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I
US Alpine Skier
Mikaela Shiffrin
April 28, 2022
It’s like you have an injury in your soul. There is no timetable. There is no rehabilitation. Some days you wake up and think, What’s the point?
“
You can’t even enjoy the fleeting happy moments in your life, because they exist in a reality where that person isn’t there anymore.
“
Some days, I feel O.K. Some days, it still feels as raw as when we walked into the hospital after our 10-hour flight home and saw him
on the ventilator.
“
PHOTOS BY CELESTE SLOMAN/THE PLAYERS' TRIBUNE
There are no words for what came next. Ten hours in an airplane. No Wi-Fi. No messages from our family. Just the sound of the engines. At that point, all you want to do is just get to say goodbye. Please, just let me give him a hug. Let me be there.
When you’re trapped on that plane, the memories become like tiny little breaths that keep you from drowning.
The memories. Memories, memories, memories, memories. F*ck.
See, there is my dad that I talk about when I have to do press … and then there is my dad. There’s the guy who used to call me Princess No (!!!).
Because, according to him, when I was little, “Noooooo!” was my favorite word. But, in my defense, it had different meanings in different contexts.
“Mikaela, do you want to hear a joke?”
“Nooooooooooo!!!!” (It really meant yes).
“Mikaela, do you want to go to sleep?”
“Nooooooooooo!!!!!!!” (It really meant no).
“Alright, Princess No.”
That was our thing. And of course he always had that big, bushy mustache, so I called him “The Lorax.”
So many memories….
The first day Mom and Dad finally let me ski in real powder on a real mountain. I was four years old. A little peanut. After months of practicing proper technique in the driveway — never letting us cheat and do “the pizza” to stop — they finally let us run wild in the powder. My first time down, I went headfirst into a mound of fluffy powder and I was so small that I fully disappeared. All you could see was two little legs sticking out of the snow. I remember thinking, Well, I’m trapped. This is my life now. I’m never getting out of here.
Then the hands of a giant came out of the sky and scooped me out by my legs. I was hanging upside down, and I saw the face of my dad, laughing.
“Do you want to go home?”
“Noooooooooo!!!” (It meant kind of.)
The next run, I remember him telling me — and I don’t know if this is just a dream of a memory, or if it was a real memory — but I can hear his voice so clearly….
“Hey, Neon, you’re maybe gonna wanna put your weight back a little more so your skis will cruise right over the powder, O.K.?”
So calm. Just a suggestion. “Hey, Neon….”
I went from getting buried alive and nearly having a panic attack to wanting to stay out there until my toes were frozen solid. I could not be bribed.
“Alright, do you want to go home and eat some french fries?”
“Noooooooooo!!!!” (It meant hell no).
“Alright, Princess No. One more run.”
I remember I got my first real racing suit not long after that. It was purple. I refused to take it off. I would wear it to bed every night. A few years later, when I was nine, I wrote in my journal, “I want to be the best in the world.”
My parents made that dream, scribbled in a notebook by a child, a possibility.
Skiing was always Our Thing. And that’s what made it so hard — just brutally hard — to keep on going when we lost my dad. When he was gone, I didn’t want to ski. I didn’t want to eat. I didn’t even want to sleep. I was so afraid of the dreams.
Usually, when you have a nightmare that something terrible happened, you wake up in a cold sweat and your heart is racing and you slowly realize, “O.K., it was just a nightmare. Phew. They’re not really gone.”
For me, it was the reverse.
In my dreams, he was still here.
When I would wake up, I'd slowly realize that the nightmare was the real thing.
Sometimes, even now, when I’m awake, it feels like he’s just stuck at work late. He’s caught up in a meeting. He’ll come walking in the door in a few minutes, and everything will be the way it was.
That’s the way grief works. It’s not linear. It’s not a climb up a mountain. It’s more like a maze. Some days, I feel O.K. Some days, it still feels as raw as when we walked into the hospital after our 10-hour flight home and saw him on the ventilator.
That night, everyone cleared out of the room, and I climbed into the bed with him and I just put his arm around me. I stayed there like that for nine hours, just letting him know that I was there. I put my head on his chest, and I could still feel his heart beating.
