Peach thought that in a way Beck had willed his demise. Dogged by suffocating bouts of clinical depression since late adolescence, Beck had been suicidal to the extent of studying the different ways to end it all. One day, shaken by his own self-destructive instincts, he had cleared all the guns from his Dallas home, brought them to the police station and turned them in. His obsession with climbing and work had become his solution. It didn't take away the pain, but just left him too drained to notice it.
That was enough anaesthetic to keep him living, but when death reached out its cold hand on Everest, Beck Weathers didn't decline the invitation.
Success had made a disaster area of their home. Weathers was a anatomical pathologist, an 11-hours-a-day workaholic who wedged workouts and large mountains into his spare time. He was a hero to everyone except those who knew him.
After 15 hours of absence he opened his eyes on Everest. He had been in the storm for 22 hours. He has no explanation for this miracle. His instincts are scientific rather than spiritual, but he has no rational way of explaining what happened. Nobody wakes up from hypothermic coma. Nobody.
When he awoke he saw in front of him his right hand, mottled, gloveless and frozen rock solid into a grotesque comic salute. And he also saw his family, their faces looming before him in stark and vivid focus. For the first time in his life it struck him that between depression and obsession he had never been there for them, that he owed them more than the news of his lonely death. He stood up and began to walk.
His Damascene epiphany was almost too late. When he finally came home, with his body ruined and crumbling, his wife Peach damned him for what he had done to her, to his kids. She gave him his year of probation, take it or leave it.
Pretty much from that day he recognised the duty of the survivor was compatible with the task of the husband. Eight people were left behind dead on the mountain when Beck Weathers got off. Eight people dead, leaving behind them great concentric circles of grief. He owed them a good and decent life, a life not shrivelled by bitterness.
"I knew who to blame anyway. Me. My legs took me there and my decisions kept me there and finding somebody to blame for not saving my bacon is a waste of time. I came back and I made the very deliberate decision not to play the blame game. I didn't want that bile, not when I was trying to stop myself coming unglued. If you are building a shattered life you have to focus."
He returned to the world with a palpable sense of obligation, a need to find something of value. All his life he had measured himself against external goals, mountains, qualifications, income. He returned to work four months after he came off the mountain, looking to turn wounds into something positive.
"Dyin' ain't hard," he says today in his southern drawl "If dyin' was hard there'd be some Bubba stuck out in west Texas who'd live forever because he couldn't figure it out. Dying is easy. Living is hard."
On the mountain he did the hard thing. He put one foot in front of the other and dragged himself back to the world. He was almost totally blind, but he deduced from the wind blowing into his face that he was going in roughly the right direction. An hour later he stumbled into camp.
Remarkable as Beck Weathers's resurrection was, it made little impression on those already there. They were each fighting for their own survival. Another expedition leader, Scott Fischer, was dead by then. They placed Weathers in Fischer's empty tent and left him there to die too.
"So having been left for dead it turns out I'm the first person ever to come out of hypothermic coma and after 15 hours of lying face down in the snow in a wind chill of minus one hundred I stand up and I stumble an hour later into camp. I haven't eaten in three days, I haven't drunk anything in two days. I'm hallucinating. Parts of my body are frozen solid, my hand is like a block of marble in front of me, my nose is about to fall off, my eyesight is totally gone, my suit is full of freezing piss, my wife's been told I'm dead . . . [pause] but, hey, I'm not discouraged."
He might as well have been. He lay in the tent alone all night as the storm gathered its malevolence again and attempted to blow him off the mountain. People steered clear of Beck Weathers's last lodging place, the deadman's tent. By chance the next morning he was found out of his sleeping bag, tent flaps blowing in the breeze. He was frozen stiff. Still alive though.
Life doesn't unravel to any plan. The first months back at work were tough and frustrating. His partners imported a literal hired hand to do those things which Weathers could no longer do. More critically, nobody knew whether or not he had lost any brain function during his 15-hour outtage.
"One of the things that is almost impossible to know is what you don't know. My partners had to be willing to look at everything I did for months to be certain that all the cognitive pathways were intact and there were no holes there. Fortunately, I may have lost a lot of neurons, but I could still work. That was so important."