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Marathon Walk Lessons


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Dear friends,

Bilbo Baggins used to say you have to be careful when you step out your door in the morning--that the road outside your door can sweep you off to places you had no thought about going to. Sunday's Marathon Walk in support of the Jimmy Fund was exactly that type of journey.

This was my third time walking the route from Hopkinton to Boston. Each of the previous walks have taken me, mentally and emotionally--if not physically--to new places in this Odyssey through NET cancer and grief.

I was emotionally a wreck the first year. I was angry at myself for letting Jane die; angry at my body, which kept threatening to quit on me over the final ten miles of the course; angry at the medical community that had let Jane down for decades; angry at the federal government that had abandoned NET cancer patients to their fates in the late 1960s and never looked back; angry at the survivors of other cancers who had had all the advantages Jane never got; angry at the other couples I knew whose lives got to go on unchanged after I had lost my other half.

I bottled up my rage that year. It helped me cross the finish line and do the day-to-day work of setting up fundraisers and Walking with Jane--but sometimes it leaked out at inappropriate times in inappropriate ways that left my friends wounded and left me increasingly convinced that I needed to withdraw from the world until I could trust myself with people again.

I am not, generally, an angry person. I've seen what I am capable of when I allow myself the luxury of letting it lay claim to me. I try to repress it, deny its existence, and control it. Even now, over three years after Jane was diagnosed--and 33 months after she died--there are still times I feel that anger building to an unhealthy eruption. But those times are fewer and fewer--and i like to think I have become better at dealing with them.

Last year I walked most of the day alone. That walk was about sorrow. Every step called up vivid memories of the last months of Jane's life: her constantly swollen feet, the swelling in her legs, the abortive walks, the day her doctor told her he thought she probably had cancer, the last vacation together, the biopsy, the diagnosis, her first hospital stay, the first tripnto Boston, the day we learned how damaged her heart really was, the final drive to Boston, pushing her in a wheelchair , waiting for the surgery to end, seeing her with all those tubes and wires in her, being there when she first woke up, the first carcinoid attack, the second carcinoid attack, the night before she lost consciousness for the last time, the words--"there is nothing more we can do"--my last words to her when she was awake, holding her hand, reading to her, her last breath, the calls,coming back to this empty house, the wake, the funeral...

Yesterday was different. The tone was set, I think, on friday night at a dinner one of my former students did to support her walk. She invited her friends from high school--all of whom had Jane in class. They talked about their memories of her 20 years before the diagnosis--about how people had tried to guess what our relationship was, about being in class with Jane and learning chemistry and physics and life--and about earning whatever you got.

That night and Sunday's walk took me through a wall I have wrestled with for months. Finally, I could see, for a sustained period, something beyond the memories of the end. We had a good life together that how she died had veiled from me emotionally for a long time. For a good part of the walk I was able to see those times with the same clarity I have seen those last months. And that ability has carried over into today.

Will there continue to be days that are too painful for words? I am sure there will continue to be those days. But it is a blessing this morning to see her coming down the aisle in her wedding dress just as vividly as walking behind her casket down that same aisle at the end.

While that is the most important part of what I discovered yesterday, it was not the only realization. I think we lose track of just how physically damaging the death of our spouse is to our own health. We talk about the importance of self-care and we focus on the obvious psychological trauma of watching hopelessly as half of our self vanishes. But we often lose sight of the physical damage we take in the process as well.

From the beginning of Jane's struggle with cancer until her death--about six months--I lost over 20 pounds. I lost muscle, strength, endurance, and God alone knows what else in that time. I was focussed on Jane and Jane's health, not my own. I ate poorly, slept poorly, and exercised neither my mind nor my body in any significant way if I did not see how it would help Jane. At one point one of the nurses handed me a razor and told me I needed to shave because it would help Jane see I was less worried than appeared. That was the only thing that got me to shave.

Summers, we climbed mountains together, Jane played tennis, I ran several miles a day. That stopped or was severely curtailed when she got sick--for both of us.

