The way Christy McDonald describes it, she ran off a cliff this summer strapped to a man she just met.
The reality is, the former Detroit television anchor has been peering over the edge since her husband died six years ago, navigating that thin line between composure and chaos. The cliff in the Swiss Alps was a long step in the right direction.
McDonald, 54, is several things she hardly expected to be at her age. A widow, to start with, a word that had always seemed reserved for much older people. A public speaker, in keynotes or workshops. A writer, posting chapters on Substack for an eventual book with an unfortunate theme and an irresistible title, “Thanks for the Lasagna, Just Send Booze.”
And, a paraglider, finally figuring out how to let go as she soared 5,000 feet above the ground.
Jamie Samuelsen died on Aug. 1, 2020, all of three hours after a crew delivered a hospital bed to their house. It was the end of a 19-month struggle with colon cancer that his sports talk listeners on WXYT-FM (97.1) didn’t know about until the final week.
“This was a very private illness,” McDonald said last Wednesday, Aug. 5, followed by a very public and widely mourned demise, followed by the everyday demands of life and the unpredictable burdens of coping with her family’s gaping wound.
She understood how to be a mom, or at least how to feel perpetually inadequate at it. Now she had to be the dad, too, emotionally and practically, and wait, rain gutters get clogged if you don’t clean them out?
“Tell me what you need,” people would say, and bless them for caring. But as she smiled and nodded, she would think, “How? I don’t even know who I am.”
Their kids were 16, 14 and 11 when Samuelsen died. Add six years, a lot of tears and a lot of inches, and they’re thriving: a Northwestern grad starting her first job, a University of Michigan junior with a deep voice and his dad’s gift for calling play-by-play, a senior and color guard captain at Troy High.
Oldest to youngest, they are Caroline, Josh and Catherine.
They ran off the cliff, too.
Beginning with Bill Bonds
McDonald left TV in January 2025. She had a good and innovative job at WDIV-TV (Channel 4), touching on long-form interviews, streamed programming and anchoring special events, but then things ran late one day and she missed the baseball game where Josh hit his only home run of the season.
“I can’t do this and be a solo parent,” she told the station, and a few months later, it graciously shredded her contract.
There were long stretches before that at WXYZ-TV (Channel 7), where she was a reporter and anchor, and then WTVS-TV (Channel 56), where the pace and format of a public broadcasting outlet meant she never had to hear about her kid’s first day of school by phone between live reports from a fire.
Breaking in, way back when, she was a production assistant for Bill Bonds’ interview show on Channel 2. Toward the end of the run for “Bonds Tonight” in late 1995, he decided to do a Detroit Lions roundtable.
A producer invited Bob Wojnowski of the pioneering sports station WDFN-AM (1130), in the days when it was broadcasting from a converted garage, and asked him to bring a friend − who turned out to be Samuelsen.
Their first date was beers at a sports bar in Troy. Their wedding was at St. Thomas More Catholic Church in the same city in May 2001.
Then time marched on, and he stopped.
“I see old people in Florida, holding hands, walking on the beach,” McDonald said, and it makes her think, “I won’t have that.”
Instead, she had a dead sprint off a grassy hillside.
Rising above their problems
Her ideal vacations involve oceans and naps. Celebrating Caroline’s college graduation, her kids wanted Switzerland and Austria.
Prepping for the trip, McDonald came across a paragliding company outside the resort town of Interlaken. Truth is, she said, she doesn’t even like roller coasters, but sometimes she dreams about flying − and suddenly there she was atop a steep Alpine hill with a dashing Italian named Dario behind her shouting, “Run now!”
They were harnessed to a fabric wing that was quickly tethered only to the wind. She laughed, she whooped, she laughed some more, and then she burst into joyous, unburdened tears.
“I just wanted to feel free,” she said. No decisions, no responsibility, “just that sensation of knowing you can’t control anything.”
Above the snowcaps and shimmering lakes, she said, “I loosened the grip a little,” and it turns out the kids did, too. Now the trick is to shelve that sensation in a sort of emotional pantry, within easy reach when the stresses hit.
Life can be heavy and exhausting. Death can linger and oppress.
What happened to Jamie, she said, taught them all that tomorrow can’t be predicted. Soaring through the mountains reminded them that it doesn’t have to be.
The peaks and the vistas make even the deepest dips worth the flight.
Reach Neal Rubin at NARubin@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: For ex-Detroit news anchor Christy McDonald, racing off cliff was healing
Reporting by Neal Rubin, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Neal Rubin, Detroit Free Press | USA TODAY Network
