WHAT REMAINS AT THE END: on climbing, living with aids, and survival

This is what it was like from inside an epidemic.Illness and friendship, medical research and journalism, activism and loss, and mountains that became both refuge and reckoning.HIV came at a time when death seemed the likely ending. Friends disappeared. Illness had stripped away strength, and recovery came slowly. And somehow, the climbing continued.The years moved between hospital rooms and activism, friendship and love, grief and survival, and high places from the Pacific Northwest to Kilimanjaro and the Himalayas. The story also reaches back to a time when growing up gay in the South meant learning to live with silence, exclusion, and the knowledge that much of the world had not yet made room for you. The mountains did not make any of it disappear. They were places to keep moving, to pay attention, and to remember those who were gone.What remains is a life shaped as much by the people who died as by the improbability of having survived at all.