Yesterday, as I plowed through Heartbreak Hill, I realized my muscles didn't hurt, that there was nothing labored in my breathing despite the pace I was making over what is universally considered the toughest part of the course--the piece that has daunted runners for years and had always pushed me to the point that the last miles become an effort of will more than of physical endurance.

It came to me then that I had spent the entire day to that point passing people--and that very few had passed me, save for the period right after lunch when I had been loosening up my muscles again. And other than as we got close the finish and the crowds became too dense, I never slowed down or got out of rhythm. Yesterday, there never came a point when the walk became an effort of will for me beyond ignoring the blisters that always form 20-odd miles in no matter how I tape my feet.

While I am not emotionally healed by any stretch of the imagination, my body is, at last, physically healed. Given that my emotional health has always been closely tied to my physical health--and I think that is true for most people--I am at least hopeful that eventually the emotional wounds will become increasingly less debilitating. I don't expect I will ever stop grieving for Jane, but if I am to finish the work she and I started--and the additional work our fight with NET cancer started--then I need to keep moving forward no matter what obstacles get in the way.

That requires a daily act of will. At first, it was about getting out of bed in the morning--and sometimes it still is. Then it was about eating and exercising--and sometimes it still is. Then it was about doing the reading and the writing and the organizing--and sometimes it still is.

Jane was addicted, especially in the hospital, to Kenny Rogers' song The Gambler: "You never count your money/when you're sitting at the table/There'll be time enough for counting/when the dealing's done." It is easy to get caught up in each individual project and judge the success or failure of the entire enterprise by where you are at any given moment. But, to echo Sophocles, we only really know whether we have been successful or failed when our lives are over. While Jane's life did not end the way we wanted it to, she told me the day before she went into the hospital that no matter what the outcome there was, she'd had a good life--and that I had made it good. I think she knew, for her, the dealing was done and that she was playing her last hand. She played it with grace and courage and turned what most would see as a losing hand into a winner.

She did that through the most incredible series of acts of will I have ever seen. Beside her physical pain and endurance what I face over 26.2 miles is nothing. That knowledge got me through the first two walks and the preparations for the third. But yesterday's walk did not require reminders of her pain or her struggle. It required I remember the totality of our life together--and that the cards are still on the table.

Peace,

Harry

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Amazing feelings you can show us Harry. An evolution of grief it truly is. I can relate with so many of the emotions you have described. I also commend you in the drive to go on. I hope you can give yourself a pat on the back for helping us all understand the need to fight on even though I know that was not your intention.

Thanks for sharing.

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I love what you shared "You never count your money/when you're sitting at the table/There'll be time enough for counting/when the dealing's done."

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“And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.”

― Raymond Carver

I know that Jane's life was far far too short, Harry, but the impact she made in it and that you are making is so impressive. I know everyone will know the above quote, but I think it's worth posting many many times.

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Dear friends,

Thank you all for all your kind words.

Jane and I loved the film Casablanca. Two scenes have come to mind since I wrote this that I think resonate. The first is at the very end of the film when Rick is convincing Ilsa to get on the plane with her husband. "We'll always have Paris," he tells her. "And what we lost we got back last night." Until this weekend, our figurative Paris had vanished. Now....

The second is from the scene between Rick and Victor Lazlo. Rick has asked why Lazlo keeps fighting. "You might as well ask why we breathe," Lazlo says. "If we stop breathing we die. If we stop fighting, the world dies." The lives of two little people may not seem to mean much in this mixed-up crazy world, but even he smallest actions by the smallest of people matter in the end. Sometimes they turn out to be the only thing that does matter. Ilsa gets on that plane. Rick goes off to join the Free French. I sit at a table and try to explain myself to myself and sometimes make just enough sense to help someone else--as each of us here does every day.

Odin gives up one of his eyes in order to be able to see the future. Each of us has lost something far more valuable, for our spouses were half of who we were. We have purchased, each of us, a knowledge of love the world desperately needs. Love does not end with death. And sometimes it grows into something even we cannot name: a love that is part amore, part compassion, part caritas, and part something indefinable.

