The sun shone upon her, warming her under the crisp hospital sheets.  If she closed her eyes and breathed deeply, she could be almost anywhere.  Images washed over her like ocean waves, pulling the sands of time out from under her feet, moving her closer to the ebb and flow of eternity.  “They say your whole life flashes before your eyes,” she whispered to herself.   “They are wrong.”

She settled her head into the cool spot on the pillow.  She was thankful for the sun.  It pulled her mind back to an image of her grandfather, sitting on the enclosed porch of her childhood home.  He was sitting with his back to the brilliant late-May sunlight.  “The sun feels so good on my shoulders,” he told her.  She was young at the time and unfamiliar with the concept of sitting still long enough in one place to acknowledge the sun’s warmth, but she loved her grandfather and took note of his observation.

Calming images of moments past washed over her.  There was no apparent order to them as one flowed into the next, settling upon her heart, validating her life.  She was trying to give a name to what she was feeling inside the shell of her own aged body, but finite words fell short as they always did in such situations.  She settled on tranquil gratitude.  Images of the past danced gently around present thoughts.  She had begun her life in a guilt-ridden world of black and white.  She was ending that life in a peacefully illuminated, sun-warmed pool of swirling lightness.

She tried to think of the first time that the notion of right and wrong had become situational.  Was it when she had decided that loving her boyfriend with her whole body could not possibly be a sin? No, it had gone much farther back than that.  She remembered questioning the concepts of good and evil as early as seven years old.

In catechism class she had been taught that it was a sin if you did not go to church.  She remembered the drawings of the children who sinned in her catechism book.  One child had black speckles upon her heart.  Another child’s heart was as black as coal. A third child–the one with the pure, unblemished heart, smiled a sweet, angelic smile.  She knew she had no hope of ever having a heart as pure as that one, and it made her feel sad inside.

She remembered crying for her best friend who did not go to church.  She wanted her friend to go to Heaven, but she had been taught that one big mortal sin had the power to seal the fate of your soul, closing off the possibility of ever going to Heaven.   Surely, she concluded, God could not be so arbitrary and cruel.  Surely God loved His children more than that.

The irony of those childlike thoughts brought a smile to her lips.  She, herself, hadn’t gone to church in many years.  It took decades of searching, studying, thinking, and reflecting until she finally developed her own belief system.  Heaven awaited her the moment she took her last breath.

More images danced like fog in morning sunlight.  First Communion class each Sunday morning.  Fashioning tissue boxes into prayer cubes.  Stringing homemade rosaries out of plastic beads and knotted yarn.  Stumbling through an explanation of “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife” to satisfy the curiosity of twenty-five eight-year-olds.  Reciting the updated version of the “Act of Contrition” in preparation for the sacrament of First Penance:

O My God, I am sorry for my sins.  In choosing to do wrong and in failing to do good, I have sinned against you and your church.  I firmly intend, with the help of  Your Son, to do penance and to sin no more. Amen.

The new version left her cold.

She taught Sunday school for nine years, until her mother’s illness and her own inability to accept  feeling like a fraud had both become too much to bear.

Her mother.

An image of her lying helplessly in bed.  A woman who could not eat, but enjoyed watching cooking shows on the television in her bedroom .  A woman who barely managed to speak in wispy strains, but craved engaging conversation.   A woman who endured constant pain, but refused to cry out.  Her mother had shown her a graceful way to die with strength, dignity, and gentle restraint.

Her mother’s last words to her echoed within her mind as she closed her own eyes—“I am sorry,” she had whispered.  She had spent the rest of her life wondering what her mother meant and what she was sorry for.  After many years of being haunted by them, she was finally able to let those words go once she realized that her mother was sorry for being sick and for putting her daughter through the agony of watching her die slowly, bit by bit.

Now it was her turn.  She worried about her own children. “This really isn’t so bad,” she had told them.  She meant the dying, but she wondered if they understood.

Her children.

Images of walking in the woods with them.  Picking berries and wild mint.  Carrying the bounty home in upturned shirts.   Tea parties afterward.  None of her children went to church either.  In her younger years she had felt like a failure.  She had obviously not instilled the faith in them and they had ultimately rejected it.  But so had she.