I know he felt me there with him. I know. I know.
This is all still so raw for me, but I cherish that memory, because at least I got to say goodbye.
If that last part is true, then maybe I will never stop grieving. And that’s O.K., too. Even when I found the strength to get back up on the mountain, it was such a battle just to feel O.K. Just to not feel guilty for doing the thing that he loved to do. When I knew that I had a chance to win my first race after his death, I had this really surreal moment at the top of the mountain before my second run. I knew that if I had a good run, then I’d win. But if I won, then I’d be winning in a reality where my dad isn’t here to experience it. And I was asking myself, Do I want to even exist in this reality?
When I was at the gate, I had this really intense memory of him. It was just a random thing, and I couldn’t get it out of my head. I didn’t want to. Normally, when I’m racing, I’m trying to block out everything. But my biggest fear now is that if I let a memory die, it’s like losing him all over again.
I mean, maybe this sounds crazy, but I just felt like … after someone dies, you have a few days where everyone they ever touched is thinking about them, right? Celebrating them. Keeping the flame alive. But when my dad’s funeral was over, and all the incredible people who shared stories and sent letters and flowers — and everyone who simply thought of him — they moved on. It’s inevitable. And when that happens, who is left to keep his memory alive?
It’s just me. It’s just us.
That’s how I felt. So this memory came to me on the mountain, in the middle of a huge moment, with TV cameras everywhere, and … I just kind of let it be. I heard the sound of his voice, and I let myself feel everything. And then I let myself ski down the mountain. I let myself win, without my dad there to experience it.
It was so bittersweet and so hard, if I’m honest. Right now, my truth is a lot more complicated than what you see on TV, or what you can get from a press conference.
Skiing was always Our Thing.
And that’s what made it so hard — just brutally hard — to keep on going when we lost my dad.
Mikaela Shiffrin
“
People always ask me, “What happened in Beijing?”
They want some kind of answer. And I genuinely don’t have one. I could give you the media answer that I always give. I could put on a brave face and tell you some generic thing. But the real truth is … I don’t know.
It’s two minutes of your life. Two minutes, on a random day. You go down the hill. You try to go fast. You try not to make mistakes. Sometimes, you win the gold, like I did. Sometimes, you fail, like I did.
I could not really tell you why.
Some days, I have perfect moments. Perfect turns. Perfect technique. I forget about the pain. I remember my dad from a distance, and when I get up on the mountain, it feels like the only place that I can truly breathe.
And then some days, it still just sucks. Some days, it’s so hard to put one foot in front of the other. That’s grief. That’s being a human.
After Beijing, when I turned things around and ended up winning the World Cup, people would say things to me like, “Mikaela, now that you’re in a much better place….”
And I never said it out loud, but I would always think: Am I?
We equate winning with being O.K., and failure with being not O.K.
The real truth is that I’m neither O.K. nor not O.K. It really depends on the day, and it has almost nothing to do with how fast I came down a mountain.
You know, I think about my dad’s video camera a lot. He took all this footage over the years, in all these different places. So many memories, stored and cataloged on a machine. Well, as fate would have it, one day he was taking his backpack through airport security and something in the X-ray machine scrambled all the harddrives.
All those little memories were wiped out. Gone. In the blink of an eye.
But, the thing is, they were just pictures on a screen. Memories work a little bit differently than the things we capture on a camera. The sound of a voice. The smell of a sweatshirt. The way someone smirks when it’s a joke that only you two understand.
“Time for bed, Princess No!”
“Nooooooooooo!!!!!!”
Laughter. Memories of memories — things you’re not sure even happened for real, but that exist somewhere in your mind, like a dream.
A walk on the beach with my dad when I was five. The way the water was. The way the sun was. The way it all just was.
Did it even really happen like that? Does it even matter?
These things don’t exist on a hard drive. They can’t be captured on a screen. And I can’t even put them into words, no matter how hard I try. They exist somewhere — I don’t know where — but it’s not here on earth. They come to you in a dream, or in a daydream, or even when you’re at the top of a mountain. They are somewhere deep in your soul.
