Its not the climb up the mountain, it is the coming down

on the Sunday morning after Connor's graduation, when we woke up, Max asked me "so, how sore are you? You were really working hard yesterday." I replied that "it wasn't the work yesterday that made me hurt; it was the 22 years before." at which, I promptly burst into tears. i hadn't cried that much in the days previously or even as he got his diploma and medal. Connor had treated the graduation with such passivity, almost disdain, I knew that this was just the first, the first degree of many; the smallest of many more mountains that he planned to climb. As much I thought I had finished, that the task might be complete, he knew that it had just begun. there would always be a grander, taller, harder, mountain to climb. I aslo realized that, much to my surprise, it wasn't the climb, the going up that hurt, it was the decent, the coming down that really hurt.
For all those years, the "naysayers" told us what he wouldn't do as a person and what we couldn't be as a family. Sometimes, what were the worse moments when having Connor's challenges in our lives, were dismissed as being "no big deal." the times when the magnitude of his disability and just what it took to get him transported to an event, dinner or party was afforded (by some) as much after thought as a person would take in choosing what kind of donut they were going to order at Tim Hortons that morning.
But, we did it!. One day at a time, one foot after the other, one wheel after the other, hand in hand we climbed the mountains. I would be lying if I said that there had not been many tears along the way or that there were not a thousand times I thought about giving up, turning around and never going another step. Luckily, we all dragged each other along:Connor, Max, Jarrett and myself, we climbed our Mount Everest.

Recently, there was a news story about a Canadian woman who had died fulfilling her life long dream of reaching the summit of Mount Everest.As it turned out, she did not die climbing the mountain; she reached the summit and unfurled the Canadian flag. She perished on the decent from exhaustion and "altitude sickness:She had spent too much time at the top.
Crying in the hotel room, I knew that Connor had the right idea: you should just find a higher mountain to climb, a bigger one, a harder one. It is not the going up that hurts; its the decent and the sudden stops that really injure you!