FINDING A NEW LIFE AFTER FLIRTING WITH DEATH.(LIFE & LEISURE)

Byline: DAVID TARRANT Dallas Morning News

Seaborn Beck Weathers seemed doomed to spend his final moments this way, stranded at the remotest point on Earth, alone, freezing high on Mount Everest.

That Saturday was supposed to have been the day of his daughter's first real date. The next day was Mother's Day.

Even if he had been able to do so, Beck, a Dallas pathologist and fanatic mountain climber, probably wouldn't have marked either occasion with a phone call or telegram to his wife, Peach, or to his daughter, Meg.

Nor would it have occurred to him to rearrange his schedule or postpone the climb. His absence from birthdays and anniversaries, as well as everyday family rituals, was par for the course.

Beck and Peach's 20th wedding anniversary had passed quietly a few weeks earlier, on April 24, 1996; Beck had spent the day in Base Camp preparing to climb Everest. ``It just went unobserved,'' Peach says coldly. ``It just was one more day.''

When Beck went on his treks, weeks would go by without a word from him. ``We all could have been wiped out in a tornado and Beck would not have known,'' Peach says in a new book, ``Left For Dead: My Journey Home From Everest'' (Villard Books, $24.95).

Written by Beck and Dallas author Stephen G. Michaud, the book unsparingly details the high cost of the 53-year-old Dallas pathologist's single-minded obsession, his near death and loss of his nose, his right arm and all five fingers on his left hand to frostbite.

But the story is also about the family that had long languished in the shadow of the mountains he climbed. Those he ignored while he focused on the summit. Those he didn't appreciate until it was almost too late.

``He had to nearly die,'' Peach says, ``before he opened his eyes.''

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