Married, thriving and expecting a baby - then Micah died BASE jumping

Shayni Couch found out her husband, Micah, had died via Facebook.

“Someone sent me a message and said ‘no, please tell me it's not true’ and I'm like, what the f… is going on?”

New Zealand-born Shayni, 27 at the time, was eight weeks pregnant with the couple’s first child. She was in Dubai, packing up their lives and preparing to leave after six-and-a-half years thriving through their 20s in the UAE. They were deciding between moving to a skydiving community in Micah’s home country, the US, or taking on a project in Sweden. They never made it to either.

She and Micah had been together in Norway days earlier on a BASE jumping expedition in Kjerag, where a big heliboogie event takes place at the end of a fjord each year.

“They basically give you a heli ride to the top and then you jump - it's pretty cool. I went there and I did six jumps, but I was really cautious and nervous… I was like this is my last hoorah… I was pregnant.”

The last night the couple were together in Norway, they called their families to tell them a baby was on the way.

“We called our family to tell them that they were gonna be grandparents. We managed to contact everybody that night and then the following morning, I said goodbye to him and that was the last time I saw him.”

Micah, 34, was with a Norwegian friend who was filming the training jump at the end of a long fjord in the rural area of Gudvangen, which translates to “Valley of the Gods”.

It was the third jump of the day for Micah off that cliff. It was hard, but not the most challenging the American pro had ever faced.

Micah was one of the best in the world at extreme sports. He was dedicated and skillful. He had clocked over 12,000 skydives, been BASE jumping for about a decade and had worn a wingsuit thousands of times.

BASE jumping involves jumping from an object, like a bridge or a mountain. Unlike skydiving, there’s only one parachute, folded in a container on your back. There's is no time to activate a back-up plan if something goes wrong.

A winged suit jump allows the flier to have more surface area, so they have better glide and can fly further.

Shayni says on Micah’s fatal jump his parachute and container weren't quite right. The wingsuit was made for competition so was more pressurised.

“There's a lot of factors that kind of went into what happened that day. I guess we'll never fully know exactly what went wrong. But it was kind of like a perfect storm because he was very calculated. He was an extremely talented and experienced flyer.

“And that was his last jump. He wasn’t able to get his parachute out for whatever reason.

“… with BASE jumping,” Shayni explains “you just don't have the time to do that, to deal with anything if you do have an issue.”

She remembers the pain of having to pry the news out of her friends that her husband had died.

“All of my friends were on site and I think they were too shocked and they weren’t able to think clearly enough to call me and I think they just thought someone had already.

“It was super traumatic and a really heavy thing to kind of have to basically pry out of someone to tell me - just to say the words.

“I knew in my heart that something had happened. I was getting these random messages, I couldn't get hold of him.”

The days that followed were a blur of Shayni getting herself and Micah’s family from the US to Norway.

“It was such a bittersweet time because all of the people that I loved in the world were in one place, but we were in one place for like the worst thing ever.

“There were times where we were spending time together, that just felt so good. Like he was there with us. And like, we were all together and it was in a place that we loved in Norway and so horrible at the same time.”

The young couple had spent the previous four summers BASE jumping with friends in Europe.

“Every single year someone of our friends would die. And the year before that [accident], it was like four or five of our group of friends died, wingsuit BASE jumping,” Shayni says.

“When I first started BASE jumping, I thought, yeah, this is awesome … When you're young and you're having a good time, it's all you can really think about.”

Shayni admits she felt stressed about Micah’s profession, but the pair couldn’t fully comprehend the risk.

“It was starting to come into the forefront of my mind seeing the people around me, the widows, who are my friends, losing people that they love to the sport.

“In our conversations before [he died]… I don't think it's something Micah really liked to talk about because every single person just doesn't think it's gonna happen to them … they would rather live their lives doing what they love.

