SPRINGFIELD, Mass. – Forty years is a long time to take to deliver thanks.

Grief never really frees one from its grip. Pat Atkinson-Sirois knows better than most. It’s haunted her for too many years.

She’s fortunate, though, to have a loving and supportive husband and great family and friends who have stood beside her along her path to find solace.

This journey began in March 1973, when she took a call from her then-20-year-old brother, George “Buddy” Atkinson Jr., letting his family know he’d arrived safely in the Adirondacks of New York state, where he planned to camp and hike for several days.

“I’ll see you guys next week” are the words Pat Atkinson-Sirois remembers him saying to her in that all-too-brief telephone conversation.

Little did she know that she would be the last person to ever hear her brother’s voice, the last person to speak with him.

When he didn’t return home the following weekend, their father, George Atkinson, came to her to say he was going to call the Chicopee (Massachusetts) Police Department to report Buddy as a missing person.

“‘Something’s not right,’ he said,” Pat recalls.

What unfolded was a massive search on ground and from the air, organized by the New York State Police and Adirondack forest rangers. Volunteers, including groups from Western Massachusetts, banded together to comb the region around Mount Marcy in search of Buddy Atkinson.

Buddy had graduated from Chicopee High School as a member of the class of 1971. He had just turned 20 in December 1972 and was working at the Marshall’s store on Parker Street in Springfield, a job he hated but which helped pay his bills and let him pursue his two passions in life, cars and all things outdoors. In another time, he would have been a true mountain man, movie character “Jeremiah Jones” come to real life, says his sister.

Just 16 months separated Buddy and Pat in age. Growing up in a tight-knit neighborhood around Ames Avenue in Chicopee, they were, as the saying goes, “thick as thieves.” They played together, shared friends together, and their older sister, Judy, “didn’t stand a chance against the two of us” as she was separated by more than a half-dozen years, Pat says.

Later, “as teenagers, you try not to be together,” Pat remembers. The sudden death in 1968 of their mother, Phyllis, at the age of 47, proved a seminal moment for each member of the family in different ways. In retrospect, Pat thinks the loss of their mother may have set Buddy on his path in search of himself amid the outdoors he loved so much.

“If you ask me, he was a guy who was born 100 years too late,” she says. Although accepted as a student at the Stockbridge School at the University of Massachusetts, Buddy Atkinson decided to put off college for awhile to figure out what he truly wanted to do with his life. “He wanted a little bit of time to just figure things out,” his sister says. “He was not a happy person with civilization. He was doing things just to make money and get these piece-of-crap cars he loved. He took every opportunity he could to go hunting or camping, by himself or with friends. He just wanted to be in the outdoors.”

So it was that Buddy planned the trip to the Adirondacks, mapping it out for weeks in advance before he set out in mid-March. He packed his shotgun, both for protection and hunting, along with all the camping and climbing gear he would need.

On March 15, Buddy signed the register at the trailhead leading to Mount Marcy from the Adirondak Loj, a place his family had enjoyed together back in the camping days of his youth. From there, it was as if he vanished into thin air. His car was found in the parking lot at the Loj with nothing appearing amiss.

He was headed to the summit of Marcy, New York state’s highest peak, and that’s where searchers knew to start looking. Unfortunately, there had been a blizzard during the week Buddy went missing, and the ensuing weather and hazardous conditions hampered the search and is likely what contributed to his loss.

Their father participated in as many of the searches as he could, keeping careful track of each one and mapping where searchers had been in the weeks and months that followed, all coming up empty.

Pat can remember how both she and her father dealt with a question from authorities, “Do you think Buddy could have just taken off?”

“I thought, yeah, maybe he could have. People back then did things like that, going to ‘find themselves.’ He was trying to figure things out. But in the back of my mind, I don’t think he would have ever done it to my dad,” she explains. “(Our mother’s death) was such a life-altering thing. I was 14. Buddy was 15.”

Hope endured for the Atkinson family.

“My dad and I were always hopeful. What else did we know?” she says.

Her father stayed in New York for about two weeks straight, on leave from his job at Monsanto, but no sign of Buddy was found. Over the course of that summer, more searches were pursued, all without a trace of Buddy in the wilderness. Over time, the searching became sporadic. Sometimes just Pat and her father would travel back to check in with the park rangers who remained friendly and concerned.

“They never closed the book. It was still an open case to them,” Pat remembers.

“I never lost hope. I am my father’s child. My dad was always this happy-go-lucky, always whistling and cheerful guy, very much an optimist about things. I always, in the back of my mind, kept thinking there would be an explanation. I never had any reason to doubt he would just come home one day.”

Until the spring of 1976.

