Don’t Climb Every Mountain

I remember the day that my mother gave up.

She was exhausted.

She had weird rashes on her hands from chemo. She would get so sick to her stomach that she couldn’t eat for days. She was tired all the time.

The stage IV uterine cancer was not what did her in—it was the bladder cancer which had come later. For some reason, this second cancer that was supposed to stay in one place spread. It was supposed to be treatable.

But in the end, it wasn’t.

An oncologist from the city had told her she could join a clinical study, try another experimental drug. But this time, she refused.

I was so angry. After the 10-year battle, how could she give up?

I would sometimes arrive at my parents’ house at 1:00 in the afternoon and find her still in bed. And I would become slightly irritated. Why couldn’t she just get herself up?

I remember speeding into their driveway almost every day to see her, and one time, my dad was standing there on the asphalt, motioning for me to slow down, pushing his palms toward the ground.

I am not going to slow down, Dad. She’s running out of time.

But I was not the pacesetter. It was not my race.

I heard someone who is dying from cancer say on a podcast this week, “This is the last thing I’m going to do. I want to do it my way.”

And this mountain was my mother’s to climb, not mine.

But how often do we want to climb that mountain for them? We want to take away someone else's pain, feather the nest, ease their suffering.

It might be their edge to cross, but we want to take it on for them instead.

It’s actually possible to distract oneself with a whole range of mountains that belong to others. We can focus on everyone else’s lives so much that we lose track of even where are our own mountain is.

Where are you right now? Are you scaling your own peak? Are you coming down the back side? Or are you in the right range but not on the right hill at all?

Sure, we can be in it with them. But it's still not ours to take on.

Perhaps you are lost on someone else’s mountain, climbing through unfamiliar territory, as if you are in a strange Narnia without a compass or Google maps.

I find myself in these places sometimes. It’s easy to do this as a parent, to suddenly find yourself climbing your kid's mountain. As a coach or mentor, you might be a bit of a sherpa, guiding someone through a challenging traverse. But even as a sherpa, it’s not your mountain. It’s not your journey. It’s theirs.

It has taken me a long time to process the loss of my mother. It’s been 14 years, and I’m still working at it.

A friend told me this week she had heard that grief is love that has nowhere to go. That's just what it's like—the love swirls between brain and heart, brain and heart, brain and heart. Trying to make connections that might make it all make sense. But, like Kundalini rising that fails to connect with the seventh chakra, it has nowhere to go.

Until it does.

Only then, sometimes years later, can we find peace in any of it. When we get off their damn mountain and find our own. Only then do we have some perspective to take it in from a distance.

Only then might be able to take in the beauty of the whole magnificent range.