From Here to Eternity

I started training harder than I had trained in years, logging hours on the bike and stair-climber, walking to work, shunning all elevators in favor of the stairs. I told lots of people about my plans, deliberately escalating the shame of failure. I enlisted two companions, both good bets to reach the summit. The first was my brother-in-law Joel Ball, Marilyn's only son. Joel, 47 at the time, is a dashing fellow: a computer whiz and freelance photographer who lives in palmy California with his wife and young children. He surfs and bikes and plays soccer against men half his age and makes it all look easy -- until you get to know him better and understand his fierce will to win. Joel would get to the top if he had to drag himself there by his knees and his teeth.

My second partner was Jim Somerville, an experienced hiker who has bagged prominent peaks from Washington state to New Hampshire. Jim's a guy I would be tempted to resent if only I didn't like him so much, because while I've begun falling to pieces like a '75 Pacer on a rutted road, Jim -- whose birth certificate claimed he was 47 -- remains as youthful as a bronze Apollo, perpetually 32. He would, no doubt, scamper up the mountain, pausing only for sets of push-ups and abdominal crunches. Once he got there, he would come in handy, too, on account of his doctorate in divinity. Jim is pastor of the First Baptist Church of the City of Washington.

On the Internet, I found dozens of personal accounts of Keyhole climbs by amateurs such as myself. As I read them, the basic contours of the hike began to feel familiar. The secret was to begin well before dawn, leaving plenty of time for slow going through the steep and hairy parts. The best time for an inexperienced climber to try the mountain is between mid-July and early September, when most of the ice should be melted and before the blizzards set in. These Internet essays typically projected astringent joy -- the pleasure of an arbitrary challenge conquered and a brief, optional hardship endured. I couldn't help noticing, however, that certain words cropped up again and again: words such as "vomit" and "pain" and "fear."

What little I know of Marilyn's biography is stitched from my wife's stories and family photo albums. She began life as a round-faced girl with braids and a baby brother. Her father farmed corn and soybeans in Holt County, Mo., near the Nebraska border. In those days, this was rich, gently rolling, nearly empty country, and it still is today. The great American sprawl is just a rumor there. Marilyn was a bright girl, a whiz at geography, an eager reader, and she graduated from a little neighborhood college, now defunct.

She married a red-haired, blue-eyed fellow from Arkansas named J.N. Ball. Most people call him Jay.

They had four kids in about as many years -- the second Eisenhower term was pretty much nonstop diapers -- with number five coming along a few years later. Jay worked for the telephone company in Kansas City. Once the kids were in school, Marilyn worked as a substitute teacher and, later, an executive secretary. They advanced from the working class to the middle class, and were just entering their retirement years when I met them in the early 1990s.

Something about Marilyn was immediately familiar -- her unflappable demeanor, sunny on the surface, steely underneath, stoic at the core. She reminded me of my father and his relatives who, like Marilyn, descended from the German American immigrants of the Midwest. Fascinating, complicated people, if I may speak in wild generalizations: extremely well-mannered, emotionally reserved, often strung tighter than snare drums. Easy to meet but hard to get close to. Reluctant to admit their complaints even to themselves. Ditto their joys. You'd never guess what strong opinions they have until you stumble into one, and it bites you like a bear trap. They like a good laugh but cannot imagine such a thing as a good cry. Because I was wise to the ways of her tribe, I could tell she had her doubts about me, perhaps just the standard doubts of a protective mom. Not long after I started seeing her daughter, Marilyn had the good fortune to bump into one of Karen's old boyfriends, who, she was delighted to report, was just as tall and handsome and polite and smart and successful as ever -- and did she mention handsome? Over time, though her reserve never melted, I think Marilyn became fond of me, and I know I grew fond of her. I was drawn most of all to a quality she had in great abundance:

Courage.

Death knows many ways to make an entrance. There's the lightning bolt, the massive heart attack on a pleasant afternoon, the load of heavy pipe spilling from a wrecked truck on an overpass just as your car passes below. There's the raw cruelty of a childhood cancer. There's the gift of a quiet departure at a venerable age surrounded by loving family. There's the humiliation of a long, helpless decline.

It's almost as if death becomes bored with itself and seeks variety. I recall reading once about a young man who stood beside a lake with a gun in his hand. Seized by an obvious impulse, he aimed into the deep water and squeezed the trigger. But instead of plunging, as he expected, the bullet skipped like a stone from the water's surface. It flew a long way, steadily losing velocity. By the far shore was a road, and on the road was a car. Car and bullet converged. By then, the projectile was moving so slowly it couldn't even break a window -- but the window was down, so it flew a few feet farther until it found a soft and lethal spot in the driver's head.

Sometimes death comes in a slow parade of one darned thing after another. That was the case with Marilyn. She was a little heavy, which worsened her arthritis. The arthritis made it painful to walk, so she walked less and less. Without exercise, she added weight, especially when her doctors prescribed steroids to treat the arthritis. A downward spiral.

In the dozen years that I knew her, Marilyn went from walking with a cane to maneuvering mostly in a wheelchair to almost complete incapacitation. She was in constant pain. Her mind never slowed a step -- I stayed in her good graces by sending her books full of New York Times crossword puzzles. She tried having various decrepit joints replaced, to no avail. I don't recall ever hearing her complain.