They describe a relationship with death that has been with them since they came home. Having seen people die, having survived when others did not, having made decisions that the rest of the world found difficult to comprehend — these experiences changed their relationship with the ordinary fears and anxieties of daily life. Many of the survivors have spoken about not being afraid of death in the same way that people who have not been through what they have been through are afraid of death. This is not, they clarify, a boast or a performance of courage. It is simply the report of what the experience produced.
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## The Glacier of Tears
The valley where the aircraft came to rest is now known as the Glaciar de las Lágrimas — the Glacier of Tears — a name it acquired because of what happened there.
The Andes Museum 1972, which opened in Montevideo in 2013, preserves physical artifacts from the survival period: items recovered from the crash site, documents, photographs, and objects associated with the survivors’ experience. It is a formal institutional acknowledgment that what happened in October through December 1972 is part of Uruguayan national history — not only the history of the sixteen survivors or the families of the twenty-nine who died, but the history of a country and of a particular generation.
The families who lost relatives in the crash did not all respond to the survival story the same way. The common grave at the crash site, established without family participation in January 1973, was a source of ongoing pain for some families. The bodies of their relatives were interred in a remote mountain location by authorities who did not permit family attendance, and remained there permanently — the terrain making any other arrangement impractical. The obelisk memorial erected in 2006 by survivors and families together represents a collective effort to honor both the dead and the living, in a place that is simultaneously a grave and a site of survival.