Reader's Digest Australia Feb/Mar 2026

are shipped to Los Angeles, and Jenni- fer picks them up at the airport. She opens the package when she gets to her car—and there is her dad, cre- mated into a 13-pound urn. She cries at the finality of it. But she is so, so happy. The plan is to pour the ashes into three urns. One will go home with her, one will go with Joseph back to New Jersey, and they will hold on to the third until the family can gather on Mount Baldy, the 10,064-foot snowy peak about 50 miles outside Los Angeles where Bill’s climbing career began. They want to scatter the remains around Bill’s birthday, Nov. 26. He would’ve been 81. Jennifer places the urn in the back- seat, and a feeling comes over her that her dad is with her in the car. The drive takes about an hour and a half in the L.A. afternoon traffic. Jennifer spends most of the time tell- ing her father that she has managed to merge their shared passion, music, with her career as a teacher. She talks about her side business making purses and jewelry, and knowing that he’d have been her No. 1 customer. She says she can’t wait for him to be around Joseph to hear the same life updates from him. She can’t help but throw out a spoiler that Joseph named his daughter after him: Wilhelmina. She also expresses the emotional toll of losing him. How this is a sadmoment and also a happy moment and also the perfect ending and also so damn funny. “Dad, you hated the cold, and that’s how you died? Frozen? Really?” she says, laughing, into the rearviewmirror. “I cried after it first happened,” Jennifer recalls later. “But there was so much uncertainty that the crying didn’t feel final. I didn’t really let it all out. I never had that moment. Having him in my backseat, knowing that this was finally it, I was able to just let it go.” In the months after discovering Bill, Cooper has gotten to know the Stampfl family. His favorite part is hearing them talk about Bill. Janet met Bill in the late 1970s. Both were divorced and in their mid-30s, with two kids apiece. She liked how he had his own life and wanted her to have her own life too. He was the bread- winner, working as a civil engineer, and she was a steady, resilient force that kept their lives humming along. Bill was constantly finding new hob- bies and passions. He learned how to play the guitar, harmonica, trumpet and accordion, and he taught himself wood- working. The common theme of his hobbies was that they were solitary pursuits. Bill liked to work alone. He grew up as an Austrian immigrant in the U.S. right after World War II, picked on nonstop for the thick accent that American kids assumed was German. The anxiety caused him to turn inward and work on getting rid of his accent. Years later, as an adult, he became the kind of man who was reader ’ s digest 92 February/March 2026 | rd.coM so quiet that when he did speak, people listened—and they didn’t hear an accent. The one place where Bill felt he could be a little loud was with his family. Janet still remembers the long car rides where the whole gang would sing “She’ll be Coming ’Round the Mountain” until their throats hurt. Janet told Cooper about how, later in life, Bill discovered what would be his favorite hobby: mountaineering. He climbed Mount Baldy once and then again, and soon he was doing it once a week, with 65 pounds of cat litter in his backpack as he pushed his body to pre- pare for bigger peaks. He’d go on to climbMount Kilimanjaro, Mount Rain- ier and a slew of others. When Cooper spoke with Jennifer, she described working for years as an EMT before she went back to school to study music. In 2002, at age 31, she’d gotten her degree to teach music around the time that Bill announced that he was going to try to climb Huas- carán. In one of their last conversa- tions, Jennifer delivered great news: She’d been hired as a middle school music teacher in the Los Angeles area. He was so happy for her. She told Cooper that Bill went to Huascarán in June 2002 with two friends, Matthew Richardson and Steve Erskine. In Bill Stampfl’s mind, she said, he’d climb Huascarán and then start thinking about trying to summit Mount Everest. He was serious—at age 58, Drama in Real Life