She had tried to fit into the comfortable folds of Catholicism until she was forty.  It began to squeeze her and she stopped going.  She studied the myths of Joseph Campbell, went to Buddhist workshops, read about Hinduism, accepted the flow of Chi through her chakras in jujitsu class until her knees gave out,  believed that the American Indians’ concept of the spirit world was closest to the Real Truth,  took great comfort in Tielhard de Chardin’s belief that all people go to Heaven, and curiously through it all, still retained a fierce love of the Blessed Mother, Mary.

She had finally discovered her authentic self.  It didn’t matter that it lay within an aged body under a crisp hospital sheet.  She was a timeless being, contained for a time, waiting for release. She imagined herself smiling.  Or was she really smiling?  The distinction didn’t matter.  As she settled into her final moments, she hoped it would be the last image her children would see.

Be not afraid of going slowly,

Be afraid only of standing still.

– Chinese Proverb

Name any race–whether it be a grueling marathon or a beginners’ 5K– and you’ll find that the race is surrounded by intensely personal stories about the individuals who run them. The most poignant and often, overlooked stories aren’t about the contenders who cross the finish line in record time, although their stories are certainly worth telling.  The most poignant ones are the stories of ordinary people who cross the finish line just before it’s dismantled, the runners who lurch past water stations while the crew is cleaning up to go home, the runners who, like Rocky Balboa, have only one goal—not to win, but to “go the distance.”

The Boilermaker Road Race in Utica, New York has attracted these first-time runners for over thirty-five years.   I call them the gray-chute runners.

Runners are assigned a place to begin the race based on their experience and previous finishing times.  The elite runners cross the starting line first and all the others follow behind them. First-timer runners and people who aren’t terribly fast begin the race from an area called the gray chute, where they wait patiently to advance forward once the race starts. With computerized chips firmly affixed to their sneakers, they cross the starting line a full seven to eight minutes after the elite runners have crossed.  By that time, the elite runners are well into their second mile.

Gray chute runners–many of whom begin to slow up and become winded by the first mile marker–know they aren’t contenders.  They’re the ones who have silent conversations with God that end with, “Please just help me finish.” Many of them carry stories of sorrow, disappointment, and loss within their hearts.  I imagine them running away from their broken selves, and toward the promise of wholeness. As I wait for the race to begin, I wonder if this is what I am doing.

It is 7:45 a.m. on the second Sunday of July, 2009. The race will begin in fifteen minutes.  We are standing amid a silent sea of 12,000 people with heads bowed and hands over hearts.  The national anthem is playing.  A priest blesses the crowd.  The mayor speaks.  The unseasonable air chills our arms and legs, while a different kind of chill works its way inward to deep and secret insecurities.

I am surprised by the feelings that well up inside of me as I stand in the gray chute waiting for the crowd to advance.  I feel emotional and alone.  I am not prepared to feel this way.  It surprises me. I am here with these thousands of people, amid a throng of runners, surrounded by a mass of humanity, and yet, the memory of one single loss wraps around my heart to define the moment.

I try not to cry.

Right ahead of me is a young woman who has decorated the back of her shirt with a memorial.  She has taped a picture of a man–probably her father–to her shirt.  Three words, written in black marker, stand out boldly above the picture: I miss you.

Tears come, unabated.

I am thankful to be alive, to be able to run and breathe and feel my feet hitting the pavement, but I still feel great sorrow.   I ask my husband’s spirit to be with me while I run, and I pledge to take his memory to the finish line.  I am alive. I can run. He is not. He cannot.  “This race is for you,” I say quietly to him.  “Stay with me.  Help me.”

The starter pistol sounds; the race begins, but we stand still for several minutes.  Slowly the gray chute runners begin to walk forward.  The race begins for us when our chip crosses the starting line.  Our personal journey begins at that moment.

The first mile is the toughest for everyone, and I am no exception. By the second mile of the race, I find a comfortable pace.  I fall into step with a young man and woman.  He is clearly a runner.  He has a runner’s physique: Tall. Thin. Long, taut legs.   Her build is more like my own.  She is not a runner and like me, she struggles.  I surmise that this is probably her first race.  They are running it together.

We keep pace with one another for several miles, but do not speak.  I do not want to interfere with the gentle interplay between them.  He coaxes her along with each step.  “Take it easy.  You are doing just fine.”

I feel encouraged.  It’s as if those words are being spoken to me.  She plods along.  We have the same pace, a similar gait.  He runs backwards, facing her, for long stretches.  He talks gently to her along the way.

“You are doing fine.”

“You look good.”

“How do you feel?”

“Pace yourself.”

“Do you need water? A water station is up ahead.”

