The Times Magazine 55your heart, that they’re going to care for it.
And I think for Max, he felt a bit betrayed.”
Over the course of making Torn, Max
delved through hours and hours of video
footage of both Lowe and Anker. In one clip,
we see Lowe sitting in a tent in Antarctica
on Christmas Day, reading a card that Max
had sent him and doing his best not to seem
emotional. We learn, through Anker, that
Lowe had been feeling increasingly as though
he was spending too much time apart from his
sons, and that the Shishapangma expedition
was perhaps one job too many.
“You know, I had this memory, this final
memory of him asking me whether I thought
he should go to Tibet,” says Max, gently
drawing the sentence out of himself. He told his
father that he should, though he does not today
blame himself for Lowe’s decision to go. “In
his mind, he never thought he might not come
back. It was more just him asking himself.”
Lowe was, in his final year or so of life, a
man in deep conflict with himself. And for Max
the discovery and understanding of this conflict
helped to make him feel more real. “It meant
I had this much more complex picture of
him, not only as a man who was driven to do
this amazing work in the mountains, but as
someone who questioned himself, and who
wasn’t sure about the way he was going in life.”
Max also came to understand more about
Anker. Whereas his younger brothers both
changed their surnames to Anker after Jenni
remarried, Max kept his as Lowe. Part of
him always wondered just how much this
man truly loved them, and how much he was
simply fulfilling a responsibility he believed
he had. “Was he maybe like... stuck with us?
Because of his survivor’s guilt?”
Instead, during the documentary Max is
shown letters Anker had sent to Jenni in the
immediate aftermath of the avalanche. In
them, it is painfully clear just how damaged
Anker was by his experience, and that his
desire to be close to Jenni and the boys
stemmed from something far more urgent
than duty or chivalry. While reading the
letters, Max breaks down in tears. “And that
was a kind of breakthrough moment in seeing
how much he needed us as well,” he says. “We
needed him as a father, and my mum needed
him as a partner. But Conrad wanted to be
there for us. He needed that after losing Alex.”
“We were both traumatised,” says Jenni.
“And I could see, after he came back, that
he was filled with so much guilt. And I am
a care-giver. That’s what gives me strength- to rise up and defend or care for other
people. And he was struggling. He was
suicidal. And I was like, ‘I have to care
for this man.’ So we were drawn together.”
As their mutual need deepened into mutual
love, “we were criticised instantly” in some
parts of the media. They had surely been
having an affair that had predated Lowe’s
death. Or if not, they were certainly now
disrespecting his memory. But the families
of everyone involved – Lowe, Anker and Jenni- seemed to understand and accept their
desire to be together. Part of the reason they
married quickly was because Jenni’s mother
had been diagnosed with leukaemia three
months after the avalanche.
“She was watching me fall in love with
Conrad and she was saying, ‘Jenni... another
climber? Is this going to be OK?’ But she also
wanted to wrap up the package and know that
I was going to be all right when she was gone,”
she says, her voice straining and breaking. “So
Conrad and I made the decision to get married.
So that my mum knew that before she died.”
The discovery of Lowe’s body and the
journey the family made to Tibet was, as
Anker says, the point at which so many of
these emotions came rushing back. “Even
17 years later, Conrad was struggling the entire
trip,” says Max. “He would just disappear. He
was emotionally vacant.”
“The self-doubt that had hung over me
resurfaced,” says Anker. Returning to the place
where two of his friends died was traumatic
enough. But for all the love he and Jenni
may have felt for Lowe, there was something
inescapably morbid about coming face to face
with his frozen remains. “The physical trauma
of having to attend to their bodies and then
take them from the glacier and wrap them up
and bring them down... That was a very intense
thing to have to do.” In Lowe’s backpack, Anker
found an old water bottle of his that he had
lent to his friend. It was an inconsequential
thing really, but reliving the memories caused
“a flood of emotion to come back”.
Kneeling beside Lowe’s body on the glacier,
Jenni removed his wedding ring before taking
his hand and holding it against her own. Lowe’s
body, along with that of Bridges, was then
carried down the mountain and cremated on
a large outdoor pyre. “I don’t want to act like
there’s closure here, because there’s not,” says
Jenni. “When you love someone, they’re going
to remain with you and your heart for ever.”
But there was, nevertheless, a
“peacefulness” to the journey back down
the mountain and the cremation. “To me, it
was kind of a gift that we were all able to go
and finish that. There are so many people
who lose loved ones in plane wrecks or in
war and who never retrieve the bodies or have
ashes or anything,” she says. “It was a horrible
experience. But also a good one.”
Since working with Max on Torn, Anker
says that he has learnt to stop doubting
himself. “I can give myself credit for what
I have done,” he says. “And be more confident
in who I am. The film has shown me how
much Max and the boys and Jenni care for
me.” Perhaps, he says, he could have been
better at expressing just how much he loves
and cares for them back. But they all know
now. “We’re better connected as a family,” he
says. So far he has watched Torn seven times.
“And I’ve always ended up in tears.”
Max says that, for a very long time, he
considered the love shared by his mother and
Lowe to have been a “romance that anybody
would be envious of”, while the love she
shared with Anker was something altogether
more complex and fraught. “But by making
this film, I came to realise that every love is
complicated and hard, you know?”
His mother nods. “Love is really the biggest
risk we take in life,” she says. “It’s bigger than
climbing mountains.” nTorn is released on January 21FINDING HER HUSBAND’S BODY WAS ‘A
HORRIBLE EXPERIENCE. BUT GOOD TOO’
From left: Jenni, Isaac, Max,
Anker and Samuel at Alex
Lowe’s memorial, June 2016LOWE ANKER FAMILY