Belated Eulogy
relinquishing an imagined tether to those lost
(this piece is an excerpt from a correspondence project with Kate Wagner)
A race win is a fleeting thing that somehow stops time for 365 days. A fountain of youth for those embedded in a system of perpetual renewals. But farming its nectar is a doomed bargain. You can drink, chase, and temporarily stave off the inevitable but will always remain vulnerable to an undoing by the statistically improbable. The illusion of suspended time offers no protection against tragedy.
It is one day after the second anniversary of Gino Mader's passing and 131 days since the four year anniversary of my dear friend Louis'. The only lives that sport actually allows to be young forever are dead. Futures lost to the pursuit of these impossible fantasies of becoming that dangle and tempt those lucky enough to spend their days dancing with the limits of human capacity.
My text editor has a tab that’s always open titled 'Descending after Gino'. It is an unpublishable assembly of errant thoughts and feelings on death and sport that I scrawl in when my late friend Louis’ death looms heavier than usual. He died on his skis in one of the Wasatch’s deadliest avalanches four years ago.
Louis is one of the reasons I kept creating conditions for the universe to end my life. Why I have pedaled for thousands of hours thinking endlessly about all the potential ways I may die on my bicycle. These moments where I'm forced to writhe in imagined pain and suffering somewhere far from home or help are the compulsory psychic accounting work of a woman who depends on lucky dice rolls but always seems to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Real time reckonings with the looming consequences of my desire to ride a wave to its logical conclusion.
I used to be able to watch these assemblies of involuntarily imagined self-snuff film frames when a car buzzed me or I narrowly escaped a no-fall zone. They would flash across my eyes as many times as a fraught bike ride demanded and always generate the same response. A sense that departing from this world “early” (my own timetable, not the universe’s) would be o k. Suicide by self manufactured circumstance is simply a death doing what one loved. But once my love departed the scene this involuntary thought exercise started leading me to the precise sentiment that you described. A death for nothing, or even worse, a death for cycling. A monster that has given me everything but left me with none of the fruits I selfishly believed I could reap.
I wish I could describe the feeling of that calculus being rewritten in real time as some sort of positive reorienting of my impulse to be-towards-death. But now the love that impelled me is gone and so too is the potential of my eternal tether. The line that only I could maintain to Louis. Renouncing cycling is a death on both margins and a shuttering of two distinct arcs. One towards the eternally fleeting, and the other, the eternal that none of us get to know. Boarded up paths to both everything and nothing.
I do not know what it’s like to die as I am comfortably seated at home writing to you. Even in my most brutal and visceral nightmares, the one’s where I hear helicopters but am unable to stop pedaling towards an opaque cause of death, I come-to unscathed. But I know for certain that Gino and Louis experienced something that I have renounced my claim to sharing in. Because I, like you, made a selfish bargain with sport. And I, like you, am a woman who cannot bear the reality that a life of Ceasardom has been foreclosed against my will.
We have been denied the fantasy of radical becoming that sport uses to taunt and goad. In exchange, our burden is a dimmed horizon, and the potential to be more than a memory of youth, of something unrealized.
Several months ago you told me, quite simply, that the solution to my stated discomfort around narrative prose was “doing more living” and I replied “the living I’ve been doing has been killing me.” For a long time I was convinced that my running was wandering. And while those boundaries are surely porous with one necessarily incurring the other. I am beginning to understand that running headfirst and away from what ails you is a seeking in tension with wandering.
But now we’ve wandered together and you know about this person you’ll never meet and I can finally see some of the lines of flight that were hiding in my propulsive sublimation of grief. I have another story about death, but it took 4 years to write about the passing that incited so much of this. It’s going to take some more wandering before I know how to talk about the drive back from Butte.
Post-script:
The only loop I have ever loved is the one where I wake up and taunt death. This wasn’t clear before but now, on account of some distance and a few chance encounters, I can put words to the feeling. All this time spent pedaling in search of a career only to find out that I’m other than what I believed myself to be. Not a machine hellbent on pedaling better than others or a culture warrior who’s good intentions are always counterbalanced by the credence given to people with cruel and callous souls, just a grieving woman who found a socially lauded sublimation that sustained a tether to someone long gone. Maybe the best thing to ever happen will end up being the comprehensive closing of every door to a spiritually fulfilling life in sport.
One day I will die, maybe in a car crash, or while recreating casually, but more likely than not it won’t happen before my eyes in an instant, and instead will come in the form of an illness that grants just enough time to say goodbyes and be forced to make some amends. Whatever the staging and scenario, it will never be a death that closes my cycle on the bike. A suicide that instead takes the words “she died doing what she loved.”
