Everyone always said that you climbed like a man - like someone much taller, with the ease with which you breezed up solid stone. I never saw manliness, nor anything unusual about it - just your patient, determined grace, calculating next moves with care and executing with form. I don’t think I ever saw you fall, recklessly - and I know that it was to be something of a special club to keep up with you as a belayer. Climbing only ever struck me as the spot when you were happiest - working persistently on a problem, not for the solution but really for the process itself. So when I say that today is the day that I miss you most, it isn’t because we couldn’t find a solution for your cancer - that same driven, patient grace and form stuck with you through all of that. No, it’s more because that driven yet quietly persistent grace is something commonly missing - and today marks the anniversary of too many people that missed out on learning it from you. Yes, it’s easy to say how much I miss you daily, and how hard it is to know you won’t be around for so many small victories and painful losses… But I’m grateful to have been a first row student to what you carried with you to teach. I love you, mom, and know you can’t ever completely leave me. Fly free, where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.
Kathy Ann Kyker-Snowman, 1954-2007.
