ON HEARING THE NEWS, I mostly remember confusion. How could Dad have fallen off the mountain? It didn't make sense. Falling and hitting a ledge I could understand, but all the way off the mountain? I needed information, to learn that he hadn't made a mistake; I couldn't imagine him failing to tie in or not clipping himself to a fixed rope. Dad didn't make dumb mistakes like that. Somehow the information about a broken rope must not have reached me. On the back of a photograph I found recently, someone—I have no idea who—had written, SON JOHNNIE VERY GOOD SKIER. COMMENTED ON HEARING OF FATHER'S DEATH: "IT WASN'T HIS FAULT."

Mom did not speak at the funeral, but if she had, she likely would have said what she wrote down later: "John offered me a world of feeling, observation, and participation that I could never have experienced on my own. One cannot measure him by the yardstick used for ordinary men. It would be like measuring an elephant in microns."

At the funeral, in Leysin, I remember crowds spilling out the door, processions of mountain guides from France and Switzerland, all in their guide's knickers and sweaters; walking up the steps to the freshly dug grave, where wreaths of evergreen boughs and huge bouquets of flowers were piled under the falling snow; and a throng of people looking down as Dad's casket was lowered into the earth.

On the day Dad was buried, Dougal and four of the Germans battled the storm of their lives to finally reach the summit. They named their achievement in Dad's honor: the John Harlin Route.

My mother refused to see the corpse: Dad's body had been mutilated by his 4,000-foot fall and she didn't want to remember him that way. She was warned that she would have dreams about Dad if she didn't see his body, and it came true. In her dreams Dad's death was a hoax: He had gone to Algeria to escape his family commitment. Then she'd meet him on ski lifts or trains, and always she'd ask, "How could you do that to the children?"

In my own dreams, Dad would simply show up at the dinner table—or on a train. He was silent, and I silently observed him and wondered where he'd been. My dreams faded much sooner than Mom's did. Eight-year-old Andréa had the hardest time, and her confession to Maria Coffey in Where the Mountain Casts Its Shadow, Coffey's 2003 book, shocked both Mom and me nearly four decades later. Andréa told Maria she had never cared whether Dad "succeeded" on a climb so long as he came back to her. Furious at him in his death, Andréa turned her anger on Mom. She started building her fantasy: Dad was not dead; the coffin was empty; he would come back and take her with him to wherever he'd gone. She was a junior in high school, she told Maria, when suddenly she realized, "No, he's not ever going to come back. He's dead."

Within the family we referred to Dad being "away on an expedition," and we tried to live as best we could by pretending this was a normal absence. Life for me was so busy and difficult that I barely had time to notice that Dad's "expedition" extended ever longer. In June, three weeks after my tenth birthday, Mom and I went to Zermatt, where we hiked under the north face of the Matterhorn and slept in an abandoned grain house. Mom wrote a friend afterwards, "Johnny has not given up his intention of being the youngest climber of the Matterhorn, despite the fact that the original guide is no longer around. Told me yesterday that if no one takes him up before he is 17, he will solo it. I do not know if that was meant as a threat or a fact."

I don't remember or understand how Mom managed her time. She had a full-time teaching job that included field trips to the coasts of France and Greece, lab preparations, exams, and grading. She sorted the radio conversations from the Eiger climb and pulled Dad's writings together. And she corresponded endlessly with James Ramsey Ullman, who was writing a book: Straight Up: The Life and Death of John Harlin. And she never lost sight of her own dreams. The summer after Dad died, Mom moved us back to the States, where she began work on a Ph.D. in marine biology at the University of Washington.