What a Motorcycle Teaches You About Grief

There's no good place to cry on a motorcycle. The helmet's too tight, the wind's too loud, and the road doesn't care what you're carrying. That's the point.

I've been riding for over fifty years. Yamahas, mostly. Long solo runs through the kind of country that doesn't ask you to explain yourself — Nevada basin, eastern Oregon, the Mojave in November when the light goes flat and honest. I've logged thousands of miles with nothing but an engine between my knees and whatever I couldn't leave behind.

People think riding is about freedom. It is, sometimes. But more often — for me, at least — it's about containment. You put the grief in the saddlebag. You put the miles on top of it. You don't open it until you stop, and some nights you don't stop.

Grief doesn't always wear black. Sometimes it shows up as a song you can't finish, or a stretch of highway you rode with someone who isn't calling anymore. Sometimes it's quieter than that. A kitchen chair no one sits in. A text you almost send.

A motorcycle doesn't fix any of it. But it does something no therapist's office or well-meaning friend can do — it gives you a place where thinking and not-thinking happen at the same time. Your hands are busy. Your eyes are scanning. The part of your brain that wants to replay the loss over and over gets crowded out by the road's demands. And in that narrow space between vigilance and drift, something loosens.

Not heals. Loosens.

I wrote a book about this, though I didn't know that's what I was doing at the time. I thought I was writing about rides. Desert highways and small-town diners and the particular silence of a motel room in a town you'll never visit again. But the miles had a way of peeling things back, and what was underneath wasn't adventure. It was everything I'd been outrunning.

The thing about a motorcycle is that it moves forward. That's all it does. You lean, you adjust, you keep your eyes where you want to go — not where you've been. Riding instructors will tell you that. Look through the turn. The bike follows your eyes.

Grief works the same way, eventually. Not because you forget. Because you learn where to look.

I'm seventy-three. I've buried friends, lost people in slower and more complicated ways, and carried silences I probably should've broken twenty years ago. The bike didn't solve any of that. But it gave me a place to sit with it at eighty miles an hour, which turns out to be the only speed at which some things make sense.

If you've ever thrown a leg over a motorcycle and pointed it at a horizon you didn't need to reach — you already know what I'm talking about.

If you haven't, the book might get you close.

A Magnificent Ride to Nowhere is available now on Amazon.

— G.A. Thompson