This story is excerpted from Nicole LoBiondo’s debut memoir, Where the Air Grows Thin, which chronicles her quest to climb the Seven Summits while serving as her mother’s primary caregiver through ALS. Blending high-altitude adventure with an intimate story of love, loss, and resilience, the book is available here, or wherever books are sold. I wanted to know how a body feels when it’s dying.
Not in some distant, abstract way. I wanted to know in the way you know your own breath on a winter morning—intimately, viscerally, unmistakably yours. I wanted to know what it meant to be a body inside the moment the world collapses.
When an avalanche comes, it doesn’t surround you—it consumes you. When it approaches, it sounds like a freight train gone feral, wild on the tracks, its weight bearing down from every direction. But unlike a real freight train, there’s no warning, no brakes screaming before the hit.
The terrible weight of white destruction keeps building, rumbling, roaring, until the earth itself moves beneath you. In that moment, all you can do is hope, and wait. I would become good at both—hoping and waiting—in the last years of my mother’s life.
But right now, all I wanted was to survive. That morning on Everest, we were camped at a place they call, with cruel irony, the Valley of Silence. There is nothing silent about it.
We had just come through the Khumbu Icefall, that broken, heaving maze of blue ice that swallows people whole. Lhotse towered straight above us like a wall meant to keep us out. Nuptse stood off to the right, watching.
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