MH370, the Dyatlov Pass Incident, and the Narrative Suspense of a Human Life

One of the headlines in today’s Guardian was the announcement that the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 will resume after eleven years, which resonated with me for some reason that I couldn’t immediately name. But with reflection, I figured it out.

A missing plane is not only a tragedy and a mystery, but also a disruption in the narrative flow. When a flight takes off, the arc of the story is supposed to be simple: departure, journey, arrival. It’s a story with such a predictable shape that we hardly think of it as a story at all. But when that arc suddenly ends in midair, what’s left for the families is a kind of suspended grief — a narrative suspense that lasts for years, even decades. They cannot finish the story of the people they loved. And so they wait for the ending, the last page, the missing line that will let them breathe.

I felt the same resonance last week when I finished Dead Mountain, the account of the Dyatlov Pass Incident of 1959. Nine young hikers died on a frozen mountainside in the Ural wilderness. Their tent was found slashed open from the inside, their bodies scattered across the snow, injured in ways that didn’t make immediate sense. The group’s diary stopped mid-entry. Photographs taken by the group captured moments that suddenly stopped. The story of the nine hikers, too, had an ending torn away.

What kept the writer researching, and me reading, wasn’t the lure of sensationalism. It was the longing for closure. The effort to gather the theories and evidence was an attempt to give narrative shape to the moment where the arc of nine lives was abruptly severed. We want to know what happened so the story can complete its arc. (Spoiler alert: at the very end of the book, the writer does construct that narrative based on his thorough review of all of the evidence, including the various theories of what happened.)

This impulse is deeply human. I’m drawn to these stories — MH370, Dyatlov Pass, the families who wait for answers — because I’m in a phase of my life where I’m trying to understand the arc of my own story, as well as those of my ancestors. I’m writing my memoirs and reconstructing the emotional truths of my childhood, my parents, my grandparents, and the long ancestral lines that brought me here. I can sense the themes, the turning points, the motifs that keep returning to me — but the ending is still unknown.

In this quest, I am both narrator and protagonist, both witness and participant. I’m living forward inside the suspense of my own story, trying to understand its meaning without yet knowing its conclusion. I am aware of being mid-chapter, awake to the structure even as I inhabit it.

The families of MH370 are living a more painful version of this. Their suspense is not just philosophical but visceral. The search that begins again this month is not only a technological expedition; it is a human act of trying to restore the final chapter of hundreds of unfinished lives.

The Dyatlov group’s families faced a similar kind of suspended grief. Over time, the mystery grew larger than the individuals lost, but at its center was always the simplest human desire: to find their story and tell it.

When I put these threads together—missing hikers, missing planes, missing endings—what I see is something larger than any single tragedy. Across cultures and generations, humans are always trying to piece together stories left incomplete.

The arc of human life itself seems to be one long set of interrupted narratives.

As I shape my own memoir and reflect on the contours of my life, I feel the same desire that drives families back to crash sites and archives, to diaries and fragments, to anything that can fill in the gap: a longing to understand the big picture of the story I’m inside. I know this is an impossible task, but the information it yields is nonetheless useful.

The narrative arc Donnie Eichar created about the Dyatlov hikers may never be definitively proven. Still, his explanation is compelling enough to convey the arc and offer some closure. The reopened investigation into Flight MH370 may also allow the families some closure as they learn more about the story's ending.

The full article from the Guardian

The link to Dead Mountain