Year of the Mountain

The top of Europe: Mt. Jungfraujoch, 3,454m above sea level

July began with the news that one of my closest friends took her own life.

The impact was like all the rest: immediate devastation followed by a window of shock where I knew I could choose if this was going to hurt now, or later.

Not now, I decided. Not again. Back into an abyss after months of climbing out? Another loss of someone I loved with no goodbye. Someone who is a main character in my book — set in Nazaré — where our friendship first blossomed.

Rubie knew about my novel, filled with stories inspired her exuberant personality, fierce loyalty, astounding artistic talent, and our unique friendship. I couldn’t wait for her to read it. Over a call in late May, she asked me to visit her in Lisbon. I told her that between tight finances and no end in sight for my film, my summer travel forecast was grim, but that I was hopeful for the fall. She understood and didn’t press further. That was the last time we spoke.

Within minutes of getting the news, I booked a one-way to Sweden (her home country) for her funeral. Suddenly money was no object. Work was no obstacle. When I had no time left, I made all the time in the world.

The following morning, I started babysitting a three year old boy, Clay, on Hollister Ranch. Sadness had no place around him, so I packed it away, knowing I would honor my grief somewhere faraway, all at once, where Rubie’s memory would be much stronger.

For two weeks, I indulged in long summer days on the most beautiful coastline in California, unplugged from technology, unresponsive to work, instead immersed in the magical world of a toddler…

How simple life became. From the words spoken to the things we did, all was reduced to its purest form. Sand castles and finger painting. Boogie boarding and bird watching. We snuggled and laughed and danced around the room, and my heart expanded infinitely to encompass all the love I held for this precious child who felt like a carbon copy of the son I know I’ll have one day.

On days we surfed Clay held steadfast to my legs, squealing with glee as we’d pop up and glide across liquid glass. Occasionally his dad and uncle, Keith and Dan, would join us. Hours melted away as I surfed with two of my heroes and a boy who didn’t understand the difference between the words, “today”, “tomorrow”, and “yesterday”.

A seamless blend they became, suspended in a kind of daydream delusion. On our last night together, before I flew overseas, Clay didn’t want me to leave and didn’t understand why I had to.
“Where are you going?” he asked. “Can I come with?”
I held him close, kissed his little nose, and taught him the meaning of the word “bittersweet”.

Once in Sweden, at 59°N — the furthest north I’d ever been — the days didn’t end and the lake was 20°C. At 3am, I went for a swim. As the sun rose, I began to comprehend the magnitude of this loss, the significance Rubie had in my life, and the bizarre pattern of losing someone in the middle of telling their story.

I walked back to her parent’s countryside home with a thorn in my foot and wild berries burrowed in my fist. There was a dead snake on the road and burnt remnants of Midsommar on the field. Rubie’s suitcase sat unpacked in her room and the dogs were fast asleep on her bed. Over a barely touched breakfast, her father folded napkins into paper airplanes and her mother lamented the memory of the sound of the printer generating her daughter’s final words.

On our way to the funeral, it started to rain. When the rain stopped, Godspeed by Frank Ocean started to play, and I cried harder than I have in a long time.

A cry of the year. Of the decade. A grief so compounded by an immeasurable magnitude of love, of loss, of feeling your own heart inside your own body swell and then collapse, playing like an accordion in our chests.

Days later, I took the train from Stockholm to Copenhagen to reconnect with a Portuguese friend I hadn’t seen in eight years. After meeting his partner and two beautiful baby boys, we walked around the cemetery and he showed me a gravesite where someone who claims to be a time-traveler died on my birthday in 2064.

From Copenhagen I departed for Frankfurt, only to find out in a hungover stooper at 4am that my train was cancelled. Dazed and confused, I tried to make a new plan with no wifi nor Danish, and befriended an American woman, four years older, who shared not only my destination, but also my hometown.

As the world whizzed by, I caught a bad cold, and began to think European countryside all looked the same. After a night in Frankfurt, I boarded another train to Interlaken at the base of the Swiss Alps, where it took an entire day for my jaw to reconnect with my face.

Sparkling turquoise water and towering smoking mountains. Waterfalls cascading from every available corridor of limestone. And winding through it all? The Via Alpina trail.

This time I wasn’t alone. This time someone held me in my deepest grief and rooted for me as I placed one foot in front of the other, thousands of steps up mountains so high they scratched the surface of the sky.

Despite our upward trend, I had this inescapable, familiar, and terrifying feeling of falling. Once more I was confounded by the capacities of the human heart — its fragility, its resilience — and the way it always wants to exist in a state of love, and answers for you what it does if you simply let it.

After all, love is patient. Love is kind. Love shows up and love sticks around. Love knows when to say, “thank you,” and love knows when to say, “I’m sorry.”

And if I’ve learned anything from July, it’s that in 30 days you can see the world; in one year, you can live a decade; that the man in the cemetery was ahead of his time; and now I am absolutely certain that this is The Year of the Mountain.