UNDETERMINED | Evelyn Potochny
Just four months after you died, I am flying to Moab to ride that serpentine trail with the loose, sedimentary rock and 200-foot cliff on one side. One of the deadliest, they say. I’m not sure if I am looking for closure or atonement. The autopsy report listed the cause of death as blunt force trauma, the manner of death accidental.
Our first date back in medical school was a mountain bike ride through some wooded single track and before long, many more epic rides and biking vacations. Never once in our marriage did I see you press your luck with the gnarly stuff, but, then again, the trails you biked with me were on the tamer side. Anything with a hint of ledge, I walked. You rode ahead and patiently waited at checkpoints. I remember your serene look when I rounded the corner one ride on Fortuna Mountain, catching you sitting on a rock like a Buddha, transfixed by the canyon below. I thought that was so fitting of your contemplative disposition. But that was your way—thoughtful, and a good listener.
Was I?
The fact that you chose forensic pathology surprised me. I thought for sure you’d continue with your initial specialty of internal medicine. You were so good with patients. Your words soothed. Your evaluations were so thorough. Your patients always commented, when I’d run into them at the Fresh & Easy, how you allowed so much time for them to talk during appointments yet never fell behind schedule. Like you could bend time.
When you came home that day not quite six months ago from your own medical appointment, I tried to be respectful and listen when you said you didn’t want to talk about it. “I’m fine. He just wants to do more tests.” You never brought it up again, and I didn’t want to press. A few weeks later when you wanted to do some riding in Utah alone, well, it wasn’t the first time. I thought you needed the break. I thought I was heeding your wishes.
The trail has a name that makes it sound like to ride it is to cross a threshold: Portal. How apt. The place where investigators determined you careened off the cliff was the section with the sheerest drop. Some surmised you were weak and dehydrated from exposure. Too much hard-core biking in that blistering heat. The ranger on-scene thought you may have swerved to avoid something—a mule deer, maybe, or whipsnake.
I steer and push my bike to that fateful drop-off on foot, bike to my left near the cliff, me listing right toward the mountain’s face, and I gasp. I don’t know how you could stomach pedaling through such a precarious section on your best day. I try to imagine your last few moments. The freak rainstorm, they said, washed away any evidence of an attempt—or lack thereof—at braking.
During residency, you once explained to me the difference between cause and manner of death. Cause is what kills you: gunshot wound, hanging, car crash, a heart attack. Manner of death is the circumstance: homicide, suicide, accident, natural. And when there just isn’t enough information to make the call: undetermined. When I got the autopsy report and saw their other findings, I crumpled to the kitchen floor. I couldn’t believe you didn’t share that with me.
On our last vacation a year ago, you hopped off your bike to read a placard hammered to a tree. “Rainer Maria Rilke,” you said, “one of my favorites.”
Why hadn’t I known that?
You read aloud. “Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” I remember wondering at that moment just how many questions remained unanswered between us. I’ve been reading Rilke. I don’t like living in the questions. Or waiting for the far off future for some kind of answer.
Standing here on the precipice, I'm transfixed by the canyon below. But this isn’t Fortuna Mountain, and you’re never going to be rounding the corner. I grab a piece of slate from my pack on which I’ve penned in acrylic this Rilke quote: “I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.” I clutch it to my chest, then gently place it on the trail’s edge.
Evelyn M. Potochny, DO is an associate professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, Hershey, PA.