Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
More than thirty years later, we still talk about those times. Perhaps Alex em-
braced the ripples and knew that he would have to flow with them. He had a list of
big faces in the Himalaya he wanted to climb. Perhaps he felt he had to climb to
have a career. Alex MacIntyre told himself - as his own boss - that he had to get
his list done; then he could be with Sarah and travel a different path.
Sarah has her family and her own life. But it took her a long time to recognise the
world needed to start rotating again. 'I am always surprised how well I get on with
Maria when I see her,' Sarah told me recently. 'Her life is such a contrast to mine.
After Joe died, she managed to recreate herself, to build on her experiences. It
took me a long while to get out of the drudgery of having kids and being with
someone who I really shouldn't have been with. I was quite resentful. Now I've
come out the other side but it has taken twenty years.
'But the truth is I was a young person back then, just twenty-seven. We had only
two and a half years together. I've spent a long time since then just burying it all; it
was too painful after I had been so happy. But I would love to meet him now, to
know what he had done with or without me. I know he would have been hugely
successful. I would just love to have carried on that dialogue we had. That is what
death is, the end of dialogue.'
The end of dialogue is not the end of the story, however.
1. A year before, I had rolled another car a few hundred yards further on when I was forced off the road by a car overtaking on a blind bend.
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2. Maria Coffey describes the many paranormal experiences of climbers and adventurers in her book
Explorers of the Infinite
.
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