Article by Mandala Covey-Bleiberg Art by Nora Johnson
Each passing day of my life, there is something that I discover about grief. It ebbs and flows like a river, but its trickle is always present, a soft current down the riverbed. When I first felt grief, the slate rocks that lined the bottom were jagged, black and rough. Now, with each passing day, the water erodes the rocks down, turning them flat and smooth. Someday, there will be only a horizontal, polished riverbed for the waters of grief to dance down.
Beside the highway in my hometown, there is a white ghost bike which sits upright on the side of the pavement. In the winter, the enormous amounts of snow that cover the mountain and basins seem to completely avoid the bicycle. It remains hollowed out, an always-visible homage throughout the entire year. Fake flowers sit tied onto the side of the white frame, shimmering yellow, beating against the side of metal during windy days. The plastic petals dull after each passing summer in the high UV of the Rockies. The bike was cemented down by the pavement almost three years ago, this coming Spring. I see it as I drive down the valley; I see it sometimes, in the daydreams that occur when I have a migraine — stuck between the hazy real-life world and the catacombs of memory.
Crested Butte is infamous for its snow. Our title as the “Last Great Colorado Ski Town” holds up. Winters mean a blanket of white over the mountain valleys, mornings when the thermostat reads -30 degrees, seasonal depression and the haunting hallucination of another, warmer time.
Thirty years ago, a woman, a man, and several of their friends were backcountry skiing when an avalanche cascaded down the snowy hillside. In its frigid, cement-like grasp, the woman was sucked down the slope as her husband watched. There was nothing he could do to stop it.
The two had been married for years. Mike and his wife had grown together, lost together. She was a teacher. The community loved her almost as much as he did. After the avalanche, Mike was alone, shivering, as cold as his wife who suffocated underneath the avalanche's clutch.
It had been over three decades since that avalanche when Mike died on the highway. Four years ago, he’d been biking downvalley on a route that was routine for him. Crested Butte lacks paved roads for bikers, so riding along the highway to Gunnison is common. He was hit by a car driven by someone he’d known for over twenty years, a local who also knew the highway's turns and potholes. Mike’s bike still sits on the side of the highway, fake flowers sashaying in the wind. The court ruled that the entire situation was a complete accident. Mike had just gotten remarried to his new wife, a woman he was head over heels in love with after years of combating depression. He was in the prime of his life, ironic but true for a man well into his seventies.
My uncle and Mike were best friends. My uncle and Mike were brothers in the truest sense. For all they lacked in blood relation, they made up for in memories, in moments and shared loves. They shared their phone plan for over forty years. They survived storms in the mountains on their bicycles, blizzards on skis and disastrous drivers while road-biking in European countries. If there was Mike, there was my uncle following behind. It seemed that only death could separate the two. And it did.
I know that death is common. I know that in the end, there will be only bones and then dust and then all the darkness that we’ve ever known will hollow out. We will be hollow; there will be no more me, no more you, no more of our suffering. There is something tragic about how the world functions, and something as resolutely beautiful as a mountainside covered in flowers, breathing with the breeze. As resolutely beautiful as the flowers on the side of the Ghost bike. We all see the end of another person. If you can escape life without feeling the grasp of death upon your heart, playing with the strings in your chest, then you are lucky.
My uncle was never the same. His eyes, cold as the cornice on a mountain, had none of their usual shimmer. There was a before, and there was an after, and there would be no going back. There was nothing he could do to stop it. Stop what happened, stop the car from slamming into Mike’s bicycle. I wonder if my uncle has memories, in the state he is in now, or if all that happened blurs away, rain washing it out of his mind. The moments of them biking together in France, the moments of him and my aunt laughing in the canyon country, the animals he saw in Botswana, the regulars at the bar he owned.
My uncle has spiraled. He lost his closest friend, his honorary brother. He lost his mind. He lost us. He will not come back. It's easy to say: that is incredibly unfair, what the fuck is wrong with the universe? Yet, it's just as easy to respond: life is unfair. The universe owes you nothing.
I have lost people before. I have watched my Grandmother, a woman most exceptionally strong and resolute, have her mind pull away from her, dementia clutching her emotions, feelings, and memories away. Like an awful magic trick, when the magician pulls the tablecloth out from under the fully set table, and instead of perfection, all of the cookery comes crashing down onto the floor. She withered. You do not know how a person can wither until you watch them die like a zombie. When you clasp their hand, and there is no blood in their fingertips, the fingertips that held you and carried you and fed you and watched you grow.
I have seen my Grandfather die, too. In that squeaky clean, glossy room, his lungs filled with fluid, and he coughed and coughed and coughed. I have watched him take in that last breath, felt the last pump of their blood extend to their fingertips, from the heart to the hands.
There were moments in my youth when I was unexplainably lonely, and unwavering was my uncle’s steady presence as my best friend. Now, it seems that he has washed down the riverbed too.
My uncle’s temporal lobe is seventy percent gone. The memories of him and Mike melt away like snowmelt, the memories of him and my aunt, the memories of him and me, the mountains. The days swoon by, and with each moment, he dwindles. Still strong, but unequivocally gone. He is a warm body on this Earth as a man without the bones of life inside of him. Hollow.
I just hope, in the end, that he will reunite with Mike and they will ride together. The dirt of the trail will be warm in the chilly air. The magpies will sing, accentuated by the call of the robin, the chickadee. They will make a chorus, just for my uncle and Mike, as they glide along the aspen forests, clean air in their full lungs. Tragedy is all around us, but so too is the riverbed, washing, washing, washing all of our grief downstream.