the predatory bird

For anyone new to the story here’s the deal; in 2011 my sister Katrina took her own life. She was 31 and it was March. I was 33 at the time and I still had a pro-model board on Zero, a pro-model shoe on eS, a retainer from Thunder Trucks and a clothing deal with Elwood. That would all end in due course. What follows is a brief account of how grief affected me and what it resulted in in my particular case. If you want to hear more then the below essay is about a two or three minute read. There’s some basic context and some big temporal gaps, so bear with me. Here we go…

If we flashback to that day in March, Katrina leaves her 12-year-old daughter, her brother, her mother, stepfather, cousins and friends reeling in the type of disemboweled loss, pain and shock reserved for those rare times when you’re reminded that there’s an invisible torture machine strapped to your chest. It has sharp steel rods that pierce the skin of your stomach and penetrate deep into your guts. There’s a dial and it gets turned up to 50. That’s the maximum.

Without getting into too much detail, when I get the news of what she’s done I fall off my chair, literally, and then less literally I descend through the beige carpet of the apartment Philippa and I are renting in Encinitas, California. I then sink through the floor and into the underworld where I spend quite a lot of time for the next 5 or so years.

When you sink through into that underworld you land on a rollercoaster ghost train that is loosely related to the concept known as the 5 Stages of Grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Those 5 stages weren’t initially proposed as the response to this particular type of loss — Elisabeth Kübler-Ross proposed them as the response to being diagnosed with a terminal illness. But the concept is certainly relevant. I feel like no matter the cause of the loss everyone experiences their own version of all or some of these stages. For me the denial came and went fast, it gave way to a deep anger that lasted quite some time.

An overlapping bargaining stage came in the form of an attempt to make sense of Katrina’s actions, or at least reconcile with how her suicide had affected my own psyche; that stage manifested as a creative project. Here’s how that played out:

Instagram was still quite new having only just launched in October of 2010. If you ever have absolutely nothing else to do and you scroll all the way back on my profile you’ll see a photo of Katrina’s ashes as they disperse into the water at the shore of Loch Ness along the stony beach near the Dores Inn. The same spot where we’d scattered our Dad’s ashes 20-years prior, and the spot she’d stipulated in her Will that we should dispose of her remains. She had imagined this for us.

I spoke about this aforementioned creative project on this Podcast, Grief, Gratitude and Greatness, where we point out that this initial project wasn’t really about my sister. It was a comic I worked on with Jon Horner and it was a reaction to Katrina for certain but the subject of this one was about my dad’s death. I suppose Katrina’s death had been a bit too raw to confront right then but 20 years had gone by since our dad died so maybe now was the time to do some more processing and this was the catalyst.

We touched on it above, that initial project with Jon came about due to social media. Instagram. Although they’re often derided as terrible suckers of time and a detriment to mental health and poor substitutes of true social contact, these tools do often result in positive outcomes. Tools are only as good as what we do with them. 

Here’s how the inception of the comic went:

Jon posted a picture of Orville the Dead Cat Drone.

I commented, “I don’t know if I like this.”

He said, “I know what you mean. It’s the expression on his face that sways it for me. Plus, he was named after one of the Wright brothers. And it would be really fun to take it to Trafalgar Square and blow some pigeons’ minds.”

So I said, “ On one level, for me, it certainly adds a new dimension to the whole predatory bird thing.”

And he said, “The villain in the Predatory Bird comic book would fly about in this.”

And I said, “If you make it I will sell it and this time next year we’ll be millionaires.”

And he said, “Excellent. I’m on it. Unimaginable riches surely beckon…”

Next thing you know I’m sending him character design briefs and scripts and pitching the idea to Thrasher.

Unimaginable riches were not forthcoming but we did do 12 installments over the course of a year. 

Here’s more about the comic if you’re interested.

For the next 5 years I knew I wanted at some point to do something that was more directly related to confronting the events specific to my sister’s passing but I was never sure what.

When I’d been back in Scotland to attend Katrina’s funeral I’d collapsed with stress at one point. Paramedics came to the house as my family was concerned I may be having a heart attack. I lay there with my arms and neck numb with ice-needles piercing my skin from the inside out, on my back, on the floor of that same guest room that had been my dark blue teenage bedroom and was where Katrina spent her final weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds and moments. Then a calm, Scottish, red-haired nurse lady in a green jumpsuit moved in gently between cousin Katie and Chris. She got me up and I hugged her. That surprised her and me. Then she helped me calm down. Soon enough the situation was back to normal and everyone left me alone to rest. It was right then that I got the call that Elwood was canning their skate program. That was the beginning of the end of the pro skate career.

Back in the states, I carried on with the remaining sponsors as pay and people got cut. Through this I searched for whatever might be next in life. I explored a few different avenues. I got a few gigs as a contributing writer for some of the skate mags I’d worked with over the years. I filed a small business name as Adaptive Media with the naive optimistic thought of developing video production into an independent agency that I’d eventually scale. I never did. I filed the Predatory Bird as an online store selling branded products (here’s the latest). I studied Biology thinking of teacher training or physiotherapy as options, I studied CSS and HTML, all the while working on small video projects with Joe Pease and wondering why Katrina did what she did. Eventually I found some work or some work found me, however that goes.

From there, long story short, we’ll quantum leap forward to 2019. In 2019 there are many more ways to connect and share work that hopefully adds some positivity to the world. The Good Egg came into being as a result of my cousin changing careers and getting a job working for the Scottish Association for Mental Health as well as the availability of the Just Giving app to create crowd-sourced  fundraising initiatives all combined with my affinity for a good dad-joke-style pun.

I hope you enjoy the video of the 2018 mission. Let me know in the comments if there are any specific questions that the above piece of writing raise for you or are left unanswered that you’re interested in.