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“I was really close to the precipice already, staring at it,” Karsten Heuer told me in his backyard in June, talking about the day he thought he would die. “I was actually okay with it.”
It was one of many moments that day that left me feeling both heavy and hopeful.
When I first reached out to Heuer to ask if he’d be interested in being profiled, I only knew a little about his work as a biologist and conservation advocate. My reporting for a deep dive into the Three Sisters development saga in Canmore, Alta. — a proposal that could double the size of the Rocky Mountain town — brought me into his orbit of influence.
But at first I failed to grasp the immensity of his life experiences and his impact. And I didn’t know that his profile would turn into a meditation on life, death and meaning.
That’s because that precipice he faced was only the beginning. Almost two years after the day he thought he was going to die in a hunting accident, Heuer was diagnosed with a fatal neurological disease; he expects to be dead by this fall.
Despite the weight of what he faces, he invited me to his central Canmore home on a warm spring afternoon to talk openly about his work, life and impending death.
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