He smiles at her all the while.  His love for her is in that smile, in his words, in the way he runs backwards so he can face her and encourage her as she advances.

I lose track of the young couple by mile six.  I come upon another woman with a personal message on the back of her shirt.  It, too, has a picture of a man on it.  “Running in memory of my husband,” it says.  So many stories propel themselves past me.  Each story pushes itself toward the finish line.

Once the race is over, the party begins.  Bands play, beer flows. There is hugging and laughter. I wonder about the young couple.  Did they finish the race? I had lost track of them, but it was important to me to know that they had finished the race.  I checked the results later that day.

Sure enough.

Two runners with the same last name from Rome, New York, finished together well before I did.  Their times were just one second apart.  Her time was listed before his. I smiled at the image: he had let her step over the finish line just ahead of him.

“True love,” I whispered to no one in particular.  “That is true love.”

For those who run knowing they have no hope of winning, there is honor in every step they take. There is hope in each ragged breath.  And in the case of the young couple, that one single second between them contains enough love to last a lifetime.

(Note: I still dream of running the Boilermaker again.)

It is not my memory, so I cannot actually recall the sounds of that night. In the sleepless hours before morning when it is quiet enough to imagine these sounds, they come to me like whispers on fog.

I did not hear the shuffling of footsteps behind her at midnight as she walked home.  She had wisely chosen to walk through a safe, sleepy neighborhood of older houses with tidy front porches—porches with American flags which rippled gently, and window boxes filled with red geraniums.  Surely she was safe in the company of these silent sentries.  Or was she? Her pace quickened as she crossed to the other side of the street.

I did not hear the little hitch in her breath the moment she realized that the footfalls had also crossed over and were behind her once again.  I did not hear her own footsteps hastening to match the wild beating of her heart.  I did not hear the flagpole being torn from its place on a porch, or the sound of the flag being ripped away from its pole and trampled underfoot.

I did not hear the voices behind her, leering and cursing, or the pivot of her shoes on the pavement as she half-turned toward them to catch a glimpse.  I did not hear the whizzing sound of the pole as it cut through the air or the crack of her skull as it split open in the silence of the night.

I did not hear the scuffling sounds as her bag was ripped from her shoulder, or the relentless thuds of the pole as it smashed down upon her legs, her back, her head.  I did not hear her cry out as she scrambled on all fours to the supposed safety of a sentry porch.  I did not hear the frantic banging of her fists upon the front door where the newly-awakened occupants huddled silently together within.

I did not hear the small ragged groan which pushed its way from her throat as warm, sticky red oozed through her hair and past her ear, then spread itself across her shoulder and down her back.

I did not hear the clatter of the flagpole as it was thrown aside, or the scratchy gravel footfalls of cowards retreating toward darkness.  I did not hear her rise to her feet, shocked at first, then angered.  I did not hear her initial tears or the curse words that followed, or her own dazed footsteps on the pavement as she ran–not away from her attackers, but toward them.  I did not hear her strong interior voice—the one that refused to let this happen without a fight, the voice that fueled her inner resolve to catch up to these men and wrestle her purse from their grip.

What I did hear was incongruous jangling from the telephone next to my bed, and the sound of my own heart beating in feral panic at a deep-sleep hour when the news is never good.

What I did hear was a quivery-chinned voice trying not to cry.

“Mommy? I’m at the hospital. Can you come get me?”

(Note:  My youngest daughter was mugged almost twenty years ago.  After being beaten and robbed, she picked up the flagpole used to beat  her and ran after her assailants to try to get her belongings back.  Once she realized she was hurt, she gave up the chase.  She lost her brand-new camera, her purse, and all its contents.  We both lost a sense of security.

The assailants were caught almost a year after the attack, due to the dogged diligence of the local police force.  We both went to the sentencing.  The prosecutor spoke on our behalf with great passion and eloquence;  the judge handed down the maximum sentence.  I often wonder if those two men have changed their ways.  Do they have jobs and families of their own?   Are they living on the straight and narrow? One can only hope.

My daughter is a strong young woman and I am proud of her.  Weeks after the attack, she resumed walking the dog at night even though the sound of leaves rustling behind her had the ability to put her heart into overdrive. She believed that changing her habits out of fear meant that her attackers won.

They may not have won, but then there are still those wicked headaches.  And there’s that little thing she does when walking together:  she doesn’t allow anyone to walk behind her, even if she knows them.  Twenty years later, and she still steps aside and lets them pass.)