by Ellen Anderson Penno
NEWEST PRESS
2024/$24.95/248 pp.
How does one carry on after losing a lover to the mountains? In what ways does grief leave its imprint on that young love, when the relationship is newly fragile and uncertain? Ellen Anderson Penno’s memoir Counting Bones touches on these difficult questions, following in the vein of Maria Coffey’s classic Fragile Edge and Jan Redford’s more recent End of the Rope.
Decades after the Mount Baker avalanche that claimed Ian Kraabel’s life, sensational reports about the emergence of his climbing partner’s backpack from the toe of Coleman Glacier vault Penno back into a grief she thought she’d sealed away. “So many times my thoughts had travelled to retrace the events of the avalanche… that my mind flew through every detail to the inevitable finish, like water flowing down the creek behind my childhood home.” Her response to this news is to tell her own story, plundering old diaries and letters to provide a vivid picture of life with Ian and the months and years following his untimely death.
The narrative joyfully conveys the affect arising from a shared language—philosophical discussions about Plato’s soul mates, “hypotenusing” as the act of taking the most direct walking route, and a letter from Ian (pronounced “Yawn”) signed “crushedly yours.” Of their intense few months living together, Penno writes, “Our carefree tangle of bodies would have me sleepily confused as I awoke, my hand resting on his stomach, thinking it was my own body.”
Too soon after Ian’s death, Penno, with little time to exhale, is flung into the rigours of medical training. “I was a med school student by day, fighting off grief at the end of every day. She was giving me a solid daily beating, and what I did not know yet is that I should not have been fighting her so hard.” Throughout the book, the mantra “step, rest, step, rest, repeat, repeat, repeat” bleats its mountain climbing mantra: the only way to make it through anything big is to break it down into manageable pieces.
Chapters are artfully stitched together with topics from Gray’s Anatomy such as The Heart (breaking, bleeding, beating) and The Sympathetic Nerve (put on your own oxygen mask before helping others). The result is a piercing and original read that enfolds the reader with touches of humour and pathos.
The author has stated that her book is meant to carry hope: that one can carry on after traumatic loss—step, rest, repeat, repeat—and moreover that grace is possible. In her first book, Penno shows that revisiting memories of a lost love can be more intimately rewarding than one might ever imagine.
Elaine Morin is co-editor of two literary anthologies.
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