In 1992, my sister Denise and started the climb to the M on the University of Montana campus, a place we were visiting with our parents (the summer before her senior year of high school), one of several schools she was considering attending.
When Greg and I stopped in Missoula for the night on our way to Spokane, I knew climbing the M was something we needed to do the next morning.
What I didn’t tell anyone when I posted photos from the top on social media was that Denise didn’t make it to the top. I did and somewhere in a photo album I have a photo looking down on her from where I stood at the M and where she stood just below me.
One of the things I did after Denise died, was write about her suicide, as a letter to her, in the Ball State Daily News where I was a sports reporter covering the men’s basketball team. She had died on the morning Ball State was to play Kansas in the first round of the NCAA tournament.
These words, the ones I wrote over thirty years ago, resonated with me on the trip to Missoula and all the way up the mountain:
“You only made it halfway up to the ‘M’ on the mountainside of the University of Montana last summer. But then, you thought you’d return and have the chance to climb the whole way up.”
We were there and it was the opportunity for me to make that second climb for her. I know she was with me, as she always is, and that we did it together.