MOUNT SHASTA – When her son was lost while scaling Mount Shasta in the spring of 2010, Mary Kenny kept vigil during the four-day search.
High winds and cloud cover hampered rescue efforts. But Kenny never lost a mother's hope for a miracle until the moment the rangers radioed the heartbreaking news: They had found the body of her 26-year-old son, Thomas Bennett, in a snow cave near the summit.
She was at the airstrip near the base of the mountain when a Chinook helicopter brought her son down later in the morning of April 1. Tests later showed that Bennett had died of a cerebral edema due to acute altitude sickness.
She could not bear to look at mountains after returning to her home in British Columbia. Yet when an experienced climber found items that belonged to her son, Kenny asked him to guide her to the base camp site.
She wanted "to understand my son's call to the mountains and feel some of what he felt when he climbed," she wrote in an August email. "I want to retrace his steps. And I want to let others know what it is like from my perspective to lose a son to Shasta and to climb it in search of answers."
After the climb, she wrote, "There are so many signs of Tommy and life all through this trip.
"I think there is a story in my story, for those who believe or wonder beyond death. I'm on a journey; I do not know where I'm going, but I'm in; as long as the peaceful feeling is part of it, I'm part of it."
The summer climb focused her efforts on ways to keep her son's spirit alive.
A chemical engineer intent on using his talents to sustain the Earth's renewable resources, Bennett graduated with honors from the University of British Columbia and was working in the Bay Area. Kenny said the gregarious, open-hearted young man climbed mountains whenever he could, cooked with skill and gusto, traveled the world and loved his family and friends above all else.
"His spirit is certainly with me and a lot of people," she said.
Kenny has created a brochure to help educate youthful Mount Shasta alpinists, and is launching a Web page about her son, where the brochure will be posted.
With family and friends, she decided to set up a University of British Columbia scholarship fund in his honor to aid future engineers who share his vision of sustainability. They've raised $4,000 of the $30,000 needed to endow the scholarship.
Kenny stays busy with these projects and she's started running – something her son encouraged her to do – but the sorrow isn't diminished.
This year her birthday fell on the first anniversary of Bennett's funeral. In spite of her reluctance, her family held a small gathering, she said in a recent interview.
"I'm sitting at the dining room table before everyone arrives, and looking at Tommy's picture on the wall, thinking, 'When will I ever be able to make sense of this?'
"But you never get your head around the whole thing. You can only deal with it a piece at a time," she says.
Although there are times when grief overwhelms her, she feels closest to her son when she embraces life, "sharing the essence of who he is," she says.
"If there's one lesson from my son to me, it's to live my life to the fullest."
MEMORIAL FUND
For information on the Thomas Bennett Student Enrichment Memorial Fund in Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of British Columbia, go to: www.supporting.ubc.ca/thomasbennett
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