On October 5, 2008, my father, while enjoying a Sunday afternoon ride along Old 71 south of Joplin, MO, approached a curve at Crescent Drive, a hundred yards east of county road V. The wind in his face and the sun at his back (that’s me struggling to glamorize), he opened up his throttle, accelerating close to 75mph. This proved not only reckless, but fatal.

Sadly, the day before, there was a significant rain that washed an abundance of gravel and loose rock into the path of a curve he’d navigated a hundred times before. My Dad lost control of his bike, skidding off the road and catapulting into a small ditch. He held onto his handlebars, so that when his front tire hit the opposite side of the ditch, his pelvis slammed into the fuel tank, shattering his pelvic bones and sending bits of bone matter into his body like shrapnel. He bled out in the hospital hours later.

On January 3, 2024, I went to the last place my father had any cognizant recognition of before he went comatose and died. I hoped I could objectively look at it and photograph it for the first time. I honestly don’t know what initially compelled me to head that direction. I just did. And when I got there, I felt a tinge of sadness that no one marks the site anymore. But I also felt a hot sting of resentment because it could have been avoided. And, of course, that feeling alone opens up an entirely different layer of the emotional onion because now I suddenly find myself angry and judging my father when that’s the last thing I ever want to do.

I went to breakfast at Waffle House with my Dad the day he died. We went back to his house and smoked a joint together. I hugged him before hopping into my 2005 Nissan Altima he helped me get a loan for. Then I went to Whit’s house for the afternoon to hang out with her and work on my college algebra homework until I’d eventually receive a call that he’d been in an accident and things looked bad. How surreal.