Grief

Today I am not okay. It’s not about the injury, but it’s day 139

Today, at 3 a.m., it was the Babylon Fire. A monster 80,000-acre conflagration chewing through the redrock canyons of Bears Ears National Monument in Southeastern Utah. It’s just doing what fires do, right? But no, no, not these massive sterilizing events from which the landscape cannot fully recover, not in this hotter and drier climate, not in my lifetime. Erosion will follow the fire. The canyons will be reshaped. I loved it for what it was. Now it will be different.

I followed the fire perimeter line on the map until I found Salt Creek Wash. It’s not far away. I wonder if the flames will lick those canyon walls, leaving black soot on the Ancestral Puebloan ruins. Wouldn’t it be something if the “All American Man,” an 800-year-old pictograph painted in red, white, and blue, burned on the Fourth of July? What if the fire keeps moving up the wash toward Peekaboo Arch? My Dad wanted to leave a piece of himself for eternity in that place, on a sandstone bench overlooking lush canyons filled with juniper and pine. It was the one thing I could do for him after he died, the one thing, to leave him where he wanted to be, where he could be at peace. But the fire. What of it? There’s nothing that can stop it.

Today, at 6:45 a.m., it was Betsy. She’s been gone almost a year now, as of July 22. July 1 was the first of my near-daily visits to her home in Arvada during those three terrible weeks in July. July 2 was the last day she could get out of bed at all, although only with significant help. With arms wrapped around her waist, I half-carried her to the bathroom while she begged me to keep her safe. “Don’t drop me. Please don’t drop me.” I thought, “I will never drop you.” And for the next three weeks, I watched her slip farther into pain and suffering that I’d not before witnessed in my privileged life. I watched her mourn as people who couldn’t bear to see her pain started to turn away, and who can blame them? I watched as her hospice providers failed her because it was July and they were off on fun vacations, and who can blame them? None of us is ready to look death in the face, or in the terrified eyes of our best friend. It was more than I could bear, but I promised I wouldn’t drop her, and I didn’t, even though the despair was more than I could endure. I thought I’d recovered, but I haven’t, and I can’t bear that it’s July again, and Colorado is burning down, and Betsy has been gone a year.

Today, at 8:45 a.m., it was Alyssa. She was set to finish as the second woman in the Tour Divide. I had an article nearly finished for bikepacking.com, describing her consistent pace, starting the Tour Divide less than two weeks after winning the notoriously tough Grand Loop, lining up her gas station runs to have her “Haribo and milkshake bottle dialed.” I don’t know Alyssa, but she’s 35 years old and from Colorado, and goes by “Dirt Vonnegut” on Instagram. She’s a woman riding the Tour Divide. I imagine we share a lot in common.

So I’d been watching her tracker dot, awaiting her finish to submit my article, and was perplexed when it stopped moving in a strange spot on the highway at 4:43 a.m. Around 7 a.m., the dot started moving east on the Interstate toward Deming, New Mexico. I expressed my concern to Beat when the dot stopped at the Mimbres Memorial Hospital.

“Maybe she was having trouble breathing in the bad air,” he reasoned after I guessed, “I think she was hit by a car.”

But then her dot was over the desert, moving at fast speeds toward El Paso, Texas. “I think maybe she’s in a helicopter,” I said.

“But why would her dot stay with her?” Beat again tried to reassure me. “Her tracker would be on her bike, and they wouldn’t take that on a flight …”

I drove to Boulder, so sick with grief that I thought I might need to pull over and vomit. But the air’s still bad, and my throat hurts, and maybe that’s it. An hour later, I was sitting in the waiting room at my PT clinic when news finally broke on social media.

“At 4:30 AM, Alyssa was struck by a car. The crash has left her with severe injuries, a fractured vertebra, internal bleeding, and a completely destroyed bike.”

But she’s in stable condition, or at least was the last I heard. A friend set up a GoFundMe if you want to keep up to date or help with her recovery.

At 12:05 p.m., it was just all of it, and I was at my gym, trying to hold back tears on the reverse fly, my most difficult lift. I had two different physical therapy appointments today — just the way it lined up when I booked so many endless appointments without checking my schedule weeks ago. Both PTs put me through pretty easy lunges and hopping exercises and raved about how great I was doing. I had been behind in my progress until I got back on my bike at week 12, and since then, I have rocketed forward. I hit week 16 post-surgery on July 6, and it is supposed to be a big celebration. I will meet with my surgeon to get cleared to return to all of it, my old life, using baby steps, of course. But still. This is supposed to be it. The day I can stop counting the days since I collapsed onto the road. The day I am officially no longer injured.

But today, I am in grief, and I don’t feel any of this.

As I put my dumbbells down and stood up straight, a man hopped past me on crutches. He was wearing one of those terrible braces, and his right knee was wrapped in an Ace bandage. I still felt like on the verge of tears and was going to be late for second PT if I spent much more time at the gym. But I walked toward him.

“Meniscus?” I inquired.

“ACL and PCL,” he replied.

“How long ago?”

“Four weeks,” he replied.

“I had meniscus surgery,” I said. “It was a root repair, completely detached, so I had to do the six weeks on crutches, the long recovery, the whole thing. So I know. I’m almost to 16 weeks now.”

“16 weeks and you’re walking so well!” he exclaimed, and he was being sincere. I was where he was, not that long ago, and I remember what it was like to believe I was never going to walk again.

“It was so hard, the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do personally,” I said. “I was here at the gym just like you. The weight machines, the crutches, all of it. So I wanted to meet you and tell you that it really does get better. I was at 12 weeks and still so discouraged, but eventually you’ll hit a turning point. You’ll get there. I had people tell me I’d hit that turning point, and I didn’t believe them, but I just want to testify that it is, in fact, true.”

We talked for another 10 minutes. His name is Don. He’s a runner. He wants to run again. I told him that I still don’t know what running looks like for me, but going through knee surgery has made me stronger in other ways that I already appreciate. I said all of this to Don, and I meant it, even as my heart was still reeling from Alyssa, and Betsy, and the Babylon Fire, and my Dad, and I absolutely do not feel strong today.

But I felt strength from Don and our shared membership in the “knee surgery club.” And I was glad he took the time to talk to me, even if I was a little bit late for PT. Evan raved about my progress, and I did not tell him about Alyssa, even though I haven’t stopped blabbing about the Tour Divide for the past three weeks with him.

I have a few minutes before I need to work again, so I am writing this blog post to help bring myself back to center, to stop reeling for a minute, to stop looking toward the western horizon and wonder when it’s my turn to see pillars of black smoke.

But I am not okay today. Sometimes, that is how things go in the club nearly all of us belong to, and yet we must all walk through this darkness alone. The grief club. It’s day 1,843 for me.

If you have the means, please consider donating a small amount to Alyssa’s recovery. Thanks so much for reading.