Climbing Out Of Grief

as told by Rae Oquirrh Dial

There's a clear distinction between the moment Brad died and all my following life chapters.

I was thirty-two when I met this very handsome man at a yoga festival in Squaw Valley (now Olympic Valley), California. After fifteen days, I moved in with him in Sebastopol, a bohemian farming town with a nourishing community of people.

We were both rock climbers. Brad Parker was renowned; he had climbed all over the world and had been on the cover of Climbing Magazine. We took a trip to Yosemite. We went to climb one of the five pitch classic climbs, Cathedral Peak, which was quite easy. So easy that Brad didn't even put on climbing shoes. His words to me when we got to the top were, “Welcome to heaven.”

Brad was training to do a big multi peak traverse, the Evolution Traverse in the Sierras. He was doing that in two weeks with a photographer and a film crew. So, when we got back down from our climb, he said, “I want to go train a little more. I'll meet you back at camp for dinner.” And he skipped away from me. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was going to be free soloing, climbing without ropes, on a very thin knife blade edge called Matthes Crest.

When it got dark and he hadn’t returned, I put on my headlamp and went to look for him. I was stopped on the trail by the police, who said they were investigating a missing person. I said, “Oh, Brad is missing. I'm going to go find him. I know exactly where he went.”

They said, “No, you're not.” They took me to the Tuolumne Meadows ranger station and questioned me for about six hours. Finally, by around midnight I tried to push my way out the door, saying, “I can’t just wait here. I know where he is. You can’t keep me trapped here.” I thought that he had been in an accident, was lost or had a broken ankle. It started to dawn on me that something was terribly, terribly wrong. Later I learned that I had been a suspect because they didn't know if the fall was accidental. It didn't occur to me that he was dead.

The ranger told me to sit down and it just kind of all goes fuzzy from there. I've described it as a wave that carried me into an entirely new reality. And so it was. That was my starting over, the beginning of the rest of my life. I had had this extraordinary high, uprooting my life, starting something fresh, falling deeply, madly, wildly in love. And it was gone within a year.

I had been studying spirituality and Buddhism, but I had absolutely no preparation for the groundlessness that comes with the evaporation of a life. Nor was I ready for the misery and the agony after the funeral, alone in the house.

I wish that it hadn’t taken a catastrophic event to wake me up so violently, but also it woke me up wondrously. I became much more tender, charitable towards myself. Grief causes a kind of precision thinking and being and doing. It’s all-encompassing and intensely absorbing.

The death of my imagination for a thing called the future caused me a tremendous amount of learning and growth. Once those initial waves of terror passed, I became more porous in terms of learning and accepting that, yeah, we’re all going to die. I learned I can survive, and I did. Practicing yoga and sitting in uncomfortable meditations, I had experience of dealing with discomfort, wanting to get out of something, yet having to stay with it. I'm thankful for those practices for giving me a baseline on how to operate amidst such terrible disruption.

When I finally came out of that fog of grief, I started a business, and I felt on fire in ways that I had never been before; motivated and ambitious in ways that I did not anticipate.

And then I found someone who was gentle, sincere, and open. I knew I was meeting somebody who was emotionally intelligent enough to carry my story and his story.

Visit Rae’s website: Crafting Stories and Strategies for Human and Planetary Health

photo by @dodrillphoto