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After My Husband Died, I Couldn’t Stop Watching the Tour de France

It carried me through those first three weeks without him

FIVE DAYS AFTER my husband died, I started watching the Tour de France.

It was the opening stage, 2013. The team buses had dropped their cyclists off at the start and headed toward the finish, 213 kilometres away. Disaster struck: a bus got stuck under the banner marking one kilometre to go. Organizers scrambled to figure out where to put a new finish line. Meanwhile, the riders were tearing through Corsica.

It was a flat stage, so everything was moving terrifically, terrifyingly fast. The sprinters were fighting for position at the front of the peloton. Some crashed. Then, the bus moved; someone had let the air out of the tires, and the vehicle squeaked underneath the banner. The finish line was open. Marcel Kittel, a handsome German sprinter with fantastic hair, took his first ever stage win at the Tour.

I watched, shell shocked and hypnotized. My husband, Spencer McLean, had been diagnosed with cancer only six weeks before that, at age thirty-six. At that moment, we were supposed to be packing up to move to California, where he was supposed to be starting a fellowship.

But things don’t go as they’re supposed to. Instead, I’d picked out a casket and a funeral dress and........

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