[K]ILLINGTON — Quentin Andrea Lawrence was skiing Pico Mountain one recent morning when, hitting a bump, a long-lost spirit miraculously sprang back to life.
The 57-year-old Virginia visitor, sliding quietly onto the slopes, hadn’t told anyone she was the granddaughter of the 80-year-old resort’s founders, Brad and Janet Mead, or the daughter of its most famous alumna, two-time 1952 Olympic gold medalist Andrea Mead Lawrence.
Ask, however, and she’ll tell you how the champion, pregnant with her in 1960, skied the Olympic flame into the Winter Games that year in Squaw Valley, Calif., then celebrated a mother and child reunion with the torch when the two relayed it to the 2002 opening ceremony in Salt Lake City, Utah.
She also can recall how she provided hospice care in 2009 when her mother, having moved to California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, was diagnosed with cancer that spread through her body.
“Mom was my best friend — her death was devastating.”
Quentin Lawrence felt buried for nearly a decade by an “avalanche” of loss and confusion that experts call “complicated grief.” Then this winter, her mother’s name returned to the news when Vermont-schooled skier Mikaela Shiffrin headed to the 2018 Olympics hoping to beat the 1952 victor’s two-golds-in-one-games record.
Quentin Lawrence didn’t scoff. Instead, she smiled.
“To me, Mikaela embodies mom’s spirit — a fierce competitor, but a sweet girl.”
Shiffrin ultimately grabbed only one gold medal in South Korea, ensuring her predecessor’s place in history. Soon after, Quentin Lawrence, feeling a pull, traveled to Vermont for the first time since she was a teenager.
Pico, founded by her grandparents in 1937, now is owned by neighboring Killington, the largest winter sports resort in eastern North America. But as she skied with her husband, Mike Grove, time seemingly wound back to the days her mother grew up on the mountain.
“My spirit is in the West,” Andrea Mead Lawrence said just before her death, “but my soul is in Vermont.”
Her daughter remembered that quote as, speeding along Pico’s Sunset trail, she felt the wind and sun and a presence comfortingly familiar.
“I used to call Mom the Nureyev of skiing.”
Quentin Lawrence had taken to the slopes with a small vial of her mother’s ashes.
“I was laughing and joking and inviting Mom to enjoy the turn with me.”
Seeing a bump, she opened the ashes and launched her skis into the air.
“It felt so right, like this was exactly how it was supposed to be. I was dancing with Mom.”
With the arrival of Passover and Easter, Quentin Lawrence recalls a quote from her mother.
“The spirit of sport is really the essence and ideal of all our human efforts — it is the exercising and joining of our individual energy with those of others in furthering the human race,” the Olympian once said. “Each contribution of spiritual and physical vitality establishes new plateaus from which others may thrust.”
Her daughter understands.
“I was not expecting the trip to be as emotional, but I’m happy it was. Mom needed to come home. I’m just glad to bring her back.”