They come to me in my sleep, or when I am daydreaming, or when I’m just lying under a picnic table between runs, closing my eyes and listening to music … They appear from nowhere.
I’m at my nana’s, and it’s Thanksgiving, and everyone is there. Everyone’s there and we’re eating chips and guac and those little shrimps we’d always have at Thanksgiving, and my uncle is making the biggest turkey you’ve ever seen, and I can smell it, and Frank Sinatra of course is playing on Nana’s stereo, because Nana controls the stereo, and I can hear his voice crackling on the speakers. I can hear all their voices. I can just feel how everything was. The sound of dishes. The sound of uncles playing backgammon. The smell of Nana’s pies. The smell of a ginormous turkey. Inside jokes. Laughter. Warmth. Love.
Everyone is there.
Some of them are not with us anymore — here.
But everyone is with us — there.
And wherever there is … it’s forever.
I Want to
Remember
Everything
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by MIKAELA SHIFFRIN
I Want to
Remember
Everything
went into his closet and I just buried my face in his clothes.
That was the first thing I did when I got home after my dad died.
I stuffed myself in his shirts and I breathed in deep and I thought of him and sobbed.
There’s a certain smell that everyone has, you know? It’s not cologne or anything like that. It’s something indescribable. It’s what you smell when they give you a big hug. It’s in their favorite sweatshirts, embedded in the fibers forever. You can’t wash it out. It’s eternal.
It’s them.
I just wanted to smell his smell. I wanted to hear his voice. I wanted to remember everything — everything.
He left us without warning. An accident. A tragedy. Like something you see in the movies and you cry your eyes out and you think, “God, that’s so sad. But that’ll never happen to us.”
Then one day, out of the blue, we were living the movie. Me and my mom were in Italy. I had training early, so we watched half an episode of Schitt’s Creek and called it a night. Right as my mom went down the hall to her room, my brother called me, and he never calls me — not like that. It was weird.
“Hey, I need to talk to Mom.”
“Mom went to her room. Why do you need to talk to Mom?”
“I need to talk to Mom.”
“What’s going on?”
“Dad had an accident.”
Dad had an accident. Ha. O.K., did he cut himself doing something stupid? Did he burn his legs making a fire pit again? What did he get himself into this time?
“I just need to talk to Mom right now.”
When you hear those words, you just know. When I got to my mom’s room and handed her the phone, I immediately broke down in tears in the corner of the room. I was hysterical. But Mom went into full Nurse Mode. It’s an old reflex. She calmly told my brother that he had to follow the ambulance to the hospital. He had to get as much information as he could. And he just had to stay by Dad’s side, no matter what. We were coming.
The last thing the doctors told us before we got on the flight was, “We’re going to do everything in our power to keep him alive until you can get here.”
It’s like you have an injury in your soul. There is no timetable. There is no rehabilitation. Some days you wake up and think, What’s the point?
Mikaela Shiffrin
There are no words for what came next. Ten hours in an airplane. No Wi-Fi. No messages from our family. Just the sound of the engines. At that point, all you want to do is just get to say goodbye. Please, just let me give him a hug. Let me be there.
When you’re trapped on that plane, the memories become like tiny little breaths that keep you from drowning.
The memories. Memories, memories, memories, memories. F*ck.
See, there is my dad that I talk about when I have to do press … and then there is my dad. There’s the guy who used to call me Princess No (!!!).
Because, according to him, when I was little, “Noooooo!” was my favorite word. But, in my defense, it had different meanings in different contexts.
“Mikaela, do you want to hear a joke?”
“Nooooooooooo!!!!” (It really meant yes).
“Mikaela, do you want to go to sleep?”
“Nooooooooooo!!!!!!!” (It really meant no).
“Alright, Princess No.”
That was our thing. And of course he always had that big, bushy mustache, so I called him “The Lorax.”
So many memories….
The first day Mom and Dad finally let me ski in real powder on a real mountain. I was four years old. A little peanut. After months of practicing proper technique in the driveway — never letting us cheat and do “the pizza” to stop — they finally let us run wild in the powder. My first time down, I went headfirst into a mound of fluffy powder and I was so small that I fully disappeared. All you could see was two little legs sticking out of the snow. I remember thinking, Well, I’m trapped. This is my life now. I’m never getting out of here.
