The Great Escape

Liz Mills — The Great Escape

My brother, William, is nothing short of Houdini when it comes to getting out of things he doesn’t want to do. Literally no excuse or strategy is beneath him. And I’m really ashamed to say I’ve often been his accomplice. Nearly 15 years ago, he called me from his college dorm room and told me he was totally screwed for a research paper the next day. And so me, his ghost writer since high school, assessed the situation here was no way I could write 15 pages on the Ottoman Empire by the next morning. And so I said, William, looks like you’re going to have to say our grandmother died. And he was like, Liz, I did that at midterms. And so I joked, how about grandpa? And he said, I did that one too. Suffice to say, even Houdini runs out of tricks at a certain point and William certainly did.

He failed the paper. But the good news is when it comes to the higher stakes stuff, William always rises to the occasion. About six years ago, he and I were on a bus on the way to Mountain View and the driver lost control of it, hit the media, and we flipped. And out of nowhere, William turned into a real-life Clark Kent. He was saving the day, running around, helping people up, bandaging people up. He was making us laugh in the middle of the dark highway when it was pretty scary. He was our brightness. So it probably comes as no surprise that a thrill seeker like William ended up in an unconventional path. About a decade ago, he became a skydiver and a skydiving instructor and then a base jumper, which means he spent over ten years climbing up mountains and jumping off epic peaks with only a parachute on his back.

Pretty insane, but kind of cool. And so despite the fact that I’m epically less epic than him, I still am always his get-out-of-jail-free emergency contact. And I do that because I love him. He’s amazing and one of my favorite people. So no surprise that I ended up in Switzerland two years ago when I got the call that he needed my help. He and his best friend Nate were on this bucket-list trip to the Swiss Alps to jump off this mountain called the Eiger as a way to celebrate their newfound sobriety and just beginning a new life chapter. But things weren’t going according to plan, and enter Liz. My task of the day was I was standing at a police station in some random town in the Swiss Alps and getting a list of to-dos. I had to sign a mountain of paperwork, make a ton of calls, pick up his shattered sunglasses, cremate his body, bring him home.

My big brother William at 32 had jumped off the Eiger, soared like Superman, seen the world from a vantage point very few ever will, and not made it out alive. Grief defies words. And as I sat there with a police officer, I was shaking. I felt outside of my body, and I could barely process the fact that William, who got out of everything, some sort of magical part of him got out of everything, hadn’t made it out alive. Where was the magic? As I was leaving the police station, the officer handed me one more thing, an SD card. William was wearing a GoPro when he jumped off the mountain because BASE jumpers do that, and so he had the final minutes of his life recorded. So I know what you’re thinking.

I hope Liz threw that out and forgot it ever existed. But of course I didn’t, because I had some sick belief that sister loyalty meant I had to experience that too. I threw it out of my head for a while, though, but a few months after he died, I broke. And in like a manic frenzy, I pulled the video up on my computer, and I just imagined if I hit play, would I regret it? Would I just be screaming at the screen, William, pull the parachute earlier. Pull it now. It’s now or never. You’ve got to do it now. I hit play. And the video was nothing like I expected. It was really cool. I saw from his vantage point, being at the top of the mountain, looking around at some of his great friends, he was saying, I love you, man. How epic is this? He was doing high fives and everything. I saw as he brought his toes closer to the edge, and then he jumped.

And for 45 seconds, when I was watching the video, it was the two of us looking at this incredible escape ahead of us, this valley, it’s beautiful. We looked to the left and to the right, and we took it all in, and I understood it. I mean, why stand at the tippy top of the Alps, looking out on a vista when you can fly over it and behold the world like entirely on your terms? William started BASE jumping when he was in a really bad place, and it was a hobby that became a passion, and a passion that turned him into the best version of himself. It was a part of the way he healed from bouts of tremendous depression throughout his life. So William’s final gift to me was he showed me a way that healing has many different paths, some of which are bananas, like jumping off mountains, and all of them are hard, but it’s worth it.

It’s taken a huge amount of courage over the past two years for me to learn how to simultaneously hold grief and devastation with joy and hope. William was the one who showed me there’s such beauty on the other side of bravery. The video ended. I was devastated. It felt irrecoverable. I could not imagine watching this video. It sickened me. But I paused, and truly it took a few seconds. I realized the magic in it, because William really was Houdini. He was always escaping all the way to the very end. The social norms, the predetermined path, the idea that the way things are are the way they’re supposed to be. He also evaded the misconception that we all have that the possibilities presented to us in life are representative of all our actual options. He didn’t escape death, obviously, but none of us will. And my God, did he show me the extraordinary beauty of a life well lived.