Marja and Gerry Vanderbeek grew up in the Netherlands. Marja was 3 and living in Indonesia with her family when World War II broke out and the Japanese invaded the islands. Marja spent the next four years with her mother and her brothers and sisters trying to survive the brutality of a prison camp and wondering about the fate of her father.

Gerry was a little boy living with his family in the northern part of the Netherlands when the Germans invaded. Gerry and his family passed the “racial test,” but the Jewish family that lived across the street was deported and never seen again. Gerry and his family were forced to feed and house German officers who moved into their home during the occupation.

Those traumatic childhood events didn't dampen their sense of adventure, and when they finally met and married they were off to see the world. They left for Canada with their two young sons, $200 and faith that it would all work out. And it did. Gerry got a job as a banker in Montreal and then a better job in Seattle where their third son was born. Eventually Gerry and Marja settled in Denver and raised their family.

And then, in 1998, the wonderful life that they had created was shaken to the core and they were forced to draw on a strength that they hadn't had to tap since they were children.

Gallacher: So what has kept the two of you together through the “thick and the thin”?

Gerry: We're both Dutch and stubborn. We don't give up.

Marja: Gerry has been telling his friends, “You need to have a wife that won't leave you.” But I think it is more about how we were brought up. We were both taught that you don't give up once you get married, you try to work it out. I think that younger people tend to give up when something happens in a relationship that they don't like.

We are still working on ours.

Gerry: Yeah, we both know from growing up, during World War II and Marja being in a prison camp, that life can be very hard. So when life is hard …

Marja: You don't give up. That was especially true after our son, Mike, died because you really can't help each other, and you just have to work through the grief. That was very difficult.

Gallacher: Can you talk about that?

Marja: It was devastating.

Gerry: We lived a charmed life as a couple and a family. We did a lot of outlandish things without giving it much thought, because analysis would have paralyzed us. “Let's move to Canada. OK, let's go.” “Let's buy a house. We don't have any money. Oh well, let's do it anyway. We'll figure it out.”

Marja: We didn't have any really difficult things happen to us in our life.

Gerry: So we couldn't believe that this was happening to us because everything had always worked out. It took us a long time to see why our ideal home had collapsed. Then we began to realize that so many other people suffer.

Marja: We started to discover that we weren't the only ones.

Gerry: After a month or so of saying, “Why us?” we began to think, “Why not us?” A lot of people have terrible things happen, why shouldn't something tragic happen to us? Why should we be spared?

Then we started to think about Mike and the incredible life that he had.

Marja: Our son was really an example to us. He was not interested in material things, at all. What he owned he had on his back. He had just bought a piece of land, and he was planning to build himself a small cabin.

Mike was an Outward Bound instructor and loved the outdoors. He had a special place in his heart for younger kids and was always helping them. He was a very giving person.

Gerry: Marja and I are idealistic, but we are also pragmatic. He was a true idealist who had a glorious short life, and I am not so sure, looking back, if he would have been happier living a much longer life. Sooner or later his idealism would have clashed with the reality of everyday living.

Marja: He was still looking for the frontier, that's why he was so drawn to Alaska. He watched as the paved roads moved further and further into the wilderness that he loved so much. That was very hard for him to accept. He was really troubled by man's disregard for nature.

He spent one winter in a hut deep in the Alaskan mountains studying the receding glaciers.

Gerry: Then in May of 1998 he was working as rescue ranger in Denali National Park. Only the best climbers are chosen for these positions, so he was very excited and having a wonderful time. And then, two days before his term was up, Mike and a co-worker, Mark, were descending from an 18,000-foot camp on Denali when they saw two Canadian climbers fall. They radioed it in and went to help and in their haste they forgot to rope up.

As they descended to Peter's Glacier, they got caught up in a ground blizzard. It was then that they realized that they needed to rope up before they went any further. They were in the process of roping up on this very narrow ledge with no visibility when Mike's partner said he heard the scratching of metal and the swooshing of the rope and then nothing. Mike was gone … disappeared.

At that point Mark tied himself into the mountain and screamed his head off. And he stayed there waiting for 24 hours.

Marja: They have never found Mike's body, which was so hard for me for a long time. But I have realized, over the years, that Denali is the perfect resting place for him, the place he loved so much.

Gerry: I climbed to the spot two years later just to have that experience and be near him in a way. There was a very steep drop off into Peter's Glacier, and Mike must have fallen into a deep crevasse because they had three different searches for him and found nothing.

Marja: They did find the body of the boy Mike was trying to rescue and Mike's backpack. They found his broken crampon. That was one of the reasons he fell.

Gerry: Yeah, I still have that. He was an amazing climber but he would not spend money on the latest and greatest equipment. He had these ancient Everest crampons, and he must have kicked in to get a hold and it broke.

Marja: Because Mike was working for the government at the time, Gerry and I were given grief money, $70,000 each. We used the money to set up the Mike Vanderbeek Scholarship Fund at the Alaska Mountaineering School. Every year there are three or four native Alaskan kids who get a chance to learn how to climb and survive in the wilderness.

Gallacher: I understand that it was Mike's death that brought you here.

Marja: We were living in Denver at the time and, even though Mike wasn't living at home, he always came back to what he called his “blue room.” I had such a hard time even walking by the “blue room” after his death. I finally decided that I had to leave that house. I could not handle it.

Gerry: He gave us the impulse to move on. We thought about a condo on a golf course, but I couldn't stand the thought of not being part of a town with the daily comings and goings. We were in Glenwood for a visit and we saw this house for sale. We didn't even have our house for sale in Denver, but we bought this house on impulse and went back to Denver and put the other one on the market. We sold it in three days.

Mike helped us a lot. There are amazing things about life that aren't obvious.

Marja: We changed a lot. Before his death I'm not sure that we would have liked to live in this house.

Gerry: We both grew up in towns where people walk around and neighbors visit. This really feels like home. I can mow the lawn and get caught up with everything that's happening in the neighborhood. So we are very fortunate, and we have to thank Mike for this.

Marja: Yes, we owe him a great deal.

Note: Marja and Gerry watch the daily comings and goings from their home on Blake Avenue in Glenwood Springs.

Immigrant Stories runs Mondays in the Post Independent. To read other Immigrant Stories go to www.immigrantcolorado. blogspot.com.