Content warning: descriptions of death
I’d forgotten my tissues, but it was too late now–my 10k race was about to start. I don’t know how someone with my aggressive spring allergies forgot to bring backups, but it’s not the pollen I need to fight–it’s tears.
For some reason, I always cry during long runs. Maybe it’s because running long distances grounds me in my body. When I run, throat burning, heart pounding, veins thrumming, it’s simply a reminder of how close I came to not being alive. How my father saved my life even at the cost of his own.
My feet start finding their rhythm on the pavement, I clear one kilometer, then two, sun warming my back.
This particular race takes place in April, which I find appropriate. Every year this month settles heavily on my family. It’s the month we experienced our greatest and most unexpected tragedy. The month when a tornado hit my house in Alabama while my family was still inside, crushing my father beneath the debris and scarring the rest of us in more ways than one.
The 5k marker is behind me now; sweat trickles into my eyes. I try to control my breathing–in out, in out. The same way I did right After, lying there under a gray sky, half trapped under a mountain of what used to be our house, waiting for help to make it through the blocked roads–just breathe, in out, in out.
Thinking to the moment Before, my dad’s arms around me, holding tight before the wind tore us apart, weightless in the roaring wind and then crushed, my leg is pinned, but my father is almost covered. We can’t move, can’t move the debris, I’m sorry, help is coming, please just keep breathing, in out, in out.
Hours later, still waiting. “How’s Dad doing?” My brother asks, trapped by his own broken bones. Part of me already knows. I check Dad for a pulse. There isn’t one. Just breathe, in out, in out.
Staring into the bathroom mirror, empty eyes, hands limp at my sides, hospital gown scratching my neck. Is that girl only 16? Suddenly I feel so much older. Breathe in out, in out.
Sitting in the sticky Alabama heat, black dress, white knuckles, squeezed around my mom’s, a military salute as he’s lowered into the red dirt, breathe in out, in out.
I round the corner and see it’s 100 meters to the finish. There’s pain everywhere–who signs up for this willingly? My lungs are bursting, black creeps into the edge of my vision, but I know I can’t stop. I know this pain won’t last forever and I know that I can take it, so I stretch my legs longer, I I take big gulps of air, I think of my father. And I make it.
Running reminds me of grief. Not to run away from, but to run with, to make peace with this discomfort, to have endurance. It’s the burning in your lungs and the tightness in your chest and that strange promise that if you just keep breathing you will continue–towards what it’s not always clear, but you will continue.
They place a medal around my neck. My chest is heaving, legs are heavy. A smile breaks across my face. A sob works its way up from my gut. I’m elated and I’m wrecked. I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive. Breathe.
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