“If you lived in the U.K. in the 1970s/‘80s, you would think every top climber in the country had died in the Himalaya,” says Dougald MacDonald, editor of American Alpine Journal. Dougal Haston, Nick Estcourt, Alex McIntyre, Peter Boardman, and Joe Tasker were the best British alpinists of their time, and all of them died within a period of a few years in the mountains. “I would say a higher percentage of elite alpine climbers died in those days than today. But that’s just a gut feeling.”

I wonder if that’s true. Amid any tragedy, especially when a celebrity dies, it can be tough to see the big picture, objectively and dispassionately. My article last month reviewing the past decade of climbing alluded to just how many alpinists are now gone.

I was thinking about death after seeing the news of the helicopter crash that killed Kobe Bryant, his daughter, and others. It’s interesting to observe how people in the mainstream—those who, unlike most climbers I know, aren’t as calloused to experiencing the sudden losses of our heroes—wrestled with what to make of death’s indiscriminate preferences.

I recognized many patterns of discourse, including token reminders to be “in the moment” and “tell people you love them,” to raging debates over what is or isn’t “appropriate” to talk about in the wake of death.

The more inured you become to death, however, the more dishonest those types of conversations begin to seem. They’re all words we say to fill a difficult space. They’re blue pills that we take that allow us to continue ignoring one of the most fundamental realities of life—that it will end, and can do so abruptly, senselessly, and without any higher meaning.

Last April, David Lama, Hansjoerg Auer, and Jess Roskelley—who, as Reinhold Messner told me, were alpinism’s “best young pioneers”—died on Howse Peak in Banff National Park when they were caught in an avalanche. The climbers had likely completed a significant one-day ascent of “M16,” one of the hardest and most dangerous alpine climbs in North America. The avalanche struck them on their descent. Had they survived, they would have been celebrated for their success. Instead, it’s a different conversation.

“There’s no amount of skill set that’s going to increase your ability to survive an avalanche like that,” Brian Webster, a Parks Canada spokesperson, told reporters. In other words, they died because they were unlucky and in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It’s interesting to consider how many of the best climbers find themselves in the wrong places at the wrong times, however. In the past six years, the mountains have taken away many wonderful souls such as Marc-Andre LeClerc, Ryan Johnson, Ueli Steck, Tomek Mackiewicz, Kyle Dempster, Scott Adamson, Inge Perkins, Alexander Ruchkin, Valery Rozov, Sergey Glazunov, Tom Ballard, Daniele Nardi, and others. They join such climbers as Alison Hargreaves, Jerzy Kukuzca, Erhard Loretan, Tomaz Humar, Mugs Stump, and Alex Lowe—all were considered among the best in the world when the mountains indiscriminately killed them.

These deaths always raise an extraordinary paradoxical question about whether this sport is even “worth it.” Indeed, is the very thing for which these climbers were known, celebrated, sometimes highly paid, and that they themselves loved to do, worth it?

“I spent my life building this athlete program, putting lives at risk just to sell raincoats,” Conrad Anker told me, being both macabre and glib, in the days following Lama, Auer, Roskelley’s deaths. That feeling of senselessness is particularly potent when bodies are still lying in the snow. And yet it strikes at the truth of the matter in a way that we seldom talk about unless it’s preceded by a painful, still raw event.

“When Mugs Stump died, it was so intense,” Anker said of his former mentor, who died in 1992 when he fell into a crevasse on Denali in Alaska. “I was 36 years old when Alex Lowe died. That was a bit more intense because I had not only the survivor’s guilt but the PTSD that went with it.”

Luck plays an enormous role in alpine climbing—and life. Skill, strength, and experience can only mitigate so many of the hazards that exist in dangerous environments such as mountains. When GOATs go down, we climbers experience shock (“How could it happen them?”), fear (“It could happen to me”), and even a sense of unfairness (“Look at the people who are less talented and cautious who ‘get away’ with bad decision making in the mountains”).

Shock, however, is not the same as surprise. And when the news spreads that a climber has died in the big mountains, “It’s hard to be surprised,” my friend Corey Rich says. “The older you get, the longer that list of friends and acquaintances who die gets.”

“I think climbers and mountaineers have a very open relationship toward risk and toward their fears,” Lama told me in the last interview I got to do with him. “We think about what can go wrong. Obviously, it’s really important to stay alive, but I also think it’d be really good if people, in general, think about the consequences of their actions as much as climbers do.”

Thinking about the consequences of our decisions is tough for climbers, too. I’m torn between two ideas when it comes to speaking honestly about death from climbing in the mountains. On the one hand, it’s somewhat insane to continue going to places filled with so many ghosts and expect that the same fate won’t happen this time, to us. The way we can talk about death in climbing sometimes strikes me as having a parallel to the gun-control debate in America. It’s almost as if we’ve begun regarding the deaths of our brothers and sisters a bit too fatalistically, as if they simply can’t be prevented—i.e., you can’t take away our guns just as you can’t take away our risky climbs. And yet the solution to this problem is as plain as day.

On the other hand, we must also honestly acknowledge that just living is a risky business; that no matter who you are or what you’re doing, it can all be torn away in the blink of an unlucky eye. And if that’s our unfair, scary predicament, doesn’t it follow that it only makes sense to live as boldly as possible … to make the most of our short and uncertain amount of time that we have here?

You can choose to think so, and even have moments where you act bravely and confidently as if it’s the only truth worth living … and yet, I wonder who among us wouldn’t trade that last, fatal ascent for another day, however mundane, of existence?