The cruel and the beautiful

In memory of Marc

June 2023

The promised summer heat has begun to press down between the Belledonne and the Chartreuse massifs, hazing the sky at the end of the valley. Swifts are screaming over the rooftops. Mosquito bites spot my limbs; I’ve been spooked by reports of dengue fever crawling its way northward over France.

The river path that I usually take to work is cooler than the streets, tunneled in sun-haloed greenery and wearing the river air like a moistened shawl. I’m lazy about cycling in the rain, though, and when the forecast hedges afternoon summer storms, I take the tram.

On Monday, going to work feels like an act of bravery. Only a night’s sleep between me and the message that wrenched reality out of socket: a young colleague lost to the Alps. A single sentence: Marc died in the mountains yesterday. Now I pass under the tulip tree and the plane trees and the lime trees on my way to the Biology department, feeling in every step how the fabric of the place has been terribly altered. I dread facing others who feel this too, who are also at a loss.

For me, the uncertainty is deeper than what to say, how to have lunch like usual with this absence beside us. I’ve lived here four months, known Marc four months. My grief has yet to sort out its own new limbs.

At the campus bar hours later, my shorts have become visibly damp with sweat where they touch the plastic seat. The tram whirs by every seven minutes; I’ve lost count of how many times. The group, crowded around four tables placed end to end in a strip of shade, is chatting in French. My limonade is empty. After a subdued start to the gathering—some quiet tears and hugs between long-standing members of the Alpine Ecology Lab, some details and speculation about what sent Marc and his equally experienced climbing partner plummeting 300 meters to their deaths—the tension is folded under. Even with my limited comprehension of French, I know the topics of discussion are benign and easy and unrelated, except maybe a fond story or two about Marc. I am a barely broken-in postdoc, sharing none of these stories.

When I get up to take the tram home, I notice with surprise the passing of the heavy cloud from my psyche. I suppose that was it, I think. I didn’t know him so well, after all. My brain has a fast metabolism for awareness of mortality, after all.

No storm breaks in the evening. I catch up with a friend from home on the phone, telling him the news but reassuring him of my lack of fragility, as I toss a rubber ball rhythmically and unconsciously between my hands. I dab anti-itch cream on my mosquito bites. I eat an ice cream bar and publish a blog post I hadn’t quite finished the day before. I finally learn the trick to finessing the rickety lock on my front door.

It doesn’t rain, either, on the evening of the Fête de la Musique, when my colocs and I join the crowds circulating the parks and streets to soak up the throbbing bass. The heat uncoils from the pavement into the solstice dusk, hangs above the grass, eases from sweaty dancing bodies. I watch the people and the colored lights swinging across eighteenth-century facades. I let the beat into my ribcage and move contentedly through the darkening hours.

In occasional moments of slack, I remember. Come lunchtimes, I think of Marc’s usual knuckle-knock on the open office door, leaning in to say, “Manger?” When I look at a map of land cover of the Alps on my computer, or out my window to the leading edge of Belledonne behind the foothills, I superimpose on it the knowledge of what happened—what happens—somewhere in its crags. Every so often my eyes brush the e-mail subject line making its way downward in my inbox, Disparition tragique de notre chèr collègue.

Sometimes I test my mind with the memory of the words that laid the blunt threshold, Marc died. The twisting is still there.

But these are only momentary pulses of melancholy. Memories, not physical realities. At home I chop an especially potent onion and prepare to explain to any passing roommate that I am not crying. This is only the most basic of biology.

On Thursday, it finally storms. My officemate has just finished wrangling the portable AC unit into the window when the leaves begin to gather fitfully into the air outside. Everything grays, first with clouds, then with water, pounding sheets of it. Thunder cracks like a total collapse. We keep working.

By the time I leave, the world is scoured and sparkling again.

I cycle to work on Friday morning. I’ve been craving the river. After yesterday’s rain, it pushes on and on, muscular beneath the skimming swallows. Rising from the path is such a medley of sweet plant scents that I can’t believe I have receptors for them all. Near the bridge, a honey locust tree has fallen across the path, forcing every cyclist to dismount and maneuver through a gap in the branches.

Friday afternoon is the double funeral. We gather in the gentle shade outside the funeral home, a place I have passed by several times and never imagined I would have a reason to enter. There are crowds of young, fit friends and older family members and colleagues. There aren’t enough seats, so I hang back with others who don’t feel they merit one. I stand for two hours just outside the doors through the many témoignages of loss and regard, not following most of the French beneath the blur of traffic. I compose my own simple eulogy in my head:

I knew Marc well enough for him to be real. I remember how earnestly he accosted me, when I first met him in the alpine chalet at the lab group retreat, with questions about my time in southern Utah, where he had gone on month-long climbing expeditions in the past. When haikus were composed in jest at the dinner table, he translated his from French for my sake and it was very good. He could talk lovingly about complex statistics. He was a world-class climber. He was a pleasant, jocular, thoughtful presence at the lunch table. He wore cutoff jean shorts and a billowy patterned button-up.

La montagne est à la fois belle et cruelle.¹

I see shaking shoulders and twisting faces among my friends and his friends. To steady myself, I focus on an artificially blue feather earring, a coarse dark hairline, the jagged band of stained glass trimming the wall. I watch a yellow emergency rescue helicopter emerge from the Chartreuse and descend toward the nearby hospital, and I wonder whose world has just shifted.

At the coffin, I don’t reach out to touch the wood as I saw those ahead of me do, but I feel the sadness settling in between my ribs.

My colleague drops me off near the office afterward. I have some delusion that I’ll get another hour of work done. Instead, I trail into the sun-dappled arboretum behind the building. I need these trees, I realize. I need somewhere to hold the rising sadness, where I can let it be.

The trees are friends, ones I’ve known for the same four months I’ve known Marc. They all seem to have weathered yesterday’s storm. The maples heavy with helicopter seeds, the tall cottonwoods that in May animated the air with their snow, the purple beeches and their cavern of quiet shadow, the ash vibrant with sun, the ancient spreading hornbeam as big as an embrace. They refuse to analyze anything, not even sunlight. They deny nothing.

I cycle home along the river, slowly.

1. “The mountain is at once both beautiful and cruel.” From an email sent by a researcher in our lab. I don’t know if he was quoting someone else.