Do Not Make a Lesson Out of This

In 2019, my best friend was killed at work. If you want a click-bait story about the accident, this isn't it. But if you've seen someone's life end without warning, you might be able to relate.

When someone dies, the book of their life ends. If you knew they were going to die—from illness or at the end of a long life—you have a chance to help write the final stories. But when someone dies in a shocking, horrible way, the book is slammed shut without warning and you don’t have a chance to write the last chapter.

***

I was mindlessly scrolling social media on a January morning in 2019 when I paused on a photo of my friend Kelsey, posted by her mother. It was from a recent hike—her wavy black hair was falling over her face and she’d been looking down at her dog, Milo. Then I read the caption. I struggled with posting this, but my heart is breaking, my family is broken. My stomach dropped. I skimmed the rest of the post as the walls of my room melted into the floor. We lost Kelsey yesterday in an accident on her job.

The paragraph went on, but the words were swimming on the screen. The first thing I thought was: This isn’t real. Kelsey had just quit a framing job because she felt like it was too dangerous. She had returned to her previous job at a barn west of town, and was planning to go to diesel mechanic school within the next few years.

I staggered out of my room and called the first person I could think of: Kelsey’s identical twin. When Kaitlin answered the phone sobbing, I knew it was real.

I met Kelsey and Kaitlin in 2010 at our horseback guiding job in Yellowstone. They had been working there for years, and I was a soft east-coast transplant who could barely throw a western saddle. I watched in amazement at the ease with which they moved around the pens adjusting cinches and helping guests hold the reins correctly. They could balance on the back of the flatbed as it rattled around the rutted corrals, bucking 80-pound bales onto their knees and launching them into the feeders. I don’t know if they found me amusing or sympathetic, but we quickly became friends.

After my second season in Yellowstone, I decided to move to Bozeman and Kelsey joined. We moved into a two-bedroom apartment with indoor-outdoor carpeting and particleboard cabinets. We got minimum wage jobs, and spent the next year exploring a new town like only people in their early 20’s can, with no responsibilities and minimal life-experience damages.

Over the next few years we hiked, camped, rode horses, and traveled to rodeos to watch our friends compete. We were so poor that we cut up hot dogs into Easy Mac for dinner, and once a week we treated ourselves to Friday night dollar slices at the crappiest pizza place in town.

Kelsey took me on some of the worst off-trail hikes I’d ever suffered through. Her unstoppable fitness had me cursing her out as I waded through waist-deep bogs because she was sure there was a giant shed “just over the next ridge.” When I was in the car-accident-that-led-to-buying-the-house, Kelsey drove me to my doctor appointments. She flew across the country to help bring my new car back to Montana. We lived in three different houses together over the course of four years—the longest I’ve ever lived with someone. She was my best friend.

***

It was snowing as I staggered out my front door, grasping for my truck’s door handle, stabbing the key crookedly towards the ignition. Snow, I thought absurdly. Kelsey will never see snow again. I drove in a nauseous daze to the coffee shop where I still occasionally worked. She’d come in every morning on her way to work and get an asiago bagel and a large coffee. She always greeted me with “Howdy Mags,” and before leaving she’d chat with the flock of old ranchers at the counter. I usually comped her coffee and gave her a few day-old pastries to bring to work.

I sat in my truck outside the shop, staring at the neon open sign before yanking my keys out of the ignition and throwing them at my windshield as hard as I could. They cracked the glass with a snap that split into a glittering spiderweb. I put face against the steering wheel and screamed as snow collected on the windshield.

She had showed up to work that morning to feed horses, backing the truck up to the hay barn. She climbed out of the truck and cut the bands holding the stacks of bales together. From here it’s unclear, but the bales were unstable, and they collapsed on her. It was a freak accident, and she was killed.

Don’t tell me that everything happens for a reason, or that the accident was some sort of lesson. The only lesson is that life isn’t fair and sometimes hay bales fall down and maybe I should have just given Kelsey the bagels for free along with the coffee or gone to the dog park with her more and bad things happen to good people before they have a chance to become diesel mechanics.

Kelsey is everywhere I look. The trailhead where she finally found the shed after bushwhacking for hours. Her favorite dog park where she’d take Milo after work. Whenever I see a yellow Ford Escape I still half expect to see her behind the cracked windshield in a trucker hat and aviators. She’s going to roll up to my house, open my fridge to peruse the contents, and say “Well Mags, what’s the dealio?” Then we’ll leave for some overgrown trailhead or head out to the lake or maybe just downtown to the farmer’s market.

Maybe this is why I take so many pictures, why I feel like I have to capture even the most mundane moments. I wish I had more pictures of Kelsey in our crummy apartments, or under the fluorescent lights of the pizza place.

When I saw Kaitlin for the first time after the accident, there was a garish emptiness vibrating in the air around her. It’s not like her and Kelsey had always been side by side, but there was something different about this space. I was looking at a twin who’s other half no longer existed in our world. I hugged her and we sobbed and the empty space expanded until it felt like a hollowness carved out of the world.

I wish I could tell Kelsey how much she means to me, and apologize for not calling her more that final year. Time takes its toll on all relationships, and we had both moved into our own places and gotten busy. I wish she knew what I’d give to be sitting on the kitchen counter in that first apartment as she made her lunch for work the next day, talking about what we wanted to do with all the years we thought we had left.