There’s still something in the air / No matter where I go / You’re gone, you’re everywhere. — Cassandra Jenkins
I graduated high school in San Francisco in June of 2023. In July, two weeks after my nineteenth birthday, I got a message from Emily, one of the other core community members at Scenic Routes. Scenic Routes is an anti-profit community bike shop I’d devoted myself to when they helped me out and introduced me to the joy of riding bicycles in a way focused on joy and utility and welcomed me into their queer community.
“I have some tough news,” she said when I picked up the phone. I braced myself for the worst: Scenic Routes was closing; Emily’s visa had issues, and she had to leave the country; her partner Kat had broken her leg; Jay, the owner of the shop and more of a father than my own, was sick. It was worse. Hansel had crashed their bike while them, their husband Jerry, Jay, Michael, Parker and Vanessa had been on bike tour in Marin. No cars were involved, but they had hit their head and cracked their skull. They had been medevac’d to Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital. It was bad. They were in the ICU and unconscious. If they survived, they would never be the same, the brain trauma had been too great. If Michael, the other owner of the shop, and a nurse, hadn’t been there too, they would be dead already. Their brain was dead already. My carefree summer, the beginning of my gap year of growth and work and self-improvement over, my strained ideas of the ways of the world finally shattered.
Two days later, Michael and his girlfriend Ashley picked me up in a parking lot by my house in a friend’s car. I squeezed into the back seat with Kat and Emily, probably the two people I was closest with at the bike shop. In their thirties and living together in Cole Valley, both Kat and Emily worked in tech and organized for transportation justice, in what I jokingly called a form of moral offsets. I had never been in a car with any of these people, we prided ourselves on not driving. We were bus and bike girls, experiencing the world from the seat of our bikes and through the windows of the bus: the ultimate freedom, go anywhere, anytime, never circling the block for any other reason than wanting to peddle and feel the air a little more. It was healthier, cheaper, better for the environment. You could go as slow or fast as you wanted to go. It was the ultimate freedom. The bicycle: a liberatory joy.
Jerry had been riding bikes around San Francisco for 20 years, Hansel had grown up in San Francisco but didn’t learn to ride a bike until 2021, in the midst of the pandemic, when the city had banned cars from the Great Highway, a road neither great nor a highway, but beautiful and on the beach nonetheless.
“I realize how open we are to the persistent message that we can avert death,” Didion writes in The Year of Magical Thinking (Didion 2007). The idea that we death is avoidable begins to be accepted as truth. It’s an unimportant notion for someone not experiencing the death of someone close, it doesn’t fill them with guilt, or shame, if anything, it is comforting.
When it happens to someone close to you, someone you care about, someone whose life you are in as much as they are in yours, the idea that death is avoidable is poison, it is torture: Hansel still could be alive if I had just…
Hansel had been so excited about their bike, a Rivendell Platypus that they picked every part and color on, and we had built it at the shop over many late nights past closing. I had even worked on it. I thought about all the times I had worked on Hansel’s bike, every bolt I’d tightened, cable I’d tensioned. If I had just…
Jay took in Hansel’s bike for a postmortem, our version of an autopsy. There is a strange desire to know every detail of a death, as if we can reason our way out of it. He found no problems with the bike. Even then, I thought if I had just…
I’d spent the better part of that year on my bike. Riding every chance, I got, between classes, weekends, to school, from school, after school. I had worked as a bike messenger, climbing San Francisco’s forty-eight hills only to descend them again, time sensitive cargo in tow, on a trailer or in my messenger bag strapped to my back. Sweating, blasting music, feeling the power in my thighs as I pushed down the pedals, swerving between cars, quickly glancing at every traffic light in every intersection to calculate in a split second how I could run the light. When not at the shop or in school or riding for work, I was organizing with a radical street safety group called Safe Street Rebel. Being on my bike made me feel in control. The way I rode made me feel like I was the sole person responsible for what happened to me. It was how I’d met a lot of these people I now called friends and father figures and queer elders and community members. In 2023 I organized protest vigils for three of the twenty-six people killed on San Francisco’s roads that year. The death of a pedestrian, of a cyclist always weighed heavy on my mind. If we had prioritized actions on that street…
Fighting for a safer city, safer from the violence inflicted upon everyone who walked or biked, I was driven partially by knowing what I was fighting was probably what would kill me. Though the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t track bike messenger fatalities (it’s a largely informal industry nowadays), it’s widely thought that being a bike messenger is the deadliest job in America, above logging workers, who are officially number one, but only suffer 98.9 deaths per 100,000 full time equivalent workers. Every messenger knows at least one dead messenger, most more.