Then the hands of a giant came out of the sky and scooped me out by my legs. I was hanging upside down, and I saw the face of my dad, laughing.
“Do you want to go home?”
“Noooooooooo!!!” (It meant kind of.)
The next run, I remember him telling me — and I don’t know if this is just a dream of a memory, or if it was a real memory — but I can hear his voice so clearly….
“Hey, Neon, you’re maybe gonna wanna put your weight back a little more so your skis will cruise right over the powder, O.K.?”
So calm. Just a suggestion. “Hey, Neon….”
I went from getting buried alive and nearly having a panic attack to wanting to stay out there until my toes were frozen solid. I could not be bribed.
“Alright, do you want to go home and eat some french fries?”
“Noooooooooo!!!!” (It meant hell no).
“Alright, Princess No. One more run.”
I remember I got my first real racing suit not long after that. It was purple. I refused to take it off. I would wear it to bed every night. A few years later, when I was nine, I wrote in my journal, “I want to be the best in the world.”
My parents made that dream, scribbled in a notebook by a child,
a possibility.
For a period of 10 years, I was never home. I made maybe one or two family Christmases. Skiing was not just my life, it was our life. My mom traveled everywhere with me as my coach, and my dad handled everything else — literally everything else — as Command Central for Team Shiffrin. When my dad traveled with us, he always had his camera with him. He would record everything — back before people were doing stuff like that. To this day, I don’t understand why he did it, but he was not just capturing what I did — my skiing — he was capturing me. Us. The little moments. Someone laughing. Someone rolling their eyes. All the memories that end up getting lost to time.
You know what’s funny about that?
The moments that everyone always asks me about … they’re a blur. They’re more than a blur, actually. When I won my first gold medal, in Sochi, I honestly can’t tell you much about how it “felt.” Or even what was going through my mind when I did it. When I saw the results, I could not process it. When I stood on the podium, I could not process it. Even 48 hours later, I could not process it.
It’s … it’s two minutes of your life.
You train for four years for two minutes.
Actually, you could say that every single day since I'd started sleeping in my purple suit had been kind of leading up to those two minutes in Sochi. From the outside, it would seem like the greatest moment of my life. And maybe it was. Or maybe it will feel like it was in 30 years. But when it happened, I just felt kind of dumbfounded. What I actually remember, though, and what I will never forget as long as I live, was that the first person I hugged after I won the gold was my dad.
He was crying.
He pulled me tight, and he was so proud. I can still feel that hug.
And it’s funny, because I was talking to my brother the other day, and he brought up the 2018 Olympics in South Korea, and he said, “You know what? I literally cannot even remember what event you got the gold in. What I really remember is us being all together. We were in the hotel hanging out and watching Justice League. Just us all together, laughing.”
Mikaela Shiffrin
Skiing was always Our Thing. And that’s what made it so hard — just brutally hard — to keep on going when we lost my dad. When he was gone, I didn’t want to ski. I didn’t want to eat. I didn’t even want to sleep. I was so afraid of the dreams.
Usually, when you have a nightmare that something terrible happened, you wake up in a cold sweat and your heart is racing and you slowly realize, “O.K., it was just a nightmare. Phew. They’re not really gone.”
For me, it was the reverse.
In my dreams, he was still here.
When I would wake up, I'd slowly realize that the nightmare was the real thing.
Sometimes, even now, when I’m awake, it feels like he’s just stuck at work late. He’s caught up in a meeting. He’ll come walking in the door in a few minutes, and everything will be the way it was.
That’s the way grief works. It’s not linear. It’s not a climb up a mountain. It’s more like a maze. Some days, I feel O.K. Some days, it still feels as raw as when we walked into the hospital after our 10-hour flight home and saw him on the ventilator.
That night, everyone cleared out of the room, and I climbed into the bed with him and I just put his arm around me. I stayed there like that for nine hours, just letting him know that I was there. I put my head on his chest, and I could still feel his heart beating.
I know he felt me there with him. I know. I know.
This is all still so raw for me, but I cherish that memory, because at least I got to say goodbye.
