.
Christian Pondella
In November, I sat in the audience at the Banff Mountain Film & Book Festival as two old friends talked climbing life together on stage. Geoff Powter (a climber who knows loss) asked Steve Swenson (same) about what he’d learned in his four-plus decades of climbing. Steve is 65 years of weathered old-school (he looks cut from the kind of tough cloth that would rather slice its own sleeve off with the arm inside before putting an emotion on it), but he silenced the room and then made us laugh when he said that what mattered was the love we found for each other in the mountains. And then he told us one of the most important things in life is to learn that there are some things you will just never understand; events that you can’t explain but have to accept. In the deep acceptance of chaos there is peace. If you fight what you can’t understand or define with words you’ll lose your mind, as I did in my thirties.
Christian Pondella
Today, when I see the warmth in a sunrise above a valley cloud layer, fresh snow falling silent and turning cars into unbalanced mushrooms that somehow scream with the promise of an epic ski day, the unexplainable exuberance of mist slowly rising on a micrometre-smooth lake, I can’t explain with words the sheer joy and the deep loss that are inherent in living a mountain life.
But we can show up and feel all of it with our community, and that is enough.
This article originally appeared in the Winter 2021 issue. (“Gadd’s Truth,” page 22).
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