Despite the death and the risks and the violence, I’ll never stop riding my bike. A life without that freedom, that feeling, that community is effectively the same as a premature death as far as I’m concerned.
Shortly after Hansel died, the executive director of the Bike Coalition, a local organization that had run the adult classes that taught Hansel how to ride a bike, stopped by the shop.
“There’s no wrong way to grieve,” she said. We talked, about Hansel, about the weather, about bikes. When she left, Jay turned to. “That’s bullshit,” he said. “There absolutely are wrong ways to grieve.”
That stuck with me. Jay was right. Grieving in community, we were seeing examples of it. People withdrew into themselves, were attention seeking, or took up space in ways that took space away from others. There are right and wrong ways to grieve.
Reading Didion late one evening, around one or two in the morning in my dorm in New York, getting up for water, I feel a subdued mania. I realize I feel this often after reading pages that strike at something deep within me. I’ve been reading Didion talk about her husband’s death. I narrate my actions but don’t quite have control over them. It feels like a subdued mania, not unlike the dissociative autopilot I enter when faced with the shock of impending loss: my friend’s crash, my dog’s hospitalization, the ends of relationships and big fights.
The sound of heavy rain through my open window takes my attention. Opening it as far as it can, I listen to the sounds of the city, muffled by the thick air of the approaching storm. It brings a peaceful lucidness back into me. It’s March, but the air is warm and humid. Though the air is humid I could see the Empire State Building, gathering mass at its base on 34th St and soaring upward, thinning at it reaches up toward where the stars probably are. I can’t see them because of the light pollution.
In the car, long stretches of heavy silence punctuated by awkward attempts at chatting was pierced only by the whirr of the road noise as we winded up I-101 toward Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital. We didn’t talk about Hansel. After parking in the cool shade of the third floor of a behemoth of a parking garage, we waited in the dry, sweltering Sonoma County heat to cross a road wider than anything in San Francisco. A helicopter flew overhead and landed at the hospital helipad. Though none of us said it, we knew it was probably the same helicopter that had brought Hansel here.
Inside, we signed in to the strangely pleasant hospital. The lobby was spacious and open, nicely air conditioned and paneled with wood. It had wide windows looking into an internal courtyard garden, and wide hallways leading off in different directions. I had grown to dread the sterility of hospitals, but Santa Rosa Memorial felt different. I felt that in the relief of this cool breeze, maybe Hansel would be okay.
We made our way up to the second or third floor of the west wing and were taken into the ICU waiting area. Jerry came out through the wide, white wing doors, smiling with his twinkling eyes evidence of recent tears. We sat with him for a while before going in. “Thank you,” he whispered in my ear as he hugged me. Not knowing how to respond, I just hugged him tighter.
Hansel’s head was lopsided and swollen, their breathing slow. “They would be so embarrassed and mad to be seen like this,” Jerry said through a sad laugh. I cried.
“If they make it out of here,” Jerry said, almost matter of factly, “they would have to spend the rest of their life in an assisted living facility.” Still, I hoped for a miracle.
My miracle never came. A week later, the morning before another group of us was scheduled to go up and see Jerry and Hansel in the hospital, we got a message to the “Hansel Updates” Signal group chat we’d set up. They were finally dead dead.
Part of grieving was coming to terms with the fact that things happen
whether we like them to or not. Things don’t happen for a reason. The universe is a bunch of chittering atoms that sometimes assemble in a way that sometimes briefly resembles consciousness before decaying back into entropy. In grieving Hansel, I wasn’t just grieving my friend—I was grieving my way of seeing the world. Everything is fleeting, and that’s beautiful.
“To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted,” writes Ocean Vuong in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019).
