I spent Valentine’s Day evening at an open-casket wake in Aspen for Chris Bove, a 35-year-old Snowmass ski instructor who died Feb. 11.
“What is it, again? Where is it?” I had asked my friend Maureen.
I was expecting a memorial of some sort, maybe in a banquet hall at a hotel or in the back room of a restaurant. I thought people would get up and talk about Chris and maybe there would be a slide show or a video, something to commemorate his life.
“It’s a visitation at the church. But don’t worry, there won’t be a body,” Maureen said.
Maureen was wrong.
Not only was there a body, there was an open casket.
Chris died a week before turning 36. He was skiing down a blue run at Snowmass on Feb. 10 when he crashed and slid chest first into a tree; he died early on a Sunday morning at Aspen Valley Hospital after several hours in surgery.
Chris had been a ski instructor at Snowmass for 10 years and was skiing on his day off, which is as simple a thing as crossing the street is for most people in a ski town. His death was as senseless as any young person’s is, a big question mark you can’t shake.
In a small town such as Aspen, everyone knows someone who was on the scene – the ski patroller who saw him crash from the lift, the ER nurse who took part in the surgery, the friend of a friend who was in the waiting room at the hospital when the doctors broke the bad news. It becomes a personal tragedy for everyone, because we’re all here for the same reason he was. It could have been any one of us, cruising on some groomed run on our day off without knowing it would be our last.
We weren’t close friends but in true ski town fashion, I saw Chris everywhere all the time, at every party, bar, après ski and on the mountain. He was just part of the fabric of the local Aspen community, your typical molecular biologist turned ski bum who couldn’t resist the pull of the mountains.
We always talked about mountain biking, and more often than not, I’d be wearing a pair of bike socks. At one holiday party, I’d worn my favorite pair, gray and black Pearl Izumis with platform pumps. I proudly lifted up my pant leg to show Chris, as if this were proof of who I really am underneath it all.
“Are you ready for this?” Maureen asked, grabbing me by the elbow.
I nodded.
We walked slowly down the aisle toward the coffin and what I saw didn’t look like Chris. His face and hands were swollen, his longish hair neatly slicked back instead of the way he normally wore it, hanging loose around his face like a surfer who just stumbled off the beach. He had been dressed in the nordic-style black and red ski school uniform sweater with his season’s pass draped around his neck. There were a few photos of him in the coffin.
“The flowers are really beautiful,” Maureen said, but I didn’t see them as beautiful. I just noticed there were a lot of them, but they were in bunches. I wished they were scattered everywhere, like they might be found in a field.
The priest talked about how this isn’t the end but the beginning because Chris will be lifted up to heaven where he will live in paradise for all eternity. People murmured about how he “lived life to the fullest,” and how it’s “part of living in the mountains,” but I didn’t see it that way.
What I saw was a guy my age who was here one day and gone the next.
I felt self-conscious standing over his body, like I was violating his privacy. Despite my lack of spiritual identity, I wondered if he was hovering over me going, “What’s the bike sock girl doing at my funeral?”
I guess the reason I went was to support the people who were close to him and because he was very much a part of this community that I care so much about. I felt like that deserved a quiet moment of thought and, for lack of a better word, prayer. It’s a reminder not only of the frailty of life but of its value.
After Chris died, I decided I should go to church more often, should pay tribute to the higher power that dictates life and death, beauty and suffering and everything between. I made a vow to hike Highlands Bowl at least once a week – if I can’t find a higher power, I figured at least I can find a higher place.
After Chris died, it started snowing and didn’t stop for two days. I don’t really know what I believe, but I believe that’s something. I do.
Freelance columnist Alison Berkley can be reached at alison@berkleymedia.com.