Her father was notified that Buddy’s sleeping bag, wallet, shotgun with a spent shell and pieces of clothing had been found. Ironically, perhaps, it was Robert Thomas Jr., the brother of another man who went missing on Mount Marcy that spring, who located Buddy’s possessions. Pat says she can only imagine what it was like for another sibling to come upon things which might have belonged his own loved one.

Her father organized a new search party and was again joined by friends from the region. Pat, at her father’s request, didn’t make that trip.

“He told me, ‘I don’t think you better go on this one,'” she said. “I don’t think he wanted me to be there if we spotted my brother’s remains, and I don’t think he wanted to worry about me. He was about as protective a father as you could have.”

Buddy Atkinson’s remains were found deep in Panther Gorge, sometimes a refuge for hikers seeking protection from the elements as they climb in the area, according to Pat. He was brought home and buried in Chicopee at Calvary Cemetery beside their mother on Aug. 1, 1976.

Pat always wanted to return to Mount Marcy one day, to the place where her big brother spent his final moments. Thoughts of how he died haunted her. So, too, did a sense of helplessness for not having been there to comfort him. Was he in pain? Why did he have to die alone?

She and her husband, Al Sirois, decided they would make the trip together this summer. Forty years had been long enough. Her father died in 1986 at the age of 70. In 2009, her sister, Judy Green, died at 62.

“I’m the last one standing,” Pat says.

To prepare for the trip, Pat combed some of the archives her father had amassed of reports of the searches. Among them she found a photograph of Buddy’s car, covered with all messages left for him, including one she recognized as her father’s: “Buddy, please come to the Loj. We’re there.”

“It hit me like a punch in the gut,” she says, pausing before continuing tearfully, recalling her father’s resolve: “I’m going to bring my boy home.”

“He was so determined,” she says.

From what she has read and learned since, it wasn’t until her father was out of the woods and headed for home that word was received that someone had found Buddy’s remains. That someone turned out to be a Vietnam veteran, an Army sergeant from Greenfield, Massachusetts, Joe Korpiewski.

The headline on one of the stories she found recently read: “Greenfield man discovers Buddy Atkinson’s remains.” In all of these intervening years, she says, she hadn’t known it was someone who lived so close who had found her brother.

In late July, she and her husband set out from their home in Belchertown, Massachusetts, for Lake Placid. She carried with her a “piece of Chicopee,” a stone from the Ted Ondrick Co. that she had engraved with Buddy’s name. Along the trail from the register that Buddy had signed back in 1973, she found a spot to place the stone off next to a sapling.

“I don’t know how else to explain it,” she said. “I wanted a piece of home to go with me so he’d have a piece of Chicopee there with him. No one else has to see it. I’ll know it’s there. It’s something on that mountain that will be a reminder that he was there, that he died there.”

Pat and Al spent five hours in the Adirondack woods on Aug. 2. Amid the tranquility, Pat says, she “felt this sense of serenity come over me. My mission was accomplished. We caught our breath on a log among the beauty, and I said to Al, ‘Now I know why he loved this place so much.'”

In mid-September, Pat finally connected with the man who found Buddy. It was a “long and intense” telephone call. He was sensitive enough, she says, to inquire if she truly wanted to know all the details of his finding her brother’s remains.

“I told him, yes, I needed to hear everything about it,” she says. “It was very difficult to listen to it all, but, in the end, as I said to Joe, he was the right person at the right time to bring this to an end and his skills were put to the best use on that forbidding mountainside.”

She was comforted by Korpiewski’s recollections of his many talks with her father, remembering what a strong and special man he was: “You couldn’t ask for a better father.”

She knows now her brother suffered no physical trauma, no broken bones, but rather was a victim of the unmerciful cold and weather which engulfed the mountain that March. She knows Buddy died a peaceful death in a place he loved.

“It was an emotional call for me to be sure, but I couldn’t say it strongly enough to Joe, that even after 40 years, I finally had the chance to verbalize the words ‘thank you’ to the one person who so deserved them,” Pat says. “I would never give short shrift to all the dozens of volunteers who helped in searches over the years, but this was the guy whose courage and dedication brought it to an end.”

Buddy Atkinson’s dream, his sister believes, “would have been to have a piece of land, very remote, so that maybe he could carve out a life for himself in the outdoors and make a living for himself in the natural world.”

As she left Mount Marcy in August, Pat says she turned back to take a last look at the vista Buddy so loved and spotted a hawk soaring by itself.

“OK, I’ll take that, I thought,” she said. “It was his spirit. His soul is still where it needs to be.”

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Cynthia G. Simison is managing editor of The Republican daily newspaper, based in Springfield, Massachusetts. She may be reached at csimison@repub.com.