Michael Reardon

There are times/moments when people who've left us resurface. My dear friend Matt Samet and I share how much Michael resurfaces in our lives. It is haunting and beautiful at the same time. Michael died in 2007 and his memory is as fresh now as it was that day bouldering on Flagstaff Mountain...this is my tribute.

I didn’t meet Michael until months after we’d had long conversations on the phone about dreams and possibilities, for our common online projects and for ourselves. Michael’s enthusiasm was infectious – I wish his intelligence had been, as well. I felt like a third grader trying to understand AP Calculus when I spoke with him. But it made him no never mind. He loved what he was doing, loved his wife and best friend, adored his daughter, and kept the faith strong that something wonderful would turn up for each of us and soon. He’d be damned if it didn’t and said so in so many words.

I finally met him in person around a Ryan Campground campfire in April of 2005. I was in Jtree for three weeks of climbing and Michael was a rock. Struggling on a classic 5.9 and working my ass off to pull a power move through an overhanging crack crux, Michael free-soloed on an adjacent route, calmly offering words of encouragement. “Come on, Martha, it’s completely within your ability levels.” Those words have become my personal mantra.

I loved Michael. He loved all of us back more. He had that unearthly capacity usually reserved for visionaries and it was exquisite. At our little agape fests, he’d slam dunk us with news of some absurd-sounding project he’d just aced, then listen and comment with the same fervor about our own mini epics and epiphanies, ours rarely as grand as his. It didn’t matter. We were here and as long as we were living large and doing the best we could at the moment, it was all any of us cared about. We could be hung over from the previous night’s tribute to Dionysius, raw because we were just betrayed by a friend, or ecstatic from conjuring up the latest derring-do. It just didn’t matter. We loved each other’s dreams and whimsy and how we never stopped trying.

Here’s the key to accepting that Michael is gone: he grew too big for this world. His heart, his skills, his mind and focus were limited by his humanity here. In his 42 years (and the little dipshit told me forever he was 36 - I’ll chuckle about that well into my own Crossing Over) he became what we all wish we could be – timeless, fearless, priceless, almost untouchable.

Someone told me once that when someone we love dies, a piece of their soul imbues our own for all time. Michael, I’m stuck with you. Listen here, my good man - in spite of the fact that Ireland has called you home, I’ll always live large and do my best in the moment.

And I’ll always be 42.

For Mícheál O'Ríordáin - An Solas Geal Lonrach. Son, Husband, Father, Friend. Inspirational Free Spirit. 1965-2007.

You are greatly missed.