Mikaela Shiffrin
If that last part is true, then maybe I will never stop grieving. And that’s O.K., too. Even when I found the strength to get back up on the mountain, it was such a battle just to feel O.K. Just to not feel guilty for doing the thing that he loved to do. When I knew that I had a chance to win my first race after his death, I had this really surreal moment at the top of the mountain before my second run. I knew that if I had a good run, then I’d win. But if I won, then I’d be winning in a reality where my dad isn’t here to experience it. And I was asking myself, Do I want to even exist in this reality?
When I was at the gate, I had this really intense memory of him. It was just a random thing, and I couldn’t get it out of my head. I didn’t want to. Normally, when I’m racing, I’m trying to block out everything. But my biggest fear now is that if I let a memory die, it’s like losing him all over again.
I mean, maybe this sounds crazy, but I just felt like … after someone dies, you have a few days where everyone they ever touched is thinking about them, right? Celebrating them. Keeping the flame alive. But when my dad’s funeral was over, and all the incredible people who shared stories and sent letters and flowers — and everyone who simply thought of him — they moved on. It’s inevitable. And when that happens, who is left to keep his memory alive?
It’s just me. It’s just us.
That’s how I felt. So this memory came to me on the mountain, in the middle of a huge moment, with TV cameras everywhere, and … I just kind of let it be. I heard the sound of his voice, and I let myself feel everything. And then I let myself ski down the mountain. I let myself win, without my dad there to experience it.
It was so bittersweet and so hard, if I’m honest. Right now, my truth is a lot more complicated than what you see on TV, or what you can get from a press conference.
People always ask me, “What happened in Beijing?”
They want some kind of answer. And I genuinely don’t have one. I could give you the media answer that I always give. I could put on a brave face and tell you some generic thing. But the real truth is … I don’t know.
It’s two minutes of your life. Two minutes, on a random day. You go down the hill. You try to go fast. You try not to make mistakes. Sometimes, you win the gold, like I did. Sometimes, you fail, like I did.
I could not really tell you why.
Some days, I have perfect moments. Perfect turns. Perfect technique. I forget about the pain. I remember my dad from a distance, and when I get up on the mountain, it feels like the only place that I can truly breathe.
And then some days, it still just sucks. Some days, it’s so hard to put one foot in front of the other. That’s grief. That’s being a human.
After Beijing, when I turned things around and ended up winning the World Cup, people would say things to me like, “Mikaela, now that you’re in a much better place….”
And I never said it out loud, but I would always think: Am I?
We equate winning with being O.K., and failure with being not O.K.
The real truth is that I’m neither O.K. nor not O.K. It really depends on the day, and it has almost nothing to do with how fast I came down a mountain.
Mikaela Shiffrin
You know, I think about my dad’s video camera a lot. He took all this footage over the years, in all these different places. So many memories, stored and cataloged on a machine. Well, as fate would have it, one day he was taking his backpack through airport security and something in the X-ray machine scrambled all the harddrives.
All those little memories were wiped out. Gone. In the blink of an eye.
But, the thing is, they were just pictures on a screen. Memories work a little bit differently than the things we capture on a camera. The sound of a voice. The smell of a sweatshirt. The way someone smirks when it’s a joke that only you two understand.
“Time for bed, Princess No!”
“Nooooooooooo!!!!!!”
Mikaela Shiffrin
went into his closet and I just buried my face in his clothes.
That was the first thing I did when I got home after my dad died.
I stuffed myself in his shirts and I breathed in deep and I thought of him and sobbed.
There’s a certain smell that everyone has, you know? It’s not cologne or anything like that. It’s something indescribable. It’s what you smell when they give you a big hug. It’s in their favorite sweatshirts, embedded in the fibers forever. You can’t wash it out. It’s eternal.
It’s them.
I just wanted to smell his smell. I wanted to hear his voice. I wanted to remember everything — everything.
He left us without warning. An accident. A tragedy. Like something you see in the movies and you cry your eyes out and you think, “God, that’s so sad. But that’ll never happen to us.”
