You might think that there have been stories between now and when I last wrote. Sure, sure....but none worth sharing.
This story is worth sharing. For so many reasons...it's about family, and heartbreak. It's about risk. It's about trust. And it's about a very special person - my cousin Marsha, also known as Samantha Morgan, who died in late April in her farm in Loxahatchee, Florida.
Since mid May the internet has been full of stories about Sam, her place in the history of trick riding, and her story of going from teenage runaway to the Motorcycle Hall of Fame. You can read her obituary and a great feature article about the Celebration held May 24th in West Palm Beach which brought together hundreds of motorcyclists to share stories of Sam and her close friend Tom "Criminal" Cavenaugh. Sam was a warm, loving, lovely, daring woman - lover of animals, ne'er do-wells, and her Indian Scout motorcycles.
She was also part of my family. Marsha, as we knew her, was my cousin...who I played with regularly growing u
p, and who had stayed in contact with my family through her days of emerging from runaway homeless lifestyle to being part of the family of trick motorcycle people. My dad helped her purchase her farm; my mom helped her in countless ways; my brothers and their kids watched her ride; and we call were happy when she became New York Times news and was interviewed on tv. She didn't quite align with the lifestyles of the rest of our family - and we all didn't overlap often in the same towns or cities. But she was special, and loved.When I got my mother's call about Marsha's death I was more concerned about my mother than about Marsha. She was crying - she'd heard the news from Marsha's natural sister, who had explained the circumstances around Marsha being found in her home by the sister's ex-husband, and Crim. And she was sad...how would Marsha be memorialized and by whom? Although Marsha had been adopted into our family when she was first born, she also became connected to her two natural sisters later in life. And she felt part of an entirely different family - that of Sunny and Judy Pelaquin from the motordromes. Sunny had died a few year back, but Marsha had devoted much of her time to creating a website that told his story and provided a unique archive of photos and facts regarding the motordrome and the Indian Scout motorbike.
Sadness quickly tranformed to confusion as we tried to help Sam's Florida friends who wanted to organize a significant celebration of life event to bring the community together about not only Sam, but also her friend Crim, who had died a few days after he found
Sam - of a broken heart, says his family.The confusion arose precisely as this story unfolds. The West Palm Beach medical examiner needed to be certain who died - Marsha or Sam? The stage name Samantha Morgan had become more than a stage name over the years. The release of the body and the writing of the death certificate was delayed pending definitive identification. The people organizing the celebration were frustrated, all parts of the surviving family were volunteering to help, and still the process dragged on.
Finally, the day before the celebration, the medical examiner released the body and the roadblock on the road to closure was removed. I had come to West Palm Beach with my son Jess to make sure that we could organize a cremation, a cleaning of the house, a search for a will, and publish an obituary so that the world would know about Sam's life. We visited the County offices twice and learned more than we ever expected to know about detective work, detectives, public records, and the process of managing memorials and cremations.
I had appointed myself family representative for making sure that Marsha/Sam was properly respected during this time. Which meant I was about to learn alot about the world in which she lived - one very different from my experiences.
Starting with the websites that featured bikers and moving into the day-to-day world frequented by motorcycle enthusiasts, I was entering a different subculture.
Furthermore, every friend, roommate, colleague, neighbor, or relative of Sam's had a different story about Sam and about their relation to Sam - and each urged me to be aware that other friends were not to be trusted. There were tales of devotion, tales of betrayals, tales of daring, tales of Sam being too trusting and loyal and being taken by people who lived in her home, worked with her projects or otherwise were part of her world. How was I to judge all these people, each asking me to verify a life story they'd heard from Sam which wasn't quite the same person to person and was only partially aligned with the facts from my family?
No matter what the story, the perspective, the relationship - all were unanimous is saying that Sam was warm, funny, talented, committed, beautiful, inspiring, and hard-working. The challenge ahead was to tease out which stories to believe and which claims and wishes to honor.
In the meantime, after 4 days in West Palm Beach and Loxahatchee, I headed home.
