The D Word

If death makes you squeamish, please skip this post. Though you might at first think it’s not, the post is running related. It truly is, and I realize more and more that most everything in my life is running related. This fact was at the heart of my original impulse to start this blog.

My sister died on October 24 at the age of 68 after a long and debilitating illness. Seventeen days later one of my closest childhood friends died, a woman ten days younger than I am whose life of late had brought her little joy. These people, the two Marys, were part of my life's landscape, faceted stones securely embedded in the mosaic of my upbringing. Suddenly, dizzyingly, they are gone.

Wednesday evening I was alone in the house (Z was out of town and Daisy Mae the cat had hightailed it off into the night). I felt only heaviness at the mystery of human life—how evanescent it is, how it amounts to no more than a brief puff of wind. I went to bed with a ravaged heart.

Thursday morning, 5:30 a.m. I fought off the demons who were pinning me to the bed with their bloody pitchforks. I threw on my running duds—shoes, sox, bike pants, shorts, bra, long-sleeved shirt—and stumbled out into a cloudless predawn world. In the west the full moon shimmered, sinking toward the horizon. In the east the hills were dark, made visible only by an apricot outline that presaged an eventual sunrise.

I ran straight west, down Channing Street, across the railroad tracks to Aquatic Park, over the freeway via the rainbow pedestrian bridge. I didn’t stop as I neared the Bay’s edge, just ran toward the water, onto the fishing pier, pushing my legs to go faster and farther. One, two, three, four, five… counting every step all the way up to 100 and then starting over again. The sky lightened. The moon sank and the sky turned rosy.

What happened out there as I came to the end of the pier, my body humming with life, my hair soaked with dew and sweat, isn’t something I can describe with any fancy metaphors or pedestrian descriptors. But I, the sulking cynic who congenitally shies away from any overt expressions of spirituality, found myself praying. May their spirits be at rest. May they dwell forever in peace. May the face of the lord shine upon them. Hail, my two Marys, full of grace! I love you. I miss you. Be happy up there.

The run home was sunny.

Later that same morning I caught the BART train into the city. For reading matter I for some reason grabbed a book that’s been on my shelf for months: Here If You Need Me, by Kate Braestrup. I bought it on impulse quite a while ago after reading an excerpt from it somewhere online.

The book opens with the death of the author’s husband. In the first 30 pages she takes the reader through how she felt compelled to deal with that catastrophic loss (he was killed in a car crash). She describes washing his body herself, taking the task out of the funeral director’s hands. She says, “I knew that I had to walk up to that which would hurt me most: [his] body without [him] in it. I wanted to do it not because it would help me heal—healing was both indefinable and unimaginable—but because it was the authoritative command of an authentic love.”

This passage grabbed me and I realized that’s what I want when people I love die—to walk up to that which hurts me most. When my mother died three years ago I wanted to be present at her cremation and so I was, although I sensed even Z wondered why. I am so glad I kissed her forehead, chilly and moist from refrigeration, right before she was consigned to the flames. It was so sad, yet so real.

I wasn’t able to be with the bodies of the two Marys. But my heart has come to feel their absence with an authenticity that honors them. Moon down, sun up—the never-ending cycle that I don’t think I could hope to acknowledge, let alone embrace, if I weren’t a running creature. I’m still quick but will be dead, and somehow that’s become more conceivable to me than it was. Even (sort of) more acceptable.