Two-Wheeled Greek Chorus - NYTimes.com I called her the "anorexic biker." My sisters and I didn't know the woman's name, but for years we saw her riding on our streetin Washington: grinding up the hill past our house, then coasting down to Massachusetts Avenue, then beginning the same climb again. She would go up and down our street for at least an hour every day. She was out there in all kinds of weather, always wearing headphones and a backpack, often chewing gum. She didn't live in our neighborhood; we figured she picked our street for its degree of incline. Sometimes we saw her riding around other parts of northwest D.C. - we learned to spot her ponytail and particular grit from far away. I was in high school when we first started seeing her. She looked to be in her 40s and was dangerously thin, so I assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that her punishing schedule was connected to an eating disorder. "Anorexic biker" was an unkind moniker, but I'd had my own brushes with disordered eating. She became a fixture in our lives, though we never talked to her. My sisters and I went off to college, but when we came home for the holidays, the biker was still there. We had to admire her discipline. While we stuffed ourselves on Thanksgiving turkey, she was burning calories. While we retreated into air-conditioning on scorching summer days, she was sweating hard. Her obsessive presence became routine. And so it shouldn't have surprised me that she was there eight years ago on the day that my mother's body was carried out of our house. She had died of cancer at just 60 years old. We'd been preparing for her death for weeks. When her doctor said all treatment options had been exhausted, in March of that year, I took an unpaid leave of absence from my job in New York and came home. The hospice nurses made daily visits to check her pain levels and adjust her dosages of morphine. My father, sisters and I took turns staying up with my mother at night. She didn't want to lie in bed, was afraid to sleep - presumably because she knew she might not wake up - and so she insisted that we push her around the second floor of our house in her wheelchair. By then she was too weak to walk. On the nights that I was on duty, I begged her to rest. "You don't have to sleep," I told her. I'll read to you. I offered to read Alice Munro. She could barely speak, but she shook her head no and made a small circle with her finger in the air. She wanted to keep going. I pushed the wheelchair around and around the house while everyone slept. It was late April when she finally let go. The flowers were in full bloom, and I remember thinking that no one should die on such a beautiful day. My sisters and I were lying in bed, holding her, when she died. My father called the hospice nurse, who phoned the funeral home. They came to take her away. We followed our mother's body down the stairs and into the hall - we would have given anything to hold onto her for just one more hour - and when they wheeled the gurney out into our front yard, I went with them and suddenly sank to my knees with a primal wail. I couldn't help myself: I was on the grass, sobbing, ready to pull out my hair with grief. The histrionics of Greek tragedy suddenly made sense to me. And then I looked up, and there she was, our very own Sisyphus. The witness to our loss. The audience for my pain. Our eyes met briefly, the biker's and mine. And then she kept riding while the men from the funeral home loaded my mother's body into a van. The next day, I found a card under the front door. "To the entire Holt family," the envelope said. It was a letter of condolence from the biker. She was touched, she said, to see our family unite to take care of our mother for the past couple of years. She was sincerely sorry for our loss. Had she always known our names? Or had we once been stock characters to her? Had she been watching us all those years while we were watching her? I wondered what other moments of human drama she'd glimpsed from the perch of her bicycle seat. What family squabbles had spilled out on the lawn. It was a lovely card. When she came riding up our street that afternoon, I ran outside to meet her. "Thank you," I said, finally calling her by her name. Elliott Holt's first novel, "You Are One of Them," was published in May.