Luke: The Rain

It's those kind of moments that stick with me - tasting the metallic tang of the road spray in your mouth, a strip of dirt up your back like that cat in the Pepe LePew cartoons, fighting to keep the bicycle upright inches from another bike while going down a steep winding hill, sprinting to the finish line in the hopes of beating some 50 year old guy for 117th place (In your face Robert Jameson of Ashland, WI!). Forget the sunny days where the road seems to always go downhill. Forget riding up a hill into the fog as the morning breaks...It's those dark days, those days in the rain that really stick out for me.

It was two years after we moved to town - the summer before I’d be a freshman in high school - and I was still struggling to make friends, the aftermath of a severe childhood speech impediment leaving me introverted and awkward at an already awkward age. Then I met Matt.

I was trying to learn how to golf, and he was always up at the course. We started talking - he'd come by the driving range and tell me I should stop bending my left arm - and somehow we just kinda became friends. And in time he became my best friend...we'd spend hours going fishing, shooting hoops, or playing a round of golf. Matt had this amazing sense of humor and for whatever reason decided that some days he'd talk with a British accent all day long. Well, really it sounded more like Thurston Howell III from Giligan’s Island, but whatevs...when you’re 15, if someone says something with an accent, even a bad accent - way funny. He was one of the few people in school who could truly transcend cliques. I'd see him walking down the hallway before Social Studies with Dan, the captain of the football team, and then after class talking with the closest guy we had to a drug dealer, Chris.

I was getting heavily into biking at the time, riding over 200 miles a week on a borrowed racing bike - custom-built for someone several inches shorter than me. I'd invite Matty along on some of my slower rides, never more 20 miles. He struggled on his crappy Huffy Mt. Hood mountain bike with the slightly wonky back wheel, but he never complained.

Every year in early October my family would do a charity ride in a nearby town that was a fundraiser for the Marshfield Clinic, the largest hospital in the area, and the Children’s Cancer Fund. That particular year my parents suggested that I invite Matt along, and despite the fact that his longest ride had been only 20 miles, he signed up for the 64 mile option.

The day of the ride was one of those gorgeous early autumn mornings where you can smell Fall in the air. The leaves of central Wisconsin were at their peak and we rode over a kaleidoscope of fallen leaves crunching beneath our tires. As we neared one of the rest stops about halfway in, I watched the nearby fields drift in and out of shadow as the clouds danced in front of the sun. After stuffing our pockets with all the candy bars and granola bars that we could jam in there (Matt and I cracked each other up by making squirrel noises), by the time we were back on the road, there were longer and longer periods of darkness until the last sunbeam finally slipped away behind a cloud. As if matching the weather, the previously flat roads began to twist and turn upward leading us up hill after hill (stupid glaciers). The wind picked up and I smelled the rain before I felt it - the air taking on this heavy clean thickness like someone opening a giant dishwasher.

So just to recap: Here we are about 30 miles away from the mini-van (my parents, several miles behind us, have the keys) heading up the side of a steep hill into a vicious wind, the rain spitting down, splattering off of our helmets. I was cold, I was wet, and I was miserable. And oh god...poor Matt. I didn't even want to look at him, I was too afraid to see his face. Finally I glanced over and Matt had this crazy grin. "I say," he said slipping into his accent and pulling out one of his favorite phrases, "bloody wonderful weather isn't it?" and stomped on the pedals, zooming ahead, as I swerved into a ditch laughing so hard I couldn't keep my bike on the road.

That was the last time I rode with Matt. That winter he called me up to say that he was going to be missing some school because he had slipped on some ice and landed awkwardly and was going to have his knee looked at by a specialist and would I mind picking up his homework for him.

That's what he told me.

It wasn't until months later that I found out the truth. What he hadn't told me was that his knee felt fine, but that his doctor had found a tumor during a routine checkup. He hadn't fallen and twisted his knee. He had cancer.

Over the next few months Matt was hardly ever in school, spending most of his time in various hospitals. The Children's Cancer Fund - the same charity that Matt had helped raise money for on the bike ride, in a bit of cosmic irony - was providing emotional and financial support to his parents. After months of chemo and depressingly little progress the decision was made to amputate his leg above the knee.

But the doctors had waited too long, not wanting to rush that life-changing moment on a teenager, or maybe the cancer was just too fast - either way it had spread to his lymph nodes and eventually the diagnosis came down: It was now untreatable. The doctors sent him home to live out the rest of his life. He'd be lucky, they said, if that was three months.

A year and nine months later I wheeled my bicycle into his family's garage and out of the rain that had been pelting me for the past few hours. I had been putting off this visit, but knew I had to, shaking drops off my bike as I leaned it up against their minivan. Matt's Huffy sat in the corner of the garage now cobwebbed and dusty, both tires flat.

"So old chap" he rasped noticing my rain soaked hair as I walked into his room, "Bloody wonderful weather isn't it?" Despite the drugs surging through his body, the prosthetic leg propped up against the side of his bed, and the 50 pounds that had melted off his frame, he was still the same old Matty. We chatted for awhile and I filled him in on the cute girls he was missing at school, and the bike race that I had done that weekend. After about half an hour, he started getting really tired, and his head began to droop to one side like his neck couldn't bear to support it.

I got up to leave. "Stay strong Matty."

He grabbed my arm - his fingers bony, his grip weak - and pulled me close so I could hear his now barely audible voice. "No, you stay strong." I reached down to hug him, so light, his skin empty, and held it together long enough to make it out of his room. I said goodbye to his exhausted-looking parents, who could only nod in return, and walked out of the door knowing that I wouldn't ever see him again.

The cancer had taken his leg. Made him weak. Literally eaten him up from inside. But it didn’t take him, even at the end. He had fought; he had fought this disease refusing to give in to it for longer than anyone thought, or hoped, or prayed was possible. And yet he was telling me to stay strong, even as he was at his weakest.

I rode home slowly that night, stopping twice, my shoulders slumping over the handlebars as tears streamed down my face until I couldn’t see. It was dark by the time I finally pulled into the driveway, my parents thankfully gone, the house somehow comforting in its emptiness, silent except for my ragged sobs and curses at the unseen entity that had allowed...no - that had done this to him.

Without bothering to flip on a light, I grabbed a marker and wrote his initials (MJE) on the back of my cycling shoes - something I've done with every pair of cycling shoes since. It's not like I needed to do it to be reminded of his strength and determination, but it just felt right to know that every time I pulled on my cycling cleats, I'd think of his last words to me: No, you stay strong.

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