Then one day, out of the blue, we were living the movie. Me and my mom were in Italy. I had training early, so we watched half an episode of Schitt’s Creek and called it a night. Right as my mom went down the hall to her room, my brother called me, and he never calls me — not like that. It was weird.
“Hey, I need to talk to Mom.”
“Mom went to her room. Why do you need to talk to Mom?”
“I need to talk to Mom.”
“What’s going on?”
“Dad had an accident.”
Dad had an accident. Ha. O.K., did he cut himself doing something stupid? Did he burn his legs making a fire pit again? What did he get himself into this time?
“I just need to talk to Mom right now.”
When you hear those words, you just know. When I got to my mom’s room and handed her the phone, I immediately broke down in tears in the corner of the room. I was hysterical. But Mom went into full Nurse Mode. It’s an old reflex. She calmly told my brother that he had to follow the ambulance to the hospital. He had to get as much information as he could. And he just had to stay by Dad’s side, no matter what. We were coming.
The last thing the doctors told us before we got on the flight was, “We’re going to do everything in our power to keep him alive until you can get here.”
For a period of 10 years, I was never home. I made maybe one or two family Christmases. Skiing was not just my life, it was our life. My mom traveled everywhere with me as my coach, and my dad handled everything else — literally everything else — as Command Central for Team Shiffrin. When my dad traveled with us, he always had his camera with him. He would record everything — back before people were doing stuff like that. To this day, I don’t understand why he did it, but he was not just capturing what I did — my skiing — he was capturing me. Us. The little moments. Someone laughing. Someone rolling their eyes. All the memories that end up getting lost to time.
You know what’s funny about that?
The moments that everyone always asks me about … they’re a blur. They’re more than a blur, actually. When I won my first gold medal, in Sochi, I honestly can’t tell you much about how it “felt.” Or even what was going through my mind when I did it. When I saw the results, I could not process it. When I stood on the podium, I could not process it. Even 48 hours later, I could not process it.
It’s … it’s two minutes of your life.
You train for four years for two minutes.
Actually, you could say that every single day since I'd started sleeping in my purple suit had been kind of leading up to those two minutes in Sochi. From the outside, it would seem like the greatest moment of my life. And maybe it was. Or maybe it will feel like it was in 30 years. But when it happened, I just felt kind of dumbfounded. What I actually remember, though, and what I will never forget as long as I live, was that the first person I hugged after I won the gold was my dad.
He was crying.
He pulled me tight, and he was so proud. I can still feel that hug.
And it’s funny, because I was talking to my brother the other day, and he brought up the 2018 Olympics in South Korea, and he said, “You know what? I literally cannot even remember what event you got the gold in. What I really remember is us being all together. We were in the hotel hanging out and watching Justice League. Just us all together, laughing.”
It’s extremely hard to relive this pain, but the reason I’m doing it is because maybe it can help someone else. I’m doing it because someone did it for me. A stranger, as a matter of fact.
When my dad died, the outpouring of support was stunning. I somehow got more letters from people in my lowest moment than I did when I was on top of the world. This one letter was from a man who volunteered at an orphanage in Portland, and he talked about all the things he’d learned from the kids there who had lost parents.
It resonated so deeply with me, because he talked about anger.
When someone dies, we hear endlessly about sadness and happiness. The endless sadness of losing that person, and the “celebration” and happiness of remembering their life. But grief is so much more complicated than those two emotions. A lot of the time, you just feel incredible, relentless anger. You’re ashamed of your anger, so you bury it. Deep down inside, you’re mad at that person for leaving you alone. You’re mad at the world that you can’t hug them anymore. You can’t get advice from them anymore. You can’t finish your favorite TV show together — you’ll never be able to, for as long as you live. You can’t even enjoy the fleeting happy moments in your life, because they exist in a reality where that person isn’t there anymore. Being happy makes you feel guilty, even if it’s just an instant.
He can’t eat anymore, so why should I?
He can’t ski anymore, so why should I?
It’s like you have an injury in your soul. There is no timetable. There is no rehabilitation. Some days you wake up and think, What’s the point?
And the most intense part of it is that you actually start to develop a sadistic kind of pleasure in experiencing that pain. Because it’s like: Even if these memories are excruciating, at least I am still having the memories. At least, through the memories, it’s like I’m keeping my love for my dad alive, and so in some way he’s still with us.
