My dad died doing what he loved, which isn’t as romantic as it sounds. It is, in fact, awfully tricky for those of us who are left with, in addition to our grief, a newfound anger toward his 18-year-long love of motorcycles. And racing them. And, like he did that Monday morning, driving them through the Sierra Nevada when a Subaru would have sufficed.

Sometimes I am angry he needed to go fast. Furious that he rode. And dreaming of a dad who spent the summer beating cronies on the golf course, instead of breaking land speed records — 13 of them — on the Bonneville Salt Flats.

But I try to resist this anger. I fight against it, daily. I work hard to remember that what I loved most about him was the very same thing that made him a rider: his insistence on living large (partially motivated by being 5’4, perhaps). It was his embrace of outsiders and his affection of alternative cultures and his fierce devotion to the journey, not the destination. That’s what made him a rider. It’s also why I loved him. It’s also why he’s gone. I cannot remove one part of him, a singular thread, without unspooling the entire essence of who he was.

Why he always had to go so fast, I’ll never know, but I do know he was never meant for a long and slow goodbye to this earth. He hated sitting still. He had little patience for lines, social norms, or the inevitability of aging (or Republicans for that matter, but I digress). So when I can, when I pause, I try to find some beauty in the idea, or at least some poetic appreciation, that he left us the very same — and spectacular — way he lived.