Climb That Goddamn Mountain

This is the beginning. This is how it starts, with a whimper, not a bang. My name is Jill Gleeson and in 11 days I will turn 50 years old. It's something I may find difficult to discuss with any semblance of wit or intelligence - though I will do my best as we go forward - because basically I have no clue how in the hell I got to be so old. I was 24, like, the day before yesterday. And it was fun.

Nowadays life is anything but fun.
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Nowadays I'm in the midst of what I think Marines back in Vietnam used to call The Big Suck. Almost exactly one month ago my longtime, live-in boyfriend, who I will henceforth refer to as T, dumped me. Two years ago my younger brother, one of the world's most dazzling human beings, died of a drug overdose. His death did not precisely destroy my parents - with whom I reside and do my best to take care of - though it didn't do them any favors.

My 78-year-old mom is gravely ill from the effects of COPD and back problems that have nearly crippled her. Two days after last Christmas, my 83-year-old father fell and broke the C1 and C2 vertebrae in his neck. That he survived what one cranky old rehab nurse referred to as "the hangman's break" is extraordinary. That he hasn't suffered any lingering effects past his four-month convalescence is more so. For that I am grateful. So grateful.

Add the deaths of a favorite aunt, a cherished friend and an ill-tempered but adored Jack Russell terrier to the grim tally, and the last three years often resembled most a kind of Dante-esque hellscape from which I could only impotently long to escape.

​At least, I used to tell myself, at least I have T. At least I have the man who told me that when he was at the end of his life he wanted to die looking in my eyes. At least I have the man who told me if I went first, he’d snort my ashes. (Not all of them, he’d assured me, just a line or two.) At least I have the great love of my life, the man who called me the great love of his.

Boy, that hurts.

Even more so because in an effort as fruitless as it was agonizing, I spent the past three years trying to refashion myself into what he thought he wanted. I twisted and turned myself around and upside down, forever seeking approval that seemed to come far too seldom, until I had disappeared as fully as a shiny copper penny dropped into a well. Once upon a time I was a woman who sledded down Nicaraguan volcanos, who paraglided off Tetons in Wyoming. I drove race cars and scuba dived, rock climbed and spelunked. I wasn’t fearless but fear never, not once, bested me. Now I have panic attacks when I think of life alone.

​So, what do you do when your heart is splintered into shards sharp and unrecognizable, when you’ve lost your baby brother, when you’re losing your parents a little more every day, when you’re afraid down deep all the way into the dark places that your best days are long gone? When giving up has begun to look not only appealing but like sweet relief? You do the only thing you can do. You take back your life the only way you know how. By daring. Daring to dream. Daring to do.

​Next year, in 2017, I will ascend two of the Seven Summits, as the tallest peaks on each continent are collectively called by the lunatics crazy enough to scale them. I’ll begin with Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, sometime in the spring/summer. It’ll be a sort of dress rehearsal for the bigger, badder mountain: Argentina’s Aconcagua, which I’ll climb in December. Along the way, as practice for Aconcagua, I plan to tackle a few 14ers in Colorado. I may try my hand at Ranier, in Washington.

While Kili, at 19,341 feet, is challenging if just for the altitude, the 22,841-foot Aconcagua, the tallest mountain outside of Asia, is a beast that kills people. Actually, so does Kili, but with less frequency and more by methods like inducing heart attacks than freezing its victims to death.  Both mountains will happily take your life with altitude sickness, but are closer to treks than climbs, which is why I chose them. I will need experience on ice, with axes and crampons, for Aconcagua, so somewhere along the way I intend to take a week-long glacier climbing crash course adventure companies here and there offer.

​And then there’s the training. I must remake entirely my body, mind and spirit. People train for Aconcagua by climbing 3,000 feet with 70 pounds on their back. My miserable carb-laden diet and lack of exercise these past few years have rewarded me with diabetes. What I’m attempting to do is so far beyond me now I can barely glimpse it on the horizon. I've never summited a mountain, though I've been fantasizing about it for two decades.

So, I’ve hooked up with Victory Sports and Fitness here in State College, Pennsylvania, who train world-class athletes, helping them win success in the pros. I’ll be working with an elite trainer who climbed Kili just a few months ago. More on Steve soon.

I’ll be blogging a few times every week, updating you on my physical and emotional journey, with an eye toward eventually turning it all into a book. I can’t promise it will be pretty, but I do pinky swear it will be raw and honest and open. I hope you’ll join me. I’ll need readers, thousands and thousands of them, to get the sponsors required to help make these trips happen. I hope you'll share this blog, spread my words around, post comments – secrets and jokes and hard-won wisdom – and perhaps even find a little healing yourself along the way. It’s gonna be a hell of a ride.