Kairos, Death, Running, and Possibly Beer

Janna, your post really made me think about how we deal with tragedy. I have had some similar experiences and I’d like to take this post to discuss how they have impacted me. My husband passed away two years ago this Wed Sept 28^th. My son was five months old at the time and I was faced with taking care of a baby and trying to figure out how to stay afloat financially and emotionally. He had been sick for a while but it was still a shock and I had no idea how I handle this without completely falling apart, which did happen at times especially those first few months. At first I found comfort in everyday routines. Any sort of repetitive action like doing the laundry or mopping the floor helped me to keep my mind straight. Mindless activities are a great way to zen out. There are a lot of people you have to call and business you have to deal with when someone dies. I got very organized and spent days calling banks, mortgage companies, credit card companies and government offices. I don’t know how many times I fought with incompetent people over the phone but it was a lot and that became part of my routine and I got very good at it. My friends saw this anger in me and about a month after my husband passed away they suggested I start running to release some of this frustration. I did a 5k on Halloween that year and I thought I was going to die but I finished it. At some point, and I don’t really know exactly when, maybe it was the morning of the 5k, but at some point, spurred by tragicomic hope and no other choice I decided to throw myself into rewriting the mythos of my life. I had thought my life story was finished. I was a high school teacher, a wife, and a mom but I had to come to terms with the fact that now I was a widow. I don’t like that word mostly because I feel like it doesn’t fully explain the situation and I think a label changes everything about a person-in both good and bad ways. But the fact remains that I am a widow and this has changed me. For the past two years I’ve thrown myself into running. I started slow, only a 5k here and there but every little step I took repositioned me. I did my first half-marathon in the summer of 2010 and my second in the fall of that same year. I was really slow and it was really embarrassing but again I finished. Running has reshaped my life and I think of it as a kind of metaphor for a pragmatic approach to everyday rhetoric. You have choices to make while running-some small some big. Your body must move across the path in a fluid movement shifting slightly here and there to account for differences in the landscape. You learn quickly through experience how to run so your knees don’t hurt, or how to run uphill while still conserving energy, or how to use other runners as pacing guides without looking like a creeper- that took me a while to figure out. After my husband’s death I had to learn how to navigate life in a similar fashion. Fluid, always moving, always shifting, forever negotiating and re-imaging my story. I realized that our life stories are never over, even after death. So what is my story now? Well I’m running my first full marathon in two weeks on Oct. 9^th. Here’s hoping my feet take every kairotic moment and move me towards the finish line so I can get that free post-race beer.