Riin Gill takes care of Ken's site now so e-mail her with your questions.

Below is her comment on Ken's death and her site.........
(She's VERY into yarn)

Has it really been 3 years?
Thursday, September 14th, 2006
Sometimes it seems like a lifetime ago. So much has changed since then. And yet I remember it like it was yesterday.

I thought it might have been a hoax at first, a cruel joke in the poorest taste. This person who had never before posted on the Bicycling Advocacy list appearing to tell us that Ken Kifer had been killed by a drunk driver. What kind of sicko would join a list just to play such a twisted prank? But as I read the words I felt a chill to my very marrow. I was grasping at straws.

I had only one way to find the truth. Ken had lived a very meager lifestyle, alone in a cabin in the woods with no phone. I couldn’t call him. But he had given me his sister’s phone number. I called her, shaking.

It was true. A drunk driver had hit Ken on his bike Saturday evening, the 13th; he had died the next morning.

No one I had loved had ever died before. I had had relatives die, but no one I actually felt a close personal connection to. I cried for 24 hours straight. Even in my sleep, I cried. I didn’t know my eyelids could be that swollen.

I cried every day for a month. After that, I cried on most days for months. Some days I wondered if I would ever be happy again. I railed against the unfairness of it all, that Ken who was doing everything right and was such a gentle soul should be wiped off the face of the Earth by Jimmy Don Rodgers, a repeat offender who had been charged with DUI the day before, held in jail for 12 hours, released, then four hours later, drunk and drug-addled, drove his pickup truck over to the wrong side of the road and hit Ken head on.

It was unfair that for the last two weeks of his life, he was having problems with his ISP and then with his webhost and could only send me brief messages from the library in town 14 miles away; then he sent me a brief message saying the problem was fixed and he would send me a long message tomorrow. The message never came. There was no tomorrow for Ken.

I don’t know what he was going to tell me. I’ll never know.

For a long time the unfairness of it all tore at me like shards of glass. In time my soul stopped bleeding enough for me to see that sometimes life just isn’t fair. That’s just the way life is. I really have no right to expect it to be fair. I can wish for fairness, but it’s a wish guaranteed to doom me to a life of frustration. All I can really do is appreciate the beauty and goodness that exist in the world, and try to contribute to them.

I never met Ken in person. After hundreds of emails and half a dozen phone calls, I just assumed we would meet each other some day. Probably some of you reading this have friends you’ve emailed hundreds of times but never met. You should meet each other. Don’t just assume you will some day. Some day may not come.

When Ken died, I knew I had to take care of his website, even though at that time I didn’t know anything about html. So many times he had said his biggest worry was what would happen to his website after he died. So I knew I would have to teach myself html (at that time I had planned on starting my own website, and he was going to teach me html. He just hadn’t taught me yet). I still get frequent email from readers of the site, many from people discovering it for the first time. I think the saddest messages are from people who discover the site for the first time, spend an hour reading it, feel like they’ve found a kindred spirit, click on the comments link to email Ken and tell him how great they think he is, and only then discover he’s dead. Poor souls. It’s like a punch in the gut.

Ken and I were kindred spirits. We became close because we thought so much alike and we had the same temperament, the same values. Losing him was like losing a part of myself. It changed me. In time I healed, for the most part, though certain thoughts or situations bring all the thoughts flooding back. I don’t think I’m the same as I was. My priorities have shifted a bit.

I’m trying harder to live my life so it’s more enjoyable and the kind of life I want. I realized how much I really do enjoy writing, so I’m writing more. I realized I wasn’t accomplishing what I wanted in the way of bicycling advocacy by going to meetings; that was only leading to frustration and taking time away from things I wanted to do, and I could accomplish more by writing about bicycling, so I stopped going to meetings. Likewise, I realized that some listservs I had really enjoyed gradually became less enjoyable over time as it seemed everything had already been said; while I really liked some of the people in the groups, I had a harder and harder time making myself read the posts.

Before Ken died, he was working on a book called The New World. He never got to finish it, but we were talking about upcoming chapters. He was going to do a chapter about the clothing they made, from start to finish. I was giving him advice on everything I could think of, what breeds of sheep I thought would be suitable, what my ideal workspace would be like for several people to wash wool, arrange fleece to dry, dye it, spin it, weave it or knit it, cut out fabric and sew… The more I thought of it, the more I really wanted to go there. It was a world where people could do the work they were skilled at, and everyone’s labor was valued equally. It was so depressing to me that I was stuck in this world where some people make hundreds more per hour than others.

Maybe all that thinking about a Utopia made me realize that really is what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to knit and spin and dye wool. After spending a couple years thinking it was impossible to do it for a living, it occurred to me that maybe it was possible. I’ll never be rich, but maybe I can make enough to live. And that’s enough.

Ken’s life and his death made me realize that I only get one chance. This is my life. I want it to be a life I can be proud of when I die. I don’t want to feel like I wasted my time here. I want to feel like I got my life’s worth. I don’t want to “discover that I had not lived.”

Ken lived. I miss him, and his death hurt me, but he truly lived his life. He was a good example. Rest in peace, friend.

http://www.riinsrants.info/index.php...ory/bicycling/