Christ tells the parable of the rich man and the three servants. The rich man is going on a journey and leaves money with each of them, telling them to see what they can do with it. On his return, two of the servants have doubled what he gave them. The third buried his silver in the desert and did nothing with it.

Many of us have written about feeling we had been left behind to finish some project or other. Part of that work. I think, is sharing that love with the greater world. It begins here but cannot end here. And I see that in so many of us. We share that love here but we also share it in the larger world. Sometimes it is intentional. Sometimes we do it without a second thought. Look at how many of you do things to help others in other places doing other things. They give no medals for that work. It will not be mentioned in our obituaries. But it is work that changes the world one small bit of humanity at a time.

Marty talks above about sharing wisdom. It is not my wisdom I share here. It is the wisdom I have learned from each of you through your daily acts of kindness and mercy. No one comes here without being welcomed; no one cries here without being consoled; no one laughs here without others joining in the laughter. No one moves forward here without applause. I see it, I record it, I play it back to you and to the world.

But the wisdom and the love derive from us all.

Peace,

Harry

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Very eloquently put!

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Use full editor, then "attach files"...browse, add to post.

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Ok. Let's try to post pics of the Marathon Walk Weekend. My former student, Beth, dragooned two of her friends to put together a dinner to raise money to support her walk. Some of these pics are of that. The rest are from the walk and the end of the Walk when we got all of us who actually did walk together.

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Great pictures Harry, and I cannot even comment on what you have written, it is so beautiful and special. Mike loved The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. "you have to be careful when you step out your door in the morning--that the road outside your door can sweep you off to places you had no thought about going to" That is a wonderful way also to describe for me Mike's leaving, he was not ill, had no symptoms of the massive coronary to come, had talked to me only a few hours before on the phone, had attended a Theatre Company general meeting while I was in the hospital in Fayetteville, and was reporting to me the outcome of the elections. We talked and laughed and said goodnight, never to speak again, me never to see him again. I think he stepped out that "door" and was off to places he had no thought about going to. I appreciate that you put that thought in my head, somehow it seems right for Mike.

Mary (Queeniemary) in Arkansas

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Harry, that is great, thank you for sharing the pictures!

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Harry, thank you for the lovely photos which make it all so much more real for those of us far away. What a wonderful event, and congratulations on another successful project done from Love.

Bravo!

I, too, was touched by your quote. We actually have a place called the Shire, where we were planning to build a little hobbit house in a draw, under the old birch trees. A hobbit house that would "float" and be insulated from the permafrost, so as not to disturb the soil or the foundation. I may still do that one for my Hobbit Hole in Alaska, but the roof must be strong enough to hold a visiting moose. :) We have several who hang out in the slough below the place.

One of the last notes Doug wrote was to the men of the Shire, his climbing friends these past 40 years, there in Alaska. And they are all wonderfully honorable and good men, which makes it a very nice Shire, indeed.

Thank you for that brain connection.


*<twinkles>*

fae

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Oh, Queenie Mary,

I am so sorry that you had no time for goodbyes, but you know Mike heard you later on, I am sure.

I am spending these days coming to peace with all the things I did not do, some things I did, and what I could have done better for Doug. We were so blessed to be together those last days and hours. I am so sorry you missed that, and I hope you have found peace there. I think you have.

We will be turning and watching your next eye appointment news now.

*<twinkles>*

fae

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Queenie Mary,

That is one of the things I lamented as well, I'd have given anything to have had that last day alone with George. But he knew how I felt, so I have to have faith that he knew what I would have wanted to say. It is one of those things that stays with you though, isn't it?

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So many thoughts in these few posts. Harry, your strength amazes me. You are a positive example for all of us. Love the pictures and the ones on FB.

QueenieMary, I am so sorry that you did not get to say goodbye the way you wanted to but you can be sure that your Mike knows everything in your heart.

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