Respect

Chad Kellogg died.

I saw it on Facebook, posted by two people I know from Seattle.  I didn’t know Chad, but I had met him before a slideshow meant to raise funds for his 2013 Everest speed climb.  I was visiting Seattle, deep in preparations for a climb of Mt. Huntington, knowing I was not quite eating at the grownup alpinist table but not sitting with the little kids, either.   It was one of those weekends in a city I called home for 3 years and darted in and out of for another 3 when I realized I could not possibly revisit everything and everyone I loved in the span of two days, so had to cut it down to the basics.  I showed up early for the show, talked to Chad about who we knew, drank a glass of wine and ate some of the tasty appetizers, saw some other climbing friends, and left to hang out and do some planning with my Alaska climbing partner. 

This was the extent of my time knowing Chad, but I knew his accomplishments.  I knew that he had come up as a fast climber on Rainier and other Northwest routes.  He had worked for one of the same guiding companies I still work for when not caught up in the oil patch.  He started as a young ranger and guide, and kept pushing himself, kept setting speed records, until he was operating at a higher level during the time in life when many people back off and focus on careers or have families.  He found a woman who was also a driven, intelligent, strong climber and athlete and married her.  She died in Alaska while rappelling a route.  He kept climbing.

This post is actually about how I and others learned of Chad’s death.  I was sitting at work, watching the Directional Driller make a slide that would allow us to rotate (drill) at a whopping 30 feet an hour, when I saw the post on the page of the Seattle climber.  Facebook is, sadly, at present a big part of my social life.  I am out here, sitting in the belly of the beast of industry most days, learning to steer the front of the machine that makes holes in the ground.  I briefly pop up in Alaska, walking down the street still defensive and sarcastic from life among rig workers, way too happy to be free and made strong enough by weight training and from spending all my days off sleeping in the lonely camper shell of my Tacoma at the base of various ice waterfalls and parking lots of rock areas.   I have my feet in different worlds, and feel like the weird sister in both of them.  This outsider’s perspective, however, allows me to make some observations that some people miss, or are afraid to say when they seek acceptance and validation from only one social group.

Don’t post someone’s death on Facebook before a family member does or a press release is issued.  Just because you know someone from a place you climbed or camped, met someone at a slideshow or after party, or in some other way peripherally interacted with him/her does NOT give you the right to announce the end of his/her life.  A relative of Chad’s said as much on a comment thread under a picture somebody posted: please don’t post for a few days.  Let the family be notified.  When someone dies in a foreign country, social media allows this knowledge to travel faster to those who are connected to it.  These people are not always the people who are closest to the person who died.  Chad Kellogg had gained fame with his bold and fast ascents.  Part of fame is a shift from being a private individual to being a public figure.  People who have not taken climbing to the level Chad did often feel some sense of ownership and belonging by posting announcements and achievements related to this person.  The public figure’s story becomes owned by the public.

Death is the end of this story.  The last year of my life was heavy with death, up, close, personal.  I see my closest climbing friends backing off from climbing by choice this year for their young families.  I am wrestling with that same question now, and the answer is pointing in the opposite direction despite all my fears that this means being alone forever.  Climbing makes me who I am, and I have played in the big arena just enough to know that at the core of the public figure well known climbers become is the private core of who they really are.  Extending out from that is a constellation of people whose lives are inextricably tied to that core person. Death takes it back to that.  You know in your heart, as you hear the sad news and want to write that post because you are in the know, because you want to inform the community, that giving those core people closest to the deceased climber the space and privacy to grieve until there is an official announcement is the respectful way.  It is kind.  Death is permanent.  There is time.