In Memorium

Ryan’s wife, Lisa, lost her battle with cancer last week. The memorial was yesterday. Over two hundred people packed my friend’s church. They exhausted the supply of chairs. Late comers stood lining the walls. They came because, in one way or another, Lisa had touched them. The service was simple in the way that Lisa was simple. Not lacking depth, but lacking pretense.

I brought my bicycle with me to Newberg not because November is prime riding weather, but because hard exercise helps me process emotions. What follows is an account of that ride and the processing that happened during it.

It was cold and dark at six this morning in Newberg. I walked out of my hotel and watched my breath make little clouds that existed and then vanished. I took my bike out of my car’s trunk and put the wheels on. There’s something reassuring about the mechanical clinks and clanks of putting a bicycle together. Something solid. I put an earbud in, turned on some music, set Google Maps to take me to Bald Peak State Park, and rolled out.

I did not immediately like Lisa. That’s not the sort of thing that you’re supposed to say when you’re talking about the dead, but it’s true. She was too nice, and the younger, more cynical me did not believe that someone could be that nice. Certainly not to someone she did not know. It felt like a show, a mask one wears in public and sets aside in private. It was not. The Lisa you saw was the real Lisa. The hundreds of people at her memorial attest to that.

I was cold as I rode. The wind bit my fingers through my gloves, and the fog collected on my handlebars in droplets. I shifted up and spun faster, trying to warm up. The GPS chirped in my ear and told me to turn, so I did. Street lights flicked by, glowing orbs in hazy darkness. My headlight cut a blurry cone ahead of me, more highlighting the fog than lighting the way.

Hiking with Ryan is dangerous. He does not seem to possess the normal checks that keep sane people from walking ridgelines in search of a better view or getting too close to bears for a better photograph. Hiking with Ryan and Lisa, as a pair, was an entirely different experience. Not only were you unlikely to be talked into climbing a waterfall or scaling a ridge at dusk to “get water from the source,” but you were going to eat well. Dehydrated food packets were not an option when Lisa was on the trip.

I remember hiking the Olympic coast with them. On the second day of a three-day trip, she made cheesecake for Ryan’s birthday. We ate that cheesecake while watching the waves wrap around the sea stacks before rushing onto the beach. I do not know how she did it, and I do not want to know. It was, that cake in that moment, magic.

The road started to tip upwards towards Bald Peak. The street lights were fewer and farther between. My breath came in rhythmic puffs, timed to the cadence of my legs. Soon, there were no lights save my own and the dim sense that somewhere, beyond all that fog, the sun was failing to rise, was being trapped beneath the thick clouds smothering the ground.

My wife went to George Fox University, the place where Ryan and Lisa met, the place where Ryan still works. We began dating over a summer, and she went back to school. With Rachel and I separated by hours of highway, Ryan and Lisa opened their house to me on more weekends than I can remember. I would drive down, sleep on their futon, and then spend next the day with Rachel. Young love is beautiful and powerful and blinding, but distance has a tendency to turn fire to ashes. Ryan and Lisa allowed Rachel and me to keep falling in love despite the distance between us. I am grateful beyond words.

You can lose a sense of time and space when climbing in a fog. The sensation of movement becomes dulled, and it can feel like you’re just spinning in air. I spun, and I struggled, and I climbed in the darkness. In front of me, the moon glowed through the fog. It hung above the road, in the space between the trees. I followed it. I know that sounds insane, following the moon. But in that moment, it felt like it was lighting my path, leading me onward.

Rachel and I visited Ryan and Lisa last summer. Lisa was in remission, and I was in the area because of a bike ride. We went to a restaurant. And I realize that going to a restaurant with your friends does not sound like a memorable moment, but it was exactly the not-noteworthy-ness of it all that made it noteworthy. Lisa was in the middle of her cancer battle, in remission, feeling normal if that word makes sense in this context. I got a phone call and left the table. I remember looking across the restaurant and seeing my wife talking to our friends, just being happy. And in that moment the cancer never happened. It wasn’t there. Then I sat down and saw the scar above her collar bone, and the illusion shattered.

I lost the moon somewhere. The road began to curve back and forth on itself, to switchback up the hill, and I lost it in the trees. The world was gray and dark and damp and cold, and I felt despair. I wanted to turn around and quit. I wanted to go back to my warm hotel room. It was stupid, climbing a hill in the dark on my bike. Stupid and pointless. I lost the moon, and I lost my hope. I rounded a switchback, and thought about Ryan and his girls without Lisa. I asked God what they were going to do now. What do you do when your world has gone dark and cold? What do you do when you lose the moon?

I followed the road around that bend and around another. And I heard or felt or sensed an answer to my question. Follow the road. They would do what they had to do. They would follow the road. They would keep moving. That sounds trite and stupid and cliché, but that does not make it less true.

I went back to Ryan’s house after the memorial. His parents and his sister and an uncle and an aunt were there. We talked over steaming cups of coffee and sliced fruit. We shared stories about life and love and Lisa. We laughed. We were somber. We existed together in the same place at the same time. Ryan sat under a picture of his family, a picture of Ryan and Lisa and the girls smiling and happy.

As I put my jacket on to leave, Ryan thanked me for coming. And it wasn’t the reflexive thanks that good hosts offer, but a deeper thanks. A thanks for being. And I was struck dumb. I nodded. I mumbled something. And then I left. What I could not formulate in that moment, what I could not say, was that I had to come. I could not not come, if you’ll pardon the double negative. There is precious little you can do for someone who is mourning. But you can be present. And you can listen. So I came. And I listened. Because to not do those things when it was in my power to do them would be to fail my friend in his time of need.

I climbed out of the fog, and I found the sun burning the horizon into pinks and oranges. The fog sat in the valley like an ocean, billowing and flowing beneath me. The moon, freed from the fog, shone next to the sun. It was painfully beautiful. And I found that thing that I was looking for. I found my sadness. It hit me all at once. My face formed a mask of grief, my eyes watered, and I rocked on the bike not out of exertion but out of emotion. I am good at putting my emotions on the shelf to deal with later. Good at setting them aside. Bad at picking them back up again. But I picked it up in that moment, and found it lighter in the sun than it had been in the dark. I rolled into Bald Peak State Park unweighted, buoyed.

They used to call Christians “followers of the Way.” And I like that. It makes me think of journeys and adventures. Of meadow paths and mountain trails. Of struggle and joy. But also of purpose. Because there is a destination. We are going somewhere. And there’s hope in somewhere.

I want to end there, in that moment of emotional catharsis, in the golden light of the rising sun. But I can’t. Because that’s not how life works. I took my bike back down the hill. Away from the sun. Away from that gold and heat and hope. Because not all stories end in sun drenched mountain tops. I went back into the dark and cold and fog because that’s where the road went. And I had to follow the road.

In his eulogy for Lisa, Ryan said many beautiful words. But the two that struck me the most were these: This sucks.

Lisa, you will be missed. I’ll meet you again someday, maybe on a sun-drenched hill top above oceans of clouds. Maybe you can tell me how you made that cheesecake then.