Can You Stand Alone?

Standing alone at the bottom of one of the greatest temples in the world, I gazed up in wonder at the ruins of a once-great city.  I thought of how many miles and years it took to get here.  To stand alone, in silence, on the other side of world.

To stand alone and completely secure in the knowledge that I could.  I thought of a promise I made to my mom nearly two years ago while she was in chemotherapy.

I don't usually talk about this promise.  I like to downplay that part of the past, brushing it off as a long time ago, as something best distanced from.  But the promise makes itself more relevant as time goes on.

"I don't think I can do this, Lisa," my Mom sobbed.  "I can't go through this again"

It was the middle of my second year of law school.  It was the last week of my Mom's experimental Interferon chemotherapy for treating Hepatitis C.  Until now, there was no known cure for Hep C.  A test study offered hope; some percentage of patients were cured in the first round of tests.  Some endured horrific side effects only to realize no cure, and, after months of cautious optimism, stared down the reality of a slow onset liver cirrhosis, and the eventual end of many Hep C patients --- liver failure; death.

No one really knew much of how their story would end, but only that it would.  With luck, it would not be now, it would not be soon; it would not be from the disease.

I stood there, watching her sob in her pink bathrobe, too weak and sick to move much.  Too tired and worn down from the daily regimen of "being strong" that people tell you to be when you're sick.  I had watched her live in that pink bathrobe for nearly six months since she rarely left the house.  Six months of immense pain and sickness as a side effect of the treatment.  Six months of cautious optimism.  Six months of experimental hope.

I knew all about the crushing blow of disappointment that usually followed cautious optimism.  I had just taken a refresher course not too long before that day.  I knew how, when all the signs pointed toward disappointment, the stubborn part of you hoped that everything was fine anyway.  You knew better than to hope for something impossible or improbable, but you did anyway.  You hoped because there was nothing else to do; like the results of that experimental study, some things were just out of your control, and your only choice was to hope for the best.

I had hoped all during my first year of law school that my marriage could survive the bumps we began to encounter.  I had hoped that they weren't signs of inevitable failure.  That they weren't signs of anything; I was just being paranoid.

Finding out that I was not paranoid was like falling up; like the odd sense one gets waking from a deep dream, the unreality of a few seconds before opening your eyes, the surreal sense of watching something happen to you and not actually being there.  You keep waiting to just wake up because it must be some kind of nightmare.  The same way that some people don't realize an arm is broken until they go to move it.  Nothing really can describe the moment when you eventually find your deepest fears realized, and I would not wish on even my worst enemy that they be experienced enough in it to know.  All those danger signs were real.  When all you have done is hope for the best, but not at all planned for the worst.  At some point, the evidence you uncover is undeniable.  Cautious optimism ends.

I remember trying to go for a run the day I found out for certain my trust had been ultimately betrayed; I remember feeling nothing when I tied up my running shoes and left.  I had a ten mile trail run to do that day, so I just kept moving.  I drove to my trail and took off.  No, I thought.  Just keep moving.  This can't be real.  Just keep moving.

But somewhere in the middle of that run, I began to hyperventilate as my mind ran through the details of all the things I had just seen and read.  Each agonizing, incontrovertible detail.  I began to sob, and I couldn't breathe.  I had to stop and sob, just sob, and I sobbed until I couldn't move anymore.  On the side of a desert road, covered in sweat and on my knees in the dirt, pricked by cactus and bleeding, miles from my truck or civilization, I let the pain bleed out of me until it was done.  Until I cried too much to feel anything anymore.  Until my guts couldn't handle anything else.  Until my body had no choice but to slow down and breathe.

Well, I thought, this is it.  This really is happening.

I sat in the desert and looked around me, submitted into silence by its solidarity, forced into listening to only the wind and my own soul.  I stared up at the vast horizon and endless rolling California hills of dry brush I grew up in.  Yucca plants jutting out from patches of brown bushes and the spaghetti-like wisps of orange-yellow Angel's Hair vines draped over them.  Scat from a coyote.  The side-winding marks in the sand of a small snake's path.  Bushes crackling and whispering with the tiny gusts of wind, an ant wandering up my calf.  The ant was lost, in a panic, trying to find its trail in the sand again.  The heat was dry and weightless, the chirp of a cricket sounded out a comforting, consistent rhythm, like a high-pitch heartbeat.  Night would come soon.

Then, I stood up.  I finished the run.

One thing was certain.  If I didn't finish those last miles, the people who hurt me would always defeat me.  I would set a precedent for allowing their failures to become my failures somehow.  I would become a plastic, usable thing subject to what people had made me out to be instead of the person I chose or wanted to be.  If I didn't finish that run I would crumble, blow away, and I would never be able to find all the blown-away pieces I needed to put myself back together again.

