In the beginning, there was Relay

When Relay for Life started back in 1985, Dr. Gordy Klatt said he was going to run for 24 hours because cancer never sleeps–so its opponents can’t afford to do so either. Relay has grown into a monster fundraising operation since then: it is the largest single fundraising campaign in the world and has spawned a cottage industry of walks and runs for various causes.

I will never fully heal from this loss.

Klatt ran by himself that first year. In the second year, people could run with him for a donation, but there was nothing Relay about his performance: he was still the only person who ran the entire time. Today’s event is a real Relay in the traditional sense of the word: almost no one walks the whole thing. Ideally, each team keeps someone on the track at all times, but most people only walk a small fraction of the total.

Walking with Jane and the ultra-marathon

Setting up and running Walking with Jane has been more like an ultra-marathon than a relay. I have had lots of support from lots of different people, but I have been the one person on the course at all times. And I have been that one person while trying to juggle both my political activities and work through the grief of losing Jane to a cancer very few people know about or care about.

Klatt ran by himself that first year.

About three weeks ago, I snapped. If you have followed my activities these last 40 months or so, you probably saw that coming. I did, too. It was harder and harder to get up in the morning, harder and harder to do the research, write these pieces, organize the series of events that had to be organized, talk to the people I needed to talk to. I was crying more 38 months after Jane’s death than I was in the days right after it happened.

A break in the ultra-marathon action

I needed a break. I needed some time where I didn’t have to think about cancer or Walking with Jane or Relay for Life or Dana-Farber or carcinoid patients. I needed some time to focus on what happened to Jane, what happened to me, what happened to us. I needed some time to lose myself in a movie or a book or a song without feeling guilty about it. And, perhaps most importantly, I needed time to cry until I was finished crying.

About three weeks ago, I snapped.

So I did that. I went out to listen to some music and closed a bar for the first time in 30 years. I didn’t drink much, but I let the music sink into my pores–and realized I was smiling for the first time in a long time about something other than how an event had gone or how many checks had arrived in the mail from our latest letter or what the latest research said. I watched movies and read books and went for walks because that was what I felt like doing.

An ultra-marathon of tears and memories

I thought about Jane’s last months, and I bawled my eyes out–cried them dry and then cried some more. And I thought–really for the first time in a long time–about the time before she was dying, about the time before her illness left us both tethered to this house or an outing with ready access to a bathroom. I remembered our wedding day and our honeymoon, the day we passed papers on our house–and all the tiny decisions that went into light fixtures and furniture and wall colorings. I remembered our first bike ride and our first date and just sitting together and talking.

…I needed time to cry until I was finished crying.

I faced my anger and my guilt and all the hurt of the last nearly 38 months and 22 days.

Forgiving myself

And finally, just this morning, I managed to forgive myself for all she went through in the last months of her life–and for failing to cure her disease and letting her die. She told me she forgave me for all those things long ago, but it took until this morning for me to forgive myself.

I remembered our first bike ride…

I will never fully heal from this loss. I know that. But I will keep working at it–just as I will keep working at this ultra-marathon I have begun. I knew from the start this was not a sprint and that it was to going to be easy. But I have been running it as though it were a mere marathon–a short 26.2 mile jaunt over hilly, but reasonable, terrain. It isn’t. It is the longest ultra-marathon ever conceived over insanely difficult terrain. There are going to be times I have to walk and other times I am going to have to find a place to lie down and rest for a bit.

I hope you’ll come by and run or walk a bit of it with me–or set up a rest area along the route periodically. This race is going to take a while–but there is a valuable prize at its end–the death of the thing that killed us.