05/07/2025
They buried my bike with me. I know because I watched them do it.
From wherever I am now, I could see everything—my mangled body on the rain-slicked asphalt, my crushed Harley Davidson Road King lying twenty feet away, oil and blood mingling in a dark pool. The paramedics didn't even bother with CPR. One look told them everything. Nobody survives having their chest cavity crushed by an 18-wheeler.
I'd been riding for fifty-three years. Started when I was sixteen, back when helmets were for sissies and traffic was light enough that you could open up on the highway and feel like you owned the world. My last thought before the truck hit me wasn't fear or panic—it was anger. Anger that my boy wasn't returning my calls. Anger that I was riding alone.
Again.
The funeral surprised me. I'd expected maybe a dozen old riding buddies, some beers poured on the ground, and a few stories about our wild days. Instead, nearly three hundred bikes roared into the cemetery, engines thundering like a storm rolling across the plains. So many leather vests with patches from clubs I'd ridden with over the decades. So many weathered faces streaked with tears they weren't ashamed to shed.
But my son wasn't among them.
Jack hadn't spoken to me in seven years. Not since that night when I told him I didn't approve of the woman he was marrying. "She's using you," I'd said, the whiskey making me cruel. "She sees a meal ticket, not a man." Words I couldn't take back once they left my mouth. Words that severed whatever fragile connection we still had.
So they buried me with my bike, a custom my riding brothers insisted on. Cut a hole twice as deep as standard, lowered my Harley in first, then my casket on top of it. Forever united in death as we had been in life.
That should have been the end. The period at the conclusion of Ray Wilson's unremarkable life. Sixty-nine years. Widowed at forty-two. Estranged from his only son. A mechanic who never made much money but could coax life back into any engine. A rider who found more honesty in the roar of a V-twin than in most human conversation.
But three months after they put me in the ground, something strange happened.
Jack showed up at my grave.
I watched him park his BMW sedan—a car, not a bike, something that always disappointed me—and walk slowly through the cemetery, carrying something bulky wrapped in cloth. He found my headstone easily enough. Someone had propped a motorcycle helmet against it, and several empty whiskey bottles stood in a row along the base.
Jack looked older than his thirty-six years. Gray already threaded his dark hair at the temples, and deep lines bracketed his mouth. He was wearing a suit that probably cost more than I'd made in a month at my shop. Success looked good on him, even if I'd never understood his world of spreadsheets and conference calls.
He unwrapped the bundle he was carrying. My old leather jacket. The one I'd worn for thirty years, patched and repatched, stained with road grime and memories. The one I'd left to him in my will, never expecting he'd want it.
"Found this in a box the lawyer sent," he said out loud, his voice startling in the cemetery quiet. "Smells like you. Like gasoline and that awful cologne Mom bought you every Christmas."
If spirits could cry, I would have. I never thought he'd remember that detail.
He ran his fingers over the patches sewn onto the leather—Sturgis '85, Rolling Thunder, the memorial patch for his mother with her dates beneath a stylized angel's wings.
"I didn't come to the funeral," he said, looking down at my name carved in granite. "Couldn't face all your biker friends, knowing what they must think of me. The son who abandoned his father."
He sat down heavily on the grass beside my grave.
"I found your journals," he continued. "The lawyer had those too. Never knew you kept them. Never thought you had that much to say."
I felt a jolt of panic. Those journals were never meant for anyone's eyes. Especially not Jack's.
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