Counting Bones: Anatomy of Love Lost and Found

When she was twenty-four years old, Ellen Anderson Penno lost her partner in a climbing accident while they were ascending Mount Baker in Washington’s Cascade Range. The avalanche hid his body in a crevasse just weeks before Anderson Penno was slated to begin medical school, and she soon found herself torn between deferring her studies for a year, or starting right away with a full course load.

Rather than succumbing to grief and risk never beginning her medical education at all, she plunged...