Notions of Grace: A Memoir of Climbing, Cancer, and Family - Paperback

by Jason Kolaczkowski (Author)

Their world was too small. Ever since the pandemic hit, along with the masks and and washing and images of bodies being piled into freezer trucks, Jason and his wife Kristina had pulled their own lives and the lives of their young, twin boys, Connor and Kade, into such a isolated space that it was feeling hard to breath. It was at Jason's insistence. He simply couldn't get past the fear. He was still shaken to his core.

Just before the pandemic hit, he returned to Colorado from an attempt at an unclimbed peak in the high Himalaya that was supposed to be to be his magnum opus - the ultimate object lesson for his young, twin sons on the power of dreams, even in the face of the uncertainty and grief carried by his recent leukemia diagnosis: "This is how to live your best life, despite the difficulties," he wanted to show them. But it turns out the supposed lesson was lost to circumstance.

The risks Jason had chosen in the mountains over years of climbing turned out to be comparatively safe when compared to the risks of COVID and cancer coming into confluence, and people with his disease began to die at alarming rates. By shrinking their worlds down, he thought his was protecting his wife and children from the the despair they would feel should they be the ones to infect, and potentially kill, him.

Jason had long been used to asking himself, "how much risk is too much," but now, as he watched his wife and children pay the costs of keeping him safe, afraid to be around others, afraid to venture out, he found himself asking a different question: "How little risk is too little?"