Sitting in the desert that day, I didn't really know much of how my story would end.  All I knew is that it would not be now, it would not be soon, and it would not be from a broken heart.  I knew this was just the beginning --- that the grief would be that of crushing, immeasurable loss, and that things would never be the same.  I didn't know how I would come back from this.  How I would ever have the kind of life I had just twenty four hours earlier.  How I would ever trust again, feel safe trusting again, or believe someone when they said they loved me.  I didn't know if I would stay or if I would go.  I didn't know if I could live with doing either.  Each choice was a loss, each path looked equally terrifying.  I was just too young to become a divorcee.  I had chosen the life I wanted as a wife; I didn’t want a different life.  Twenty-four hours ago, I had been deeply content, ready to spend the rest of my life this way.  At the same time, I didn’t know how to stay.  I had vowed long ago to never accept someone who couldn’t commit fully.  I didn't know how I would put my relationship or my heart back together again from the shattered mess of pieces it had now undeniably become, no matter which path I chose.  I didn’t know how I would reassemble these pieces back into a life.

All I knew for certain is that this last mile would be the first piece.

It takes a good deal of resolve to yell at your mother when she's on chemo.  But six months after I had gone on that fateful run, it was the only thing I could think to do.  Of all the times to give up, now was not one of them.  I decided to sway her with a running metaphor; as a life-long runner and athlete, she would understand it.  Hopefully it would strike the right nerve.

"I don't think I can do this, Lisa," my Mom sobbed.  "I can't go through this again"

"NO!" I told her, "Absolutely fucking not.  What do you do during your last mile of a marathon?"

She stopped crying immediately, shocked, wide-eyed, her little mouth hanging open.  She hadn't seen my anger coming.

When one admits defeat, one usually expects sorrow, sympathy, commiseration.  But when the race is not yet over, that is not what we need.

The question made her stop panicking just long enough to actually think; I could tell she knew the answer already, but I said it anyway, just to be sure.

"You do whatever it takes in your last mile.  I don't care how much it hurts, you finish it.  I don't care if you're missing feet.  You crawl on bloody fucking nubs where feet used to be.  You're finishing this treatment and taking that last shot of Interferon, no matter how sick you get.  You're crawling on your bloody fucking nubs even if I have to drag you myself."

Then, she stood up.  She finished the treatment.

So what exactly was the promise to my Mom on chemo?  It was simple.  Infallible in its wisdom, undeniable in its truth.  We promised to push each other through our pain, and that neither of us would ever give up moving forward, even if it meant crawling to the finish line on the bloody nubs where feet used to be.

By the time I told this to her, the advice I gave her had seemed to become some odd prophecy for this time in my life.  That first run was, in fact, just the beginning of things falling apart.  That particular part of my life fell apart senselessly, as these things always do, and with each step forward there seemed to be some new species of unbearable loss and heartache I had yet to learn or understand or expect.  As much as I tried to stay, things could never be the way they once were.  That part of the past was over; done; dead.  Trying to revive it became like trying to breathe life back into a corpse.  I was living life in the wrenching sickness and mourning of sorrow, like a TV character crying hopelessly over a dead body as they give it CPR and the medic pulls them away.  In time I had to learn to accept the loss of someone and something I truly loved with all my heart.

Still, life is not without its victories.  My Mom completed the treatment study, and months later the results came back: cured.  Cured, 100% free of any virus.  I was thankful beyond measure, and the lesson of it was not lost on me: keep running that last mile.  If you run through the pain, there is eventually change, there is always new growth.

I remember losing myself profoundly in the grief of loss.  I remember days and months going by without having the desire to leave my bed, or to eat, or to be awake and aware of anything.  I remember the complete and utter loss of hope that I would ever be okay again.  I remember what it was like to feel nothing – no joy, not in anything, not even the things you once loved.

…Save one thing. 

One spark, one part of life that always been immune from sorrow since the first day I began to do it over ten years ago.

I remember the first day I joined Blackhouse Team Nogueira was in the midst of that crushing grief.

“I want to fight,” I told the coaches.  “I came here to fight.”

That became the one hour each day that the grief lifted, the one hour each day where I set aside the grief long enough to grow and become the best possible version of myself.  That hour began to encompass whole days, and those whole days turned into weeks, and those weeks into months.  I surrounded myself with these positive people, all sharing similar dreams and all facing their own challenges, all inspiring in their ability to just keep fighting, to just keep crawling “on bloody nubs.”  By the end of the first summer, it was clear to me then; I had found an ironclad way to keep that promise to my mom on chemo.  More than ever before, I understood who I was.  I was a fighter.  Like so many of the people I now knew, I was a fighter because I simply made the choice to be one.  The choice to keep pushing past pain.  Not only did I keep the promise to stay in the race despite the grief, I found the finish line.  I eventually found the other side of the grief.  The key was not waiting around for things to change; it was not some new person to fill some void, nor was it approval or commiseration from anyone else.  The key was in becoming stronger, strong enough to love life and myself in it, myself standing in it alone.  The key was to love myself more than I ever thought I could, more than anyone else had.  The key was to stand alone.

I stood alone at the bottom of the temple, looking around me in each direction.  I inhaled deep, tasting the humid jungle air. 

Well, I thought with all the excitement of a child on Christmas morning, this is it.  This really is happening.