Fell and Died

The Afterlife We Leave Behind

“Bob Conroy fell at Crow Hill yesterday and died.”  Stewart’s text had a couple more sentences besides that one, but those words are the only ones I really saw when my phone dinged and I checked the message.  I stood there, stunned, for I don’t know how long.  Then I replied.  “Wow.  Thank you.  Absorbing this.”

Bob was part of a friend group that sprang from and was mainly sustained by an annual hike up the only considerable mountain within an hour’s drive of central Massachusetts where we all live.  Every year, we hike Mt. Monadnock, located in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, in the southwest corner of the state.  And we do it in the dead of winter.  Because we set the date, typically a Saturday in February, months in advance, we face whatever weather happens to swirl our way that particular morning.  That’s part of the fun.  Over the years, we’ve hiked every weather condition you can think of.  One blustery hike the reported temperature at the summit with windchill was 35 degrees below zero.  Another year, there was fresh deep snow, and more was falling, big fluffy flakes.  We were the first party on the mountain that morning and we marched single file in our snow shoes, trading off the lead.  Several years it’s rained.  Sometimes, there are different kinds of ice, maybe thick plumes from running water that’s frozen over time, other times a gossamer glaze on the bare rock near the summit, so thin it is undetectable until you set your hiking boot on it and find it slippery as a skating pond.

Bob was a super-experienced rock climber and outdoorsman.  Crow Hill, where the accident happened is a popular local, and not very challenging, climbing area.  Bob had climbed there a million times. His sudden death stunned us all.  Some may think, but won’t say it, Bob’s luck ran out, with a sub-text of, what do you expect if you spend a life-time in a dangerous sport.  Would anyone think that if he’d been killed in a car crash on the interstate?   Curious, I looked up some mortality stats.  One study, published by the National Institutes for Health in 2019 reported 6.77 deaths per 100,000 annually for rock and ice climbing.  Meanwhile for automobile fatalities, the National Safety Council reported, in 2022, a rate of 13.8 per 100,000 annually.  Apparently, riding in a car is twice as dangerous as rock climbing.

Summit Toast, Mt. Monadnock.  Bob is far right.

                                                          Photo credit: Stewart Lanier

An article appeared in the Worcester Telegram a week after Bob’s death.  It was more profile than obituary.  It said that every morning, Bob did 100 pushups, 100 situps, and 100 chair climbs.  He went to the gym three or four times a week.  And he was a month shy of 70 when he died.  He was an active musician, whose last recording was a classical guitar piece.  He also played in a rock and roll band, The Spytones, that recorded several albums of original music and had regular gigs.  He was part-time care-giver for his two grandchildren. His daughter, Merry, was quoted in the article, saying, “He was our rock. He was such a consistent presence and he was very, very Zen. He was just a consistently calm, patient person in my life and my children’s life and my brother’s life.  We didn’t have any regrets, We didn’t have anything that was left unsaid. We didn’t have a tumultuous, strained relationship. We had a very tight-knit family. We had family dinners almost weekly. He was just an ever-present, consistent patriarch of our family.”

 Bob was living his best life, as they say.  The Japanese call it ikigai—a life of purpose and passion. Aristotle called it eudomonia, the state of human flourishing.  Through our hiking friend-group, I experienced glimmers of Bob’s remarkable qualities.  The newspaper profile was the confirming backstory.  His life was fulfilling.

Bob’s profile got me thinking, as an obituary sometimes does, about my own life.  How do I measure up?  What do I wish I’d done differently?  I think it was his music.  In high school and college I played in several jazz and rock bands.  Some were school-sponsored and some were just music-slinging friends who got together.  None of them ever ascended to regular, paying gig-dom for weddings, dance parties, etc., but we performed enough that I got a taste for that unbeatable high of live performance in a small combo.  Trading solos on a simple blues progression with the other members of a band, riffing off each other’s musical phrases, eyeing my band mates for visual cues, while creating a unified sound, in front of a live audience, that’s feeling the vibe, and responding with applause and whoops…  Well, it’s unlike anything else.  If I could do it all over, and if I could arrange my genes to be just a little more musical, I’d choose being a musician instead of a writer, for the performance element, the spontaneity of improv, and the joy of shared creativity.  Bob’s bandmate is quoted in the profile, saying how he felt after playing a gig: “It would be like I just had an infusion of the best drug in the world.”  But I’m not Bob.  I’m meant to find my own ikigai.  Working on it.

Bob’s sudden passing also got me thinking, how long do you live after you die?  There are the immediate tributes, of course—obituaries, eulogies, stories told.  After those come the living, enduring memories among your family and friends.  Besides memory, among those who knew and loved you, are the conscious and unconscious ways you influenced people.  Maybe someone laughs sometimes the way you laughed, or clears their throat, or makes a hand gesture, or a phrase, a vocal inflection, a way of thinking about a problem, an opinion on some perennial issue, an attitude, an outlook.  And maybe you pass those traits onto other people in your orbit, your children, your spouse.  And they, in turn, will pass on small bits, the origin of which they know not.  Some of these bits will get passed to a next generation.  ‘You talk just like your father,’ someone may say.  For family members, their origin may be named, for others the origin may be unknown and untraceable.  No one’s influence ever really dies, but it gets disbursed, re-mixed, transformed.  Kind of like the half-life of something radio-active, the core grows weaker as the energy dissipates, neither increased nor lost, just passed around and mixed around.  It’s the first law of thermodynamics, conservation of energy.

Isn’t it ironic that religions professing selflessness place the self at the center of the big prize— Immortality?  Maybe when we pass, the self passes too.  No more you.   If we go with the idea that your afterlife is really about the impact you have on those who remain after you’re gone, and how they think and act because of your influence, then your afterlife is not about you at all.  It’s about everybody else.  The self disappears like a gust of wind that runs itself out disturbing the surface of a pond.  The gust is spent, gone.  But ripples remain.  This is the only afterlife we actually know something about.

Here’s a way to think about humanity.  Of the X billion who’ve ever lived, most are dead and gone.  Then there are, presumably, if we manage to avoid turning our planet into a gray dustball in the near future, x billion more who have not yet been born.  Those of us who are alive at the moment are just a small fraction, a thin slice.  You know how sports fans at a stadium will do “the wave”?  If it really gets going and everyone participates, it’s quite a spectacle with each stadium section rising and falling as the wave passes through.  The stadium is like all of humanity through all time, past, present, future—everyone dead, everyone living, everyone to be born.  The wave is the narrow band of people who happen to be alive at any moment, and that wave passes through with a certain speed and determination.  We rise briefly, then we fall.  The wave moves on.

On second thought, I’m not sure I buy the no-energy-created-or-destroyed theory.  In the case of a remarkable person, like Bob, I think the universe may make an exception.  I hand wrote a note to Bob’s family expressing my sorrow for their loss.  I pushed it in an envelope, which I addressed, and then went for the drawer where we keep postage stamps.  I peeled back a stamp, checking to make sure it was the right kind.  Sure enough.  It said, “Forever”.