In this piece, Natalie Berry recounts the extraordinary story of a family of climbers. It’s a tale that has already been well-documented—most recently in The Last Mountain, a moving documentary including footage from 25 years of family history—but Berry’s writing is precise and well-researched. This essay does not shy away from the darker side of a family driven by an obsession to conquer mountains.
The real tragedy, Douglas believes, was the fact that Alison was taking back control of her life prior to her death – for her children’s sake.
When six-year-old Tom Ballard was told of his mother’s death, he carried a photo of Alison on the summit of Everest to bed because he liked ‘talking to her’. Soon after, he asked Jim whether he could see her ‘last mountain’.
Five weeks later in Pakistan, in a tent on a ten-day trek to K2, Tom was asked to ‘draw something sad’ in a grief-counselling book. With determined, heavy-handed strokes, he scrawled a pyramid with figures representing his mother’s body and himself in tears. The camera lingered as Tom started crying.
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“Scaling the world’s highest mountain is a very different experience than it was when I climbed it.”
