<body><div>On a trip through Boise, Idaho, my wife Kristi found a sticker in a coffee shop with three words printed on it: Keep on climbing. That sticker was meant for her. Those three words became her motto, then our family’s, and eventually the title of a book I never imagined I would write.Keep on Climbing: A Story About How to Always Live is a memoir about Kristi and the life we built together over three decades of marriage. It’s a love story, a family story, and, because life doesn’t let you choose your plot, a story about cancer. But more than anything, it’s about how one woman chose to live, right up until the very end.<figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=2y60E2_1H5RmNRb00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=2y60E2_1H5RmNRb00" width="250" height="400" ></figure>Kristi and I met at Fresno State, in the Agriculture building of all places. Not exactly the setting of a romance novel, but it worked for us. We went on to build a family partly through adoption, raising five children who are the center of this book as much as she is. Kristi spent eighteen years teaching at a continuation high school, working with students who had often been written off somewhere else. She never wrote anyone off.She was also a hiker. Kristi grew up visiting the Sierra Nevada, and the mountains stayed in her blood. Together we summited 11,000-foot peaks more than once, and one summer we hiked twenty-five miles from the Eastern Sierra near Bishop all the way over to Cedar Grove in Kings Canyon. When I say she kept on climbing, I mean it literally before I mean it any other way.Kristi carried a rare genetic condition called Li-Fraumeni syndrome, which makes a person far more likely to develop cancer, and to develop it again and again. She survived breast cancer. Later came leiomyosarcoma, a rare and aggressive soft-tissue cancer. There were many long drives to Stanford Hospital, many waiting rooms, many conversations I would rather not have had to have.Kristi died on December 30, 2025, at 9:09 in the evening.I want to be honest: I did not set out to write a cancer book. Cancer was something that happened to Kristi. It was never who she was. So while the illness runs through the second half of the story, I worked hard to keep her, not the diagnosis, at the center of every page. If you asked me to sum her up, I would use three words: stubborn, kind, and grateful. The book’s final chapter is built around exactly those three traits, because those are what I want people to remember.While I never intended to write a book like this, I needed to. Grief has to go somewhere, and for me it went onto the page.But there were other reasons, too. I wanted our children to have their mother’s story in one place, told by someone who was there for all of it: the hikes, the adoptions, the ordinary Tuesday nights, the hospital rooms, and the last evening. I wanted our families and friends to have something to hold onto. And I hoped that someone I’ll never meet, a husband sitting in an oncology waiting room, a family newly facing a hereditary cancer diagnosis, a widow or widower trying to figure out what comes next, might pick it up and feel a little less alone.The subtitle, A Story About How to Always Live, came from watching Kristi. Even when she was sick, she kept planning trips, kept teaching, kept showing up. On one of our cruises, she told me she just wanted to “be fancy for a week.” That was Kristi: tired, worn down by treatment, and still determined to put on something nice and enjoy the view.I wrote chapter by chapter with the help of our travel and health blogs, roughly in order, and then went back again and again. Memoir is humbling that way. You think you remember exactly how old the kids were when something happened, or which trip came first, and then you sit down with the calendar and discover you were off by a couple of years. A lot of my revision time went into simply getting the facts right, because Kristi deserves accuracy.I also didn’t write it alone. Kristi’s lifelong friend Beti shared memories of Kristi’s early years that I never could have supplied myself, and they gave the opening chapters a richness I’m grateful for. And since a lot of it comes from our blogs which we wrote together, Kristi helped me write it just as much as anyone else.One structural choice mattered a great deal to me. The book opens at the moment Kristi died, and the closing chapter returns to that same moment in the very same words. In between is everything that led there: thirty-some years of a life. I wanted readers to know from the first page how the story ends, so they could stop worrying about the ending and pay attention to the living.The last chapters, covering Kristi’s final weeks, were the hardest things I have ever written. Some days I could only manage a paragraph. But I kept going, because that’s what she would have told me to do.In addition to the book, our family established the Kristi Mulligan Memorial Scholarship, an idea that came up during one of those drives to Stanford. This fall it was awarded for the first time to a student heading into a career in health care. Kristi would have loved that.Keep on Climbing is now available on Amazon in paperback, hardcover, and e-book. If you read it, I hope you come away knowing Kristi a little. And I hope, whatever mountain you’re facing right now, you’ll remember her three words.Keep on climbing.You can click here to purchase this book from Amazon. Jim Mulligan lives in Reedley, California, where he has served in several faculty positions at Reedley College for 19 years. He is a certified life coach, a former school board president, an amateur travel blogger, the father of five, and a grandfather of three. Keep on Climbing: A Story About How to Always Live is his first book.</div></body>

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On a trip through Boise, Idaho, my wife Kristi found a sticker in a coffee shop with three words printed on it: Keep on climbing. That sticker was meant for her. Those three words became her motto, then our family’s, and eventually the title of a book I never imagined I would write.

Three Words From a Coffee Shop: Why I Wrote Keep on Climbing

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On a trip through Boise, Idaho, my wife Kristi found a sticker in a coffee shop with three words printed on it: Keep on climbing. That sticker was meant fo

Three Words From a Coffee Shop: Why I Wrote Keep on Climbing

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