Last week someone stole both of Josh’s mountain bikes out of our garage.
Yes, the doors were closed. That that is the first question people ask when I tell them. Were the garage doors closed? It’s just survival math. A math I am very familiar with. How can I be sure that your suffering won’t be my suffering, in this case, because I would have shut my garage doors.
But our doors were shut, when they stole them anyway.
They aren’t often shut though to be honest. More often than not our garage doors are wide open. Wide open and overflowing with kids, with bikes, with chunks of sidewalk chalk. Overflowing with discarded helmets, abandoned basketballs, and more scooters than we have offspring. More often than not there is at least one dog, but more likely two, sniffing around for a tennis ball, and a 7 year old attempting to rig up a skateboard trailer situation with a discarded amazon box. More often than not there is a dad tinkering with some doohickey that needs fixing and a mom organizing this or that.
Our garage is our home, and doors open or not, it’s not ok to steal things. Basic life principals.
Alas, two expensive bikes were lifted and it left us feeling out of sorts. Mostly in productive ways- like installing security that we’d been pondering for a while and tightening up our habits of closing the doors more consistently, or better yet using the front door for coming and going (I’m looking at you kids…)
We told friends and neighbors about the theft and we all agreed that it was likely part of one of the organized crime rings that steals bikes and disassembles them as they drive west, selling them for parts online before you can say, “police report.”
But not our bikes. Our bikes are being sold by someone on Facebook, 40 minutes away.
How does one go about getting back a stolen bike? I am sure you as a reader have a list of the ways, and thank you for your survival math, but we have already done almost all of them to no avail.
I laid in bed last night and wondered how to make sense of our property being casually sold on Facebook. Would the seller surrender if I wrote, “Give it back, you jerk!” Likely not.
The bikes aren’t coming home.
Yesterday I saw an IG post from a lady who recently experienced her second late pregnancy loss. She is suffering, grieving, hurting, and among many things, she wrote, “I won’t let the hard, harden me.” I am not sure the idea is her own. It’s pretty basic and likely has been written on the hearts of the suffering since the dawn of time. But last night I read it and thought, “me neither.”
This morning I woke-up and wrote the seller of our bikes the following:
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Dear Thief,
I would ask you where you got this bike, but I already know because you stole it from our garage last week. I wanted to reach out and find closure on this.
In 2019, our oldest son was diagnosed with cancer. We spent five years in a very desperate situation, hoping that he would survive and the only way that my husband found an outlet for his grief and stress was through mountain biking. My husband is a pull yourself up by your bootstraps, salt of the earth type and as he watched his family suffer, he worked harder, and harder, to make sure we had what we needed. After years of denying himself any joy, he bought a mountain bike and took up a hobby. A hobby which even through the unknowns, and the heartbreak, and the pain, he could stitch together a couple of deep breaths of peace on quiet Sunday afternoons.
In the last 5 years, we have had over $100,000 in medical debt bc the US health system is fucked and my husband decided to spend precious money on his biking hobby. One year he actually chose not to come to a very important fundraiser for our son’s cancer treatment and to instead go on a mountain biking trip with his brother. Because after 5 years of great pain, being able to choose was the greatest expression of our family’s slow walk to healing.
During the years since my son was diagnosed, I unknowingly convinced myself that the world wasn’t actually inherently good and that bad was likely coming for us. It was in small ways mostly, but over time I lost my belief that a simple, good life was possible. It’s only in the last couple of months since my son’s treatment ended that I have started to carve back out a space of believing the world may be good.
Last week, we paid off our last hospital bill after 6 years of owing the Children’s Hospital hundreds of dollars every month and we planned to celebrate. Would we have a champagne toast among friends, or a BBQ with neighbors? Would we go to a fancy restaurant and scream “Look at us!” as we let everyone order both a drink and an appetizer and tipped the waitstaff 100%.
The whimsical felt at our fingertips. And then we went out to dinner, and you broke in to our home and stole from us.
I imagine your motivation of stealing a bike from our house is probably similar to our motivation – we all just want a better life than we had before. We all just want a way out of the suffering. We all want more moments of, “Look at us!” where whimsical is the feeling that surfaces first.
I know what it feels like to live off adrenaline. To live off of the high of “what the hell just happened!” and “How the fuck did we escape that blow!” It feels powerful. I bet you feel powerful.
But it’s now power.
It’s survival.
I’m really not mad at you. I don’t imagine that either of us laid in bed when we were little and dreamt of a future where our children would endure cancer and we would be stealing things out of people’s garages to feel in control in a completely out of control world.
And yet, here we both are.
I hope that in selling this bike, you get closer to what you actually want which, I would imagine, is peace. I hope that you can use the money for good, maybe supporting your own family in whatever hard comes your way. I hope that your life has less suffering and that at some point in your journey you can have at least a couple of stitched together, deep breaths of peace.
I will not let the hard things harden me. I hope you don’t either.
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