Forget Me Not: A Memoir

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Alex Lowe death was caused by an Avalanche, a dream that his wife Jen had had a day before the trip.

At the time of his unfortunate end, the story is that of this couple struggling to reconcile their respective needs for fulfillment and employment with Lowe's frequent absences.

The first few chapters of this book are steeped in the early lives of Alex and Jennifer, whose life together wasn't always smooth. In the end, I feel she is the biggest hero here, even though she somehow manages to take a backseat and paint everyone else as larger than life.

Like a Marc Chagall of the American West, Jennifer Lowe-Anker paints lucid dreams, and she’s given us one of her best in Forget Me Not. At the same time I sensed what it would be like to be married to a person so absorbed in a dangerous sport/hobby. Jennifer got together and married Conrad (Alex's best friend and survivor of that fateful climb) less than a year after the accident and married him shortly after that.I stumbled across it because I am such a huge Jon Krakaur fan, and found that he had contributed to the Forward.

In moving in with Jennifer, as a father figure who had survived the avalanche that killed the boy's father, Conrad would be shouldering the responsibility of a lifetime. Lowe and the photographer ran down the mountain as the avalanche started, rather to the side as Anker did. Jenni's detailed recollections are beautiful, the letters she kept from herself and Alex are wonderful, and her open and honest reflection of living a life with a partner who was at times unbearably moody and at times so thoughtful and passionate was stunning.

I felt myself identifying with the author due to her style of writing and because of her husband's letters. Forget Me Not" spans continents and tells the story of three people whose lives intertwine to a degree they could never have imagined. These are the bittersweet memoirs of a Bozeman, Montana based artist coming to grips with the loss of an extraordinary husband, a professional athlete who died in the mountains, leaving the love of his life and three small sons behind. It is also a deeply felt meditation on love, family, perseverance, the inevitability of loss, and the need to be true to one's nature for better of worse. This is a love story and Jennifer shares their blossoming relationship, marriage, and family life with three sons in great detail.