It wasn’t until I got this letter from a stranger that I started to process these emotions and even appreciate them, in a way. The letter said a lot of things, but I remember that it said…
“You may need to tell stories about your dad that everyone has already heard 100 times, but that’s O.K. Keep telling them.”
It said, “Remember, grieving is not an intellectual process.”
It said, “It’s O.K. to be mad at your dad for leaving you.”
And it said, “You grieve as much as you love.”
Laughter. Memories of memories — things you’re not sure even happened for real, but that exist somewhere in your mind, like a dream.
A walk on the beach with my dad when I was five. The way the water was. The way the sun was. The way it all just was.
Did it even really happen like that? Does it even matter?
These things don’t exist on a hard drive. They can’t be captured on a screen. And I can’t even put them into words, no matter how hard I try. They exist somewhere — I don’t know where — but it’s not here on earth. They come to you in a dream, or in a daydream, or even when you’re at the top of a mountain. They are somewhere deep in your soul.
They come to me in my sleep, or when I am daydreaming, or when I’m just lying under a picnic table between runs, closing my eyes and listening to music … They appear from nowhere.
I’m at my nana’s, and it’s Thanksgiving, and everyone is there. Everyone’s there and we’re eating chips and guac and those little shrimps we’d always have at Thanksgiving, and my uncle is making the biggest turkey you’ve ever seen, and I can smell it, and Frank Sinatra of course is playing on Nana’s stereo, because Nana controls the stereo, and I can hear his voice crackling on the speakers. I can hear all their voices. I can just feel how everything was. The sound of dishes. The sound of uncles playing backgammon. The smell of Nana’s pies. The smell of a ginormous turkey. Inside jokes. Laughter. Warmth. Love.
Everyone is there.
Some of them are not with us anymore — here.
But everyone is with us — there.
And wherever there is … it’s forever.
by MIKAELA SHIFFRIN
PHOTOS BY CELESTE SLOMAN/THE PLAYERS' TRIBUNE
Mikaela Shiffrin
It’s extremely hard to relive this pain, but the reason I’m doing it is because maybe it can help someone else. I’m doing it because someone did it for me. A stranger, as a matter of fact.
When my dad died, the outpouring of support was stunning. I somehow got more letters from people in my lowest moment than I did when I was on top of the world. This one letter was from a man who volunteered at an orphanage in Portland, and he talked about all the things he’d learned from the kids there who had lost parents.
It resonated so deeply with me, because he talked about anger.
When someone dies, we hear endlessly about sadness and happiness. The endless sadness of losing that person, and the “celebration” and happiness of remembering their life. But grief is so much more complicated than those two emotions. A lot of the time, you just feel incredible, relentless anger. You’re ashamed of your anger, so you bury it. Deep down inside, you’re mad at that person for leaving you alone. You’re mad at the world that you can’t hug them anymore. You can’t get advice from them anymore. You can’t finish your favorite TV show together — you’ll never be able to, for as long as you live. You can’t even enjoy the fleeting happy moments in your life, because they exist in a reality where that person isn’t there anymore. Being happy makes you feel guilty, even if it’s just an instant.
He can’t eat anymore, so why should I?
He can’t ski anymore, so why should I?
It’s like you have an injury in your soul. There is no timetable. There is no rehabilitation. Some days you wake up and think, What’s the point?
And the most intense part of it is that you actually start to develop a sadistic kind of pleasure in experiencing that pain. Because it’s like: Even if these memories are excruciating, at least I am still having the memories. At least, through the memories, it’s like I’m keeping my love for my dad alive, and so in some way he’s still with us.
It wasn’t until I got this letter from a stranger that I started to process these emotions and even appreciate them, in a way. The letter said a lot of things, but I remember that it said…
“You may need to tell stories about your dad that everyone has already heard 100 times, but that’s O.K. Keep telling them.”
It said, “Remember, grieving is not an intellectual process.”
It said, “It’s O.K. to be mad at your dad for leaving you.”
And it said, “You grieve as much as you love.”
Mikaela Shiffrin
Mikaela Shiffrin