Saying Goodbye to My Ski Buddy

My two-year-old son Ted played innocently in his bedroom as we sat together on the floor, driving toy trucks through a whimsical land of make believe. Cement mixers and frontloaders greeted each other before driving off again, down imagined roads. In a trance-like state I watched him, at once in the moment but also caught in reverie, in awe that I had the luck of being responsible for this amazing little being.

I also had the pleasure of how this tiny human could hold a mirror up to myself, reminding me of things simple and beautiful; ignored or repressed.

“Where did Aunt Cate go?” he asked.

The soft words from his small mouth staggered me. My only sibling–and little Ted’s Aunt Cate–had passed away some six months earlier on a beautiful spring day. In different ways she and I had both left behind an orderly, sensical world for a realm of impermanence whose nature defied belief. We had made plans to have dinner the day after she died.

But those plans, like so much else, had suddenly evaporated. Much like my fallacy of thinking I would always have more time, like I could make up for missing out or not calling. Like that crummy thing I might have said could one day be smoothed over, even laughed about.

Suddenly we were left with that void. I had never imagined that my ski buddy would someday never be around for the next bluebird Saturday.

Having had the amazing luck of being brought forth into a mountain-town family, Cate and I always had skiing. Untold days on the mountain as children, most now lost to memory, framed our winters. But many others remain in my mind—like when Cate tried snowboarding, much to my father’s dismay. Or the many Christmas mornings we shared, always bound to a strict if awesome schedule: opening presents while listening to A Charlie Brown Christmas by the Vince Guaraldi Trio, cinnamon rolls, then skiing together as a family. Skiing was, in many ways, the cornerstone of our lives.

Enter adulthood. Cate and I had both moved back to Steamboat; after a college odyssey of health woes and the beach for her, for me, subsequent to a few wandering years, including an attempt at finding myself in bars and steeps at Big Sky. Though it wasn’t an everyday affair, Cate and I skied regularly, and, in a reality I only realized retrospectively, she became my most stalwart ski companion.

Cate was sick, and her joints fought her most of her life. Repairs of her knees and hips were laid bare by scars measured in many inches. And some of the medicine she was prescribed required doctors to strongly suggest she give up skiing, certainly in the trees. But Cate couldn’t take that advice; she even snuck turns in between a few sparse aspens at the edge of a certain run every once in a while. That was much to my vocal, condescending misgivings, communicated in a way only an older brother could muster. But Cate had to ski–she had to be a little bad and go against doctor’s orders every once in a while. Like everyone she just wanted to feel normal; like us all she simply wanted to live.

So we mostly took to the groomers when we skied together. While it wouldn’t have been my first choice, what with my constant internal pressure to ski hard, it was our time together. It spoke to not only how we were different skiers, but different people. Cate wasn’t just a good skier, she had taken to yoga, strength training, and a holistic body and mind philosophy. In contrast I exercised my brain into oblivion, took happy hour too seriously, and obsessed over free-heel skiing until it occupied most of my waking thoughts.

But we came together on those sunny days. She’d wear her pink helmet, her long, brown curls always flowing behind. On lucky days, where we had a little extra time, we’d grab a cold après beverage, complain about work, then go our own ways.

We were close, but we quarreled in the way siblings do. Always missing the fact that she was trying to relate to me, she would regale me with tales of throwing caution to the wind while skiing–and otherwise–something I responded to by barking at her, invariably taking her to task for not taking her health seriously. But little could I know what it was like to feel the yawning chasm of borrowed time. Little did I try to relate to how crummy she must have felt most of the time from simply being sick.

We always came back together, we always figured out a way forward. Until we couldn’t. One mellow, beautiful Sunday I got a call from her best friend–they were supposed to go to a concert that night, but she hadn’t heard from Cate all day. I immediately jumped from my bed where I was laying, writing, enjoying a beer. I rushed to her condo in my car; I ran to her front door through melting spring puddles basking in sunset. But I knew. I already felt she was gone.

Before then, on one of the last days we ever skied together, we happened upon a deep powder day. Cate, my wife and I took to bumps and crud as the morning wore on. Even with her knees as stiff as ever–and with a little coaxing–Cate was game for going where her joints rarely let her. Making our way down classic Steamboat mogul runs, bashing through choppy snow, we put our hearts into it when our legs had mustered everything they could. On one run, I looked over my shoulder, checking in on my younger sister, expecting her to be far up the run. But Catie was right there. Like she always had been.

My mother told me she didn’t believe in God anymore; that my sister’s death had laid bare to her that we would never see her again, in any form. While I shared her belief–I hadn’t believed in anything more than agnostic hope since I was a child–hearing it from my mother’s mouth shook the ground I stood on. If she now couldn’t believe in something higher, how could I? How would we go on with the belief that we would never all be together again?

In a cliché beyond cliché, I found solace in skiing, and it became indispensable in a world that didn’t quite make sense anymore. I wept at the summit of a glorious predawn resort skin, basking in a righteous full moon with two close friends just days after my sister passed. I skied and reviewed telemark gear and joined in the passionate if fairly meaningless online banter about such the rest of that season. I lunged down bump runs until I was lightheaded, maybe just to feel something in those numb, confused days.

Months later, another season came around, but I wasn’t excited like I usually was for skiing anew. Life had gotten beautifully more busy with the arrival of a new baby daughter who shared my sister’s initials, and I still grappled with the cosmic wounds and heartbreak from losing my only sibling.

Still, I found myself at the base of the ski area a few mornings after opening day. On that first chairlift ride of the season, a metal tube containing some of my sister’s ashes sat in my right pocket. My sister, who, through everything–from ignoring doctor’s orders to never ski again, to taking her girls trips–just loved skiing. She simply enjoyed living. In a way, she came skiing with me that morning.

I met up with a few friends at the top of the chair, and after a few pleasantries we poled off toward the one open run. There, I paused for a moment, pouring a handful of Cate’s ashes into my hand. Lifting them toward the sky, I let the wind take them forth–into the trees, onto the snow, into the ether.

And then I went skiing.

Catherine Joan O’Brien: November 21st, 1990 - March 17th 2024