“I would never have said to him ‘stop doing that’. People might think I'm crazy for that, but everyone has to make their own choices. I did really, fully trust in his ability to keep himself safe. But I know that bringing a child into world had made him think about it more, like we were like maybe this is not something that's sustainable.”

A few years earlier, Micah tricked young Kiwi traveller Shayni into going on a first date with him, she says, to help him buy a skateboard. Next minute, they were dining under candlelight by the water.

“I thought we were just gonna grab food and turns out it was his idea of a date. So I always laugh about that, that he tricked me into it.”

Shayni had left her home in Tutukākā, about four hours north of Auckland, at 21. She worked managing a fleet of yachts in Dubai, hosting watersports, hanging out with a bunch of expats with tonnes of stuff to do in the busy capital city.

In his late 20s, Micah had been handpicked to work at the Skydive Dubai Desert Dropzone, as part of a team paid to train and promote the sport in the desert. When they weren’t training, they were shooting videos, capturing content or teaching people how to skydive.

Shayni remembers seeing Micah and his mates jumping at Skydive Dubai from where she worked on the yacht.

“Micah had done so much work and training to get as good as he did. I think people see it online or on YouTube or whatever and they're like ‘those guys are crazy’. But there's a lot of work and a lot of time and money and skill that goes into it, just like anything that you become a master at.

“… when he was really young … he said he wanted to be a skydiver and he was told ‘you’re never gonna make money from that. You can never get a career out of it.’ And ohh how wrong they were,” Shayni says.

“… he was like, well, I don't really care what people say. I'm just gonna go do what I love and I'm gonna make it a career out of it.”

Being close to Europe, the young lovers would spend months travelling around when the hot summer months got too much in Dubai.

“We were living our best life at that point.”

It was a whirlwind romance. They moved in together, got engaged on New Years Eve seeing in 2013 and married on the Tutukākā coast the following year in front of about 150 friends and whanau who had gathered from around the world – they extended the invite to anyone who would make the mission. They went out diving and playing around Poor Knights Island.

Micah’s energy, kind heart and wild sense of adventure made him a “incredible with kids”, Shayni says.

“I think because he had that that kind of child-like energy, he was able to just be on their level and he was so good with kids.

“He was so much fun.”

Micah was at a skydiving event in Italy when Shayni called with the news she was pregnant.

“All I heard was him yelling to everyone within earshot that he was gonna be a dad. He was freaking out… That's how excited he was, he could not wait.”

On June 28, 2017, in Gudvangen, Micah did his last jump. In January the following year, the couple’s son, Lincoln Micah Couch was born on the Tutukākā coast.

This year, a documentary was released following Shayni and Lincoln's return to the site of Micah's death. Shayni in the Sky had its world premiere at the Doc Edge Film Festival in Auckland, which the pair attended along with Micha's family from the US and lots of Shayni's Kiwi friends and whanau. Shayni doesn't BASE jump anymore but she still regularly skydives.

What is it like to lose the father of your unborn child? "Your entire future that you thought you were gonna have has just gone,” Shayni says.

“There's the grief of the loss of your partner and the father of your child. But then there's the grief of an entire future that's completely gone.”

Now living in Washington State, married to Noah, one of her and Micah’s best friends, Shayni says Lincoln looks just like his dad and carries some of his mannerisms – “it’s pretty crazy”.

“[Micah] is his father. He always will be, regardless of what happens. And they will have a special connection that I maybe I don't even understand that he how he feels about it.

“I don't wanna be forceful, making him talk about it. I don't wanna put my grief on him, but I'm not gonna also hide that that it hurts that it's sad that I lost that because like I want him to see that it's okay too.”

Lincoln has the same adventurous spirit as his dad, he’s currently learning to ski, and it’s terrifying.

“How much do you protect? How much do you let them learn on their own? How much do you hold them back if they're really passionate about something? And I mean, that could be the same thing for, like, how I felt with Micah.

“Do I hold him back from the things that he loves doing out of fear? I don't wanna live in fear. But there's a healthy amount of it necessary."