I think of Max being young when this happened. I would say 10 years old by memory, but the picture evidence suggests it was July 20 of 2012, so he was 14 years old. Definitely young, as it was a big deal for him to be taking off with his cousins on their bikes. As you can see in the picture, tne whole side of his face is bright red with road rash, and he has a grimace on that fits the obviously painful injury. I am glad we have the picture because it shows just how solidly he landed on his face. I wouldn't remember that wound without the picture, but I remember going to pick him up, and the time we spent tending to him after. There are two things in this memory that bother me - the first is Max's tendency to hit his head. He fell from a gazebo when he was about 2 - straight onto his head. It cracked his orbital bone, and a small pressure crack behind his left ear as well. That's another picture, and another memory for another time. The other bothersome thing is that he was badly concussed in this incident, and we didn't really know as much back then about how gently to treat the recovery. I have always felt bad about this - long before his death made it guilt mixed with sorrow. When your child dies, you spend a lot of time thinking back through what was good and what was bad - and hoping it was all good, but knowing acutely those things which were bad; and it's really bad if you caused them.

In any event, it was likely a weekend as all the boys were around, I was around, and I think Meredith was not (she remembers the whole thing, and apparently actually was there). I recall the excitement of the request. This was a rare opportunity for Max to hang out with the older Wei cousins. They were headed down to Diary Queen, I believe. A trip out with the older boys, and without parents - if I recall correctly, this was new or at least rare freedom for Max. We set the location, when they would return, and they scrambled off. Maybe I'm making it up, but I am pretty sure I called after Max as he entered the garage, "Put on your helmet!". He hated wearing a helmet. It wasn't cool, and it looked stupid. Look, I had never worn a helmet in any point I could remember. I thought they looked stupid. I was not yet back on the bike myself, so my own childhood and teenage years colored my perspective. I rode BMX bikes as a kid, racing fast, and jumping jumps on dirt tracks near my home. I had my own early collision with a curb that smushed one of my eyebrows. I don't have strong eyebrows anyhow, but it seems like one of them is really messed up by the scaring from that accident. I rode road bikes incessantly in my teenage years. Helmets just weren't a thing - watch the Tour de France from my era and you'll see that even the pros didn't wear them.

So I called it out, but I didn't even go check. Max did not wear his helmet. It wasn't long before I was notified of the accident. I have a hard time believing it was a phone call, but that's how I remember it. Perhaps I've overlaid more modern expectations over my memory. Certainly it's more likely that one of the boys rode back to the house to get me? In any event, the news was that Max had hit a bump and gone flying. The report (from Derek?) was that it was a header, and Max was disoriented. I drove just around the corner to the crash site. He had only made it 1 mile; as far as the bridge over the little creek that runs under Walnut from the park (used to be church yard) and behind all of the homes on Mainsail which ends just about at the bridge. Max was propped up against a tree with his cousins gathered around him looking concerned. Max was crying, and then not. He was clearly dazed, and it was immediately obvious that he had taken the crash straight to his head with only minor scrapes on one shoulder and his hands. The boys quickly let me know they were just in front of Max heading down the small decline over the bridge, and Max must have hit a bump because he simply flew over the handlebars with no notice. They've since made that trail very smooth and wide, but at this time it was more of a simple layer of asphalt over whatever terrain happened to be there, and the bridge was narrow with an improper transition between the path and the bridge surface.

I gathered Max up and put him in the backseat of my car. Was this the CR-V? I don't remember. I just remember looking back at him as he alternated between crying fits and stupor. The condition of his brain was evident through his emotional rollercoaster. He was verbalizing that his sadness was over his shirt. It was ripped at the shoulder and stained with blood and he kept looking at it and crying. I said "You didn't even like that shirt, why are you crying about it?" He stopped and laughed and said he didn't know. He laughed a bit too much actually, and then went back to crying. I got him inside the house, and he laid down on the floor just between the kitchen and the living room. I looked up the number for an advice line and dialed up a nurse. I described the injuries and the apparent poor state of his mental faculties. She said he was clearly badly concussed, but going to an emergency room wouldn't be necessary. I just needed to keep him awake, and keep him in a quiet space. She thought I should check on him through the night as well to make sure there wasn't anything getting worse. I really don't recall how things went from there, but I am sure we kept checking on him. I do know that we sent him back to school the next week - something you wouldn't do with a concussion now, and advice that became known to us within a year or two of this incident. The sad thing about that is that Max complained of not being able to concentrate shortly after. He was always doing poorly in school, so it seemed like an excuse. I regret that now more somehow when it means even less. Anyhow - at some point shortly after the call with the nurse, we must have snapped that picture because it looks pretty fresh. This was the second time Max hit his head badly in his life. There would be two more notable impacts.