Grief and tiaras, a truly weird week

It has been a weird week. My second book is out, so I have this buoyant, celebrity feeling like I should be wearing a tiara, and at the same time, am volunteering for a Hospice client, and had a tough obituary to write for Rick "Slick" Markee, a nice guy who died in a freak snowmachine accident, which hit his friends, family, and neighbors hard.

Of course, any death like that in a small town brings back all the others before it in a kind of parade of grief. People who should be happy with the king salmon running in the inlet and the bears padding the street in the early dawn are as blue as a January cabin low on firewood. It seems so unfair to have such a bad thing happen during a fine sunny May. The annual Spring Fling dance at the fairgrounds will happen the same evening as a memorial potluck out at the relatively young (he was a youthful 37) carpenter and fisherman's cabin.

Then again, maybe these things are easier when the weather is good. I'm not the first person to notice that you appreciate a sunny day more after you understand how lucky you are to be among the living. Emily Dickinson never left her house but knew that what makes life so sweet is that it won't last.

I didn't know Slick, but my family all did, especially the ones who work at our lumberyard, which he frequented. They all liked his energetic good humor, the way he said, "Right on, that's so great," and meant it. With his dark beard and slight lisp, he was not exactly a guy you'd think of as slick. He came to Haines with that childhood nickname.

How he got here is a familiar story. Slick was an adventure-loving Oregon teen who loved stories about the frontier and headed north a few years after high school graduation. While I was writing the obituary, I talked to his mother on the phone. She said the family was a little puzzled by his love of the rustic. "He had an outhouse."

Slick was alone when he apparently fell over the handlebars of his snowmachine on the third run of a high-five-and-smiles kind of day transporting snowboarding friends up a popular, but rugged, back country ski hill. His friends found him not breathing and buried under his snowmachine just off the trail. They think that the ski caught his helmet and it dragged him under. The trooper told me on Main Street the next day, "It was just a freak thing."

The first thing his mother told me was that he could run before he could walk and that he followed his big brother everywhere. "Once the training wheels were off there was no stopping him," she said. Grown men will be always toddlers in their mother's eyes.

Anyway, a few days later, Slick's friends, and my son's snowboarding buddies, came by my house to talk about it. I offered tea and grapes and felt like it wasn't enough when one said Slick wasn't a rich guy, but when you came to his house he'd get out the best he had for company, "a deer heart or king salmon." They told me he loved to fish, and never went inside the wheelhouse of his double-ended classic troller. "He'd eat his lunch out there." There is not much comfort a person can give in those situations, except to be present, as my Buddhist friends would say.

And that is the same with a Hospice client. In the middle of the night, in a quiet bedroom, mine, a smart old woman, said, "It feels nice to hold your hand." My daughter said the same thing the night she labored before giving birth to my granddaughter.

I had rubbed the old woman's soft hair on the side her head the same way I had my daughter's that night, and the same way I had smoothed my four-month-old granddaughter's fuzzy head earlier in the day. It was the same way my mother stroked my hair when I was sick as a child, and how I touched her post-chemo fur as she lay dying. My mother was a great believer in muscular memory. She praised practicing the same motions as a way to learn golf, or the piano. But what she left us was that touch.