“We had a death on the ride yesterday.”
When my mother says this I’m getting off the elevator, and think at first that something is screwy with my cell phone.
“What?” I say.
“We had a death on the ride.”
“I don’t understand,” I say at last.
She tells me about their bike club, the overnight ride through Kellogg and Wallace. She tells me how gorgeous the day was. He shouted post, and then he was down.
I wait. I wait to hear who was down.
“His sister heard him shout post, and then he was down. And she started CPR right away. But he never responded.”
Because my mother is telling the story, I hear how many minutes it took the sheriff to respond, and the EMT. How my dad took over CPR before help arrived. How the man’s lips were blue. How he never was good about hydration.
He shouted post because it was a kind of game to shout post whenever you saw one. Each rider had done so.
Later in the evening, my mother and I ride on the Fish Lake Trail, and she tells the story again. It is heavy, and she is having trouble carrying it. Of course, my father is brilliant in emergencies. You get the athlete, the military man, and the minister all at once. I know this. And I have already heard about him directing the scene. What is late in coming is that my mother was leading the ride. That she sped back when she heard the cry go up that a rider was down. The first group of women she came to had refused to go back to the man on the ground, because they were afraid, because they saw my father was doing CPR. And so my mother went alone. She was the one who called 911, the one who held the man’s sister until the paramedics put the sister in the ambulance with the body.
Because my brain insists on replacing the downed rider with first my mother — her short legs in her tiny cycling shorts — and then my father — his flared ribs enormous in his green jersey — because I know this is the sort of death they envy — one without illness or violence — because I loop the incident — POST! and then down — I focus instead on my mother’s solitary ride to the scene. How maternal the journey. To come alone, and quickly, bringing as much aid as comfort can provide.
I’m with you in how you are processing and replaying this. I wonder how your parents minds are working through it…
My kids and I witnessed an awful awful accident a couple of weeks ago. Two boys (brothers, probably) on a bike- one pedaling, one on the pegs on the back wheel. Helmetless. The pedaler flew up in the air when the car struck them and landed flat and defenseless immediately. The peg rider was on the hood of the car until it crossed the intersection. The poor driver of the car never could have saw them coming.
In my head, especially in the first few days that followed, my kids are those kids. Or I am that driver behind that wheel.
Tina, that’s awful. And I wonder if it’s part of the grief or part of the experience of tragedy that makes us relive those moments through different points of view. Story is how we understand the world. How our brains see.
It’s the specificity that troubles me. The fact that I can see the details — hear the shout and see the crash — and substitute the unknown man for people I love.
I like how you’re redirecting your thoughts. I bet your dad knows the scripture about taking thoughts captive… We have to or else we’ll dwell in these things. Every time I replayed the accident, I interrupted the visual and instead, imagined those boys healing. I had to or all the details in slow motion would take over my brain.