Sixty-four minutes of music dominated my listening in 2023. The soundtrack to June and early July that summer had been Janelle Monáe’s thirty-two minute The Age of Pleasure, a hot, steamy, queer fun album about fucking and floating: “I don’t step, I don’t walk, I don’t dance, I just float.”(Monáe, Seun Kuti, and Egypt 80 2023) After Hansel died, it was Cassandra Jenkins’ beautiful and devastating An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, about grieving the suicide of her friend and artist David Berman, who she was about to tour Europe with (Monger).
“I’m a three-legged dog / Workin’ with what I got / And part of me will always be / Looking for what I lost,” she sings on Michaelangelo, “There’s a fly around my head / Waiting for the day I drop dead / My DNA looks pretty strange / Can you see it on my breath?” (Jenkins 2021c)
An Overview marked a substantial change in style from her earlier work, much slower, sadder and more contemplative. You can hear her hurt in it.
An Overview became the closest thing I’d ever had to a religious text. I relied on it to coach and comfort me through grief. It was my most listened to album that year. We listened to it at the shop, I listened on my rides home, on the train, on the bus. I listened to it at home. The way I listened to music changed too, instead of making playlists, I listened to albums on loop for hours or days at a time. I listened to An Overview’s thirty-two minutes of songs hundreds of times. The lyrics of “Hard Drive” promised me it would eventually be okay, and I believed them:
I’ll count to three and tap your shoulder
We’re gonna put your heart back together
So all those little pieces they took from you
They’re coming back now
They’ll miss 'em too. (Jenkins 2021b)
In July of 2024, a year after the crash, Jenkins released My Light, My Destroyer. Jay described it as “showing healing.” My partner at the time loved it. Jenkins had quickly become my favorite artist, somewhat of a greater than life figure to me after my reliance on An Overview to guide me through grief. When I listened to My Light, My Destroyer, also thirty-two minutes, I hated it. I wasn’t ready for the person who was guiding me through a grieving process I wasn’t done with yet to be done with theirs. It wasn’t until months later, in New York, separated from that partner—physically distanced from the version of me that experienced Hansel die—that I realized Jenkins wasn’t done with grieving. Nobody ever fully moves on from loss. My Light, My Destroyer isn’t about being done, it’s about the next steps.
“Delphinium Blue,” the standout song from the album according to most critics, embodies what I was now doing: learning how to live again in the shadow of death. She distracts herself on lines like “I picked up another couple of shifts / I hear your voice when I’m closing / The nights fall like thorns off the roses,” narrating her actions to herself, a silent anthem that says just keep moving in the final chorus: “Chin up / Stay on task / Wash the windows / Count the cash / Cut the stems / To make them last / Keep it cool / Behind the glass” (Jenkins 2024).
About a week later, we biked down El Camino Real to a funeral home in Colma, a town where the living are outnumbered one thousand to one (five million buried, five thousand residents), we attended a Filipino Catholic viewing. A couple days later, we attended the funeral mass at Holy See, a huge, echoing Catholic church in the Outer Sunset, blocks away from where Hansel had grown up and lived. Through this time, my father kept up his incessant pushing for me to find a job, a therapist, follow through on the promises I had made for my gap year. I began to spend more time at my mom’s.
Interviewing Jay for this essay, I asked him how grief has shaped me, expecting a meandering response filled with his usual wistfulness and sharp but wise words—he was a poet before he became a bike mechanic or a restaurant guy—all I got was “how hasn’t it?”
He went on with another question, “what haven’t you grieved since I’ve known you? I think you’re grieving a functional relationship with your dad, you’re grieving life as a boy, multiple dead identities, the childhood of a little girl, you’re grieving a failed relationship, a life in San Francisco. Everything that changes is loss, all loss is grief.”
Putting words to what I had been struggling to wrap my head around is what Jay does best. My life had changed in a lot of ways, both small and drastic, and all of that led to—required—a period of grieving. Without loss change is meaningless, it dilutes the essence of what it means for something to be. Grief can be a generative force, not just a subtractive or necessary step in “moving on,” whatever that means.
“In some ways,” Jay tells me, “You were lucky to lose someone like this, in a community where you could learn how to grieve the right way, because there are wrong ways to grieve.” What I gained was a blueprint on how to grieve other losses, which may have been Hansel’s biggest gift.