Trust Your Gut: A Crash Story

By Kris TigerLady Slawinski

I have hung out with the Chicago Section Vincent Owners Club going on almost 50 years, and as their median age climbed and their energy dropped, another group, the Chicago Vintage Motorcycle Group (i.e., “not a club”) was forming peripherally to the VOC and eventually eclipsed it. The ChiVinMoto group has held an annual event in various areas of the Driftless Area of Wisconsin called TWALD—The Weekend After Labor Day (or, Two Weekends, or Three Weekends, depending on scheduling)—over the past ~25 years. The mostly younger crowd rode or trailered everything from tiddlers to road cruisers to toodle around the twisty country roads and enjoy group rides, camaraderie, and late-night bonfires.

About 14 years ago, as excitement built about the upcoming group weekend exodus to SW Wisconsin, I couldn’t shake a sick feeling in my stomach whenever I thought about it and decided not to go. I was sure I would be involved in a crash, so I stayed home and worked on a writing project. That Sunday, as folks were heading back in various groups, I got a call that my close friend Shellee had gone down and was in the hospital in Rockford, by the Illinois-Wisconsin border. She was accompanied by her usual riding companions, Jenn and Lena, who I expected to hear from any moment. As the minutes ticked by, I decided to meditate on Shellee to try to gain information about her condition. I was not a successful meditator, but my worry had me grabbing at straws. So I focused on Shellee and saw her, in my mind’s eye, in a strange posture, hanging on a wall, or inside a wall. She didn’t understand what was going on and wanted me to help her. The experience scared me to my core and I quickly backed out of the vision.

After that, I talked myself into believing that if she was in any kind of terrible trouble I would have heard from her riding companions, so I put it out of my mind. When my husband returned home from the event he was full of stories about how bad the weather was, and how at least three people had gone down on their bikes on the ride back, although none was hurt badly. The next day I powered on my computer at work to find an email from Jenn, still with Shellee who was now on life support, and waiting for her brother and nieces to arrive so they could end their vigil. She said she knew Shellee would want me to be there, that she often talked about what close friends we were, etc., and racked with shame and panic, I raced back home, fielding calls from other ChiVinChix, and we were all soon heading north in our respective cars to the hospital in Rockford two-plus hours away to rally around Jenn and Lena who had been there for close to 24 hours.

I will skip the sobbing, the group pain, the regret, etc., to mention that the neurologist attending to Shellee asked Jenn and Lena to explain numerous times exactly what happened. Apparently, they were slowing down at an intersection of two highways and Shellee seemed to put her right arm out and just slipped off the bike onto the pavement. He theorized that she had suffered an aneurism, and was probably gone before she hit the pavement. The weather had not turned bad yet, the road was in good repair, and she did not hit anything. There was nothing else to blame.

Anyway, to quote my favorite dean, I’ve told you all of that to tell you this: A couple years afterward, I had a dream that I was at a ChiVinMoto event with the ChiVinChix, and suddenly Shellee appeared within our group, just smiling and hanging out. She didn’t speak to anyone, but she acknowledged me and was visibly very happy. I quickly pointed her out to the other gals, and amazed, we rallied around her, all smiling and enjoying this special gift of time with her. Then, as suddenly as she had appeared, she vanished, and we clustered together, exclaiming things like, OMG, did you see her, wow, etc. The dream made me very happy and I shared it through an email with rest of the gals. Shellee’s father declined an autopsy, so it is still unknown exactly what happened to her. All her organs were donated, as she would have wanted. I learned later that people who have had strokes sometimes feel that they are locked in a wall, and I realized that the odd posture I saw her in in my meditation was her riding position, only I saw her more vertical than horizontal. She always told me she didn’t want to grow old, and somehow she got her wish. How does that happen?