That Helmet

Why did you even wear a helmet Grant?! It’s not like it can protect you from hundreds of feet high. That helmet made no difference in safety.  Oh… yeah, to mount the go pro video camera, that’s probably why, so you could film everything. It gave you some sense of power or importance, freedom or control that is clear.

I sit here now, knowing the part this mount played in your death. Looking at it, I remember how excited you were about it when you conceived the idea of how to mount it on a helmet. You’d come up with a method to get it securely on there. You figured out a way to be able to film all your flights. 

You were so eager to capture your view from the sky; to have it, video it and show it to us. I have a lot of video footage from what the camera on that mount captured.  It's mostly a bunch of dirt and trees, it’s uninspiring to me.  I don’t understand what it was in that, which you valued. 

It tells me now what you were really excited to capture. Yet, it’s all really boring to me.  I see the ground, the panorama that was below you from hundreds of feet up. There is a lot of nothing very exciting in my opinion. There is the occasional squirrel or other wildlife. 

Once a herd of deer running as you flew over them, you were really stoked about that one. They ran away from you and you chased them from up above. They seemed scared. That was kinda interesting.  I see what you captured in those moments when you were flying.

It was as if the sky was where you wanted to be.  The ground was left behind and it seemed you felt more alive up there than on the ground.  What I see in all that footage now, is what’s to come. And I guess, you’re permanently in the sky now in your happy place, flying.

I think about the parts of your life it captured and all of a sudden I feel sad. From it, the comparison that creates when I’m organizing our history and pictures of which I have a lot less hours, that’s what makes me feel sad.  I’m sad because of the view I have now of what was then and what is now, a life apart. 

I’m saddened that it was so important to you to get footage of everything around you but only while flying.  Those moments you were away from us, you captured every moment on video. I see the relatively small amount of video you have of our kids and us or me, compared to the massive amount of the views of dirt from your flights.

I look at our gorgeous kids, to me, that’s worth capturing on film. So then, I feel like you didn’t care much, and I know that’s not true, but I feel that way.  I know you did care; but in the face of the evidence of what’s left, none of these hours of empty wilderness have meaning to me. 

You’re not even in them besides the tips of your shoes. I look at all the footage captured by the go pro.  Why?  What did it do for you?  I’m left with so much of it.  I don’t want to watch it.  Not any of it.  I love when I find a video of you and the kids or you and me.

I get that I am still processing even now, almost 2 years later. I get that I still miss the life we would have had. I don’t get what will make it all be okay yet. I don’t know when my life that is now will stop being about this moment. Maybe never, I’m seeing that’s the more likely answer and so I’m learning to live with it, in it, because of it.