If Beck Weathers's story had finished with him dying in a tent on Everest he would be no more than an interesting footnote in the mountain's dark history. He wasn't ready for that though. That vision of his family drove him.
Weathers was helped still further down the mountain. David Breashears, who was leading the IMAX Everest expedition, had abandoned filming plans and shared his crew's resources with ailing climbers all over the mountain. A Taiwanese army Colonel, Madan Khatri Chhetri flew a helicopter up higher than any such machine has ever flown before, up and up into the thin air of Everest. Making two death-defying journeys, each using just seven minutes' worth of fuel, Madan plucked two dying men off the ice. Weathers was the second to go, having waved another climber on board before him.
"Character is what you do when you think nobody is looking," he says. "There were a lot of people came through for me that day when nobody was really looking. For myself, I just didn't want to have a life of second guessing myself if I had gone first and left a man to die."
That's his story. The first half of it. He lost his nose and surgeons had to grow one back using skin from his neck and cartilage from his ear. They attached it first to his forehead where it fed off the blood supply till it grew upside down. Then they twisted it around and made a nose of it. He lost his right arm just below the elbow and lost a lot of his left. What remains is a massively swollen club of a hand with half a thumb that is moveable. Just sufficient to give him independence.
Unknowable things are hardest to fix though. Depression beat him up worse than Everest did. Failing to find the right words to utter to Yasuko Namba's family when they came to see him still aches his heart. Putting his marriage back together was tougher than the 11 operations he suffered in reassembling his body.
And it would take more death and tears to make the catharsis complete.
Howard Olsen was Peach's brother and all through her life he had filled in the gaps. Their father died when they were infants. Howard had to be more than a kid. When Peach married a man whose defining contribution to the marriage was his mental and physical absences, Howard filled the spaces left behind.
Eight months after Beck Weathers's return Howard Olsen died of inoperable liver cancer. Howard had what Weathers describes with mordant southern wit as a "die like a dog in the road" health insurance policy. Weathers spent the last four months of Olsen's life arguing with insurance companies, researching possible cures and supporting his wife, while fighting a raging rearguard battle against the cancer.
Beck gave the eulogy at the funeral. His daughter Meg sang Amazing Grace and the recollection of her voice delivering the lines "I was once lost, but now am found" still brings tears to Beck's eyes. Sometime during the depths of their grieving Beck and Peach noticed that the blame and anger and recriminations had been sucked out of their lives. They were different people.
Beck Weathers didn't find that good oletime religion, although people told him that his survival was divine providence. He believes, though, that if he leads a good life and puts back more than he took out, he'll finish up ahead, even if there is nothing after death. That's enough for now, he says.
Whatever about the gods, his hours in extremis on Everest have given him a benign tolerance of humanity in all its porcelain frailty.
"I think people are mostly good. Given an opportunity, most people want to do the right thing, but the fact is some people are lions, and others are rabbits. Not everyone has the level of stamina or courage or even character to be what they hope they will be.
You hope that when you are tested you will have a measure of honour and that you will conduct yourself with a sense of grace. One of the reasons you go there is to find that out and if you had to ask the question you know that at some level what you may discover is something about yourself that will be hard to live with afterwards. Maybe you could have been braver, but the fact that a person worries about that is a measure of their humanity. The person who doesn't have those feelings is probably the more cowardly soul."
He awaits the return of that cowled old companion, depression. He has armed himself this time. Weathers grew up in a time which he describes as the John Wayne era: "If somebody ripped your heart out and threw it across the room, well it's only a flesh wound, so a mental illness like depression was positively shameful." Next time, he says, he'll be open, treat the depression as an organic illness.
In the meantime, life is about savouring the small things. Travel with Peach, a renewed interest in music, literally and metaphorically taking time to smell the roses. Joy is in the tiny quotidian things he never noticed before. Happiness is opening new doors.
"I always thought of myself as a storyteller," he says, "but I was an anatomical pathologist and that doesn't make for much of a story. Now I have a story to tell, I wound up with a great story, not an adventure story, but a love story, a great love story."
You ask him where he'll be in 10 years' time, when he is no longer Beck Weathers the man who came back from the dead and walked off the mountain. He smiles and shakes his head. Targets don't matter. "Me and Peach will be growing old together as comfortable as a pair of old shoes. That's all I know."
And he says goodbye offering the swollen trident that lives where once his left hand was. You grasp his reconstructed flesh and pump it. Dr Seaborn Beck Weathers, standing taller now than he ever did on Everest.