Running on Empty (3 page)

We were both quiet during the seventy-mile drive back home from the hospital. Neither of us could say it out loud: We might never have another child, and Elaine might grow up without a mother.
Jean might die.
What we'd heard in that sterile room overwhelmed my wife; although she'd known, on some level, that her cancer could be deadly, she hadn't really accepted that fact until she realized that her future as a mother was threatened. The realization knocked Jean off-kilter for a few days, but she eventually regained her footing, deciding that what she needed to do was take this one step at a time, try to get well, and then we'd figure out what to do next. Everything had become incomprehensibly complex.

After Jean healed from the surgery, our lives changed, but not as drastically as you might expect. We kept up our normal routine as much as possible: Jean went to her office and continued to practice law five days a week. I took Elaine with me to Fort Morgan early every morning, left her with a friend, and then put in a long day at the rendering plant. Sometime around six or seven o'clock, I'd pick up Elaine and head back to our house; occasionally, I'd stay later than that and Jean would get Elaine, or I'd go back to the plant in the middle of the night, depending on my workload. Jean never brought work home, so she could focus her attention on the family, and was always eager to have our daughter back in her arms. We dealt with this crisis by compartmentalizing: There was home, work, and the medical merry-go-round—which we desperately hoped would solve this problem for us. We tried to keep it all as separate as possible, acting as if everything would be okay if we kept moving forward, just as Jean had resolved, taking one step at a time.

She was a trouper, although it's true what they say about cancer: Sometimes the treatment is as awful as any illness might be. Jean lost both of her breasts and some tissue under her arms to the radical mastectomy, and then her hair fell out from the chemotherapy. She was often weak, nauseated, and off balance, and she had no appetite, so she dropped weight, yet she was puffy from taking prednisone. She worried about what I thought of her appearance. Honestly, I couldn't have cared less about that and was simply grateful to have her home with us, no matter how much this cruel disease might change her. It did make me sad and angry that cancer could attack my wife so viciously, so senselessly, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

Jean was mad, too. “Why me? I don't smoke or drink. What have I ever done to bring this on myself?”

Staring blankly, I was completely incapable of answering her, but I could empathize. “I understand. I'd be furious if it was me.”

And what if it
was
me . . . next? I couldn't help wondering. Her illness made me acknowledge my own mortality, along with my powerlessness and the vulnerability of everyone around me. If this could happen to Jean, such a good person, so smart and loving and health conscious, who was safe? What about Elaine? Could I really protect anyone I loved?

Once, when Jean went to the hospital for a spinal biopsy, a long procedure that involved an intimidating surgical drilling device and a lot of waiting, a nurse took my blood pressure to kill some time. She deftly avoided telling me my results but talked with Jean about it later. The numbers were through the roof, something like 160/110. My wife urged me to see our family physician.

The doc confirmed my hypertension and had one piece of advice: cardiovascular exercise. The problem was stress-induced, as my blood pressure had been rock solid until then. I was extremely fit from my work at the rendering plant and from my fairly recent foray into salt-curing hides, demanding physical work that had given us the money we needed to put Jean through law school. At five feet, nine inches and 148 pounds, I was lean and muscular, but the pressures of my personal life were squeezing my heart.

My brother Steve liked to run and would enter a few races here and there. Jean's boss at the law firm was a runner, too, and he encouraged me to get outside and blow off some steam.

“It'll do you good.”

So I pulled on a pair of low-top canvas Converse shoes I'd had since I was thirteen, and I stepped out the front door of our house to go on my first jog. No music to accompany me, of course; this was 1980. (Not even an early-model Walkman, as Sony hadn't introduced portable cassette players to U.S. markets yet.) I listened to the sound of my breath, pulling hard through my mouth, my jaw tight. As I picked up the pace, my heart pounding, I wondered why the hell any adult would run if he didn't have to. I didn't like that feeling of gasping for air, my leg muscles straining, my feet slapping the pavement until I turned off the road and into the woods, where at least the ground was softer. I ran a couple of miles.

The next day I was sore and uninterested in ever doing that again.

But I did do it again, of course. I took a break for one day, and then I got back out there because I knew I had to. After a week of off-and-on “training,” I entered my first race, the Fort Morgan Times 5K, and got done in just over twenty minutes—once again ahead of Steve, who was unamused. At the finish, I congratulated him, and he gave me a dead-eyed stare, then walked away into the crowd of runners, distraught. Soon after that, he quit running altogether, for which I sort of blame myself.

Running provided an excellent distraction from my life, which was filled with the stress of my business, my little girl's confusion about what was happening to her mom, doctor's appointments, and the looming threat of death, coupled with the effort of maintaining my denial. While running, I could focus on something else: It provided mental relief and emotional release, an escape into physical effort. Sometimes, the real world would catch up with me, and I'd duck behind a bush and allow myself to indulge in sorrow and self-pity, crying openly, something I never did at home. But most of the time, I kept plugging along, fantasizing about something completely unrelated to my existence at the moment. In my mind, I explored other continents, scaled Everest, trod the jungles of Borneo and the Australian outback, paddled the rivers of Patagonia.

In short order, the regular cardiovascular exercise worked to bring my blood pressure down and keep it in check. Nearly every day started with an early-morning run, which I finished by about 6:30 a.m. so that I could get back to the house for Elaine and then on to work for the day. It was also good for me to be able to go off on my own, both physically and mentally, whenever I'd reached my emotional limits. When I'd feel as if I was going to break down in front of Jean, who I believed needed me to be unfailingly positive and strong, I'd head out for a run, where I could think about her, admit my sadness, let the tears flow, dwell on something else for a while, and then come back to the house in better shape to care for my wife and child. I felt guilty about spending time away from my family, but I also knew I was literally running for my life.

Jean's treatments seemed to do the trick, at least for a while. But less than a year after her surgery, the cancer returned with a vengeance, and she stopped working as the disease consumed her body. She sought comfort in being with family and friends, spent time reading the Bible. Her doctors tried an experimental treatment that brought her white blood cell count down to dangerous levels, leaving her susceptible to infection. Any visitors had to wear face masks, and Elaine was banned from the room. Many times before, though, when Jean had been in the hospital and in better health, Elaine had played on the white bed, chattering and singing and showering her mother with kisses. Now, when I had to come alone, the pleasant distraction was gone and the disease became more present, the nearness of Jean's death more real. At these times, we'd talk about Elaine's future, and what we wanted for her. During one of these hospital-room discussions, Jean asked me to promise that I'd secure a place for Elaine at a college on the East Coast, where Jean imagined she would have gone had she not decided to put our romance and then our family first. (Not that she had any regrets, she assured me. She wanted Elaine to have opportunities she might have pursued herself.) She especially liked Wellesley College, a school she believed would help our daughter become the kind of person we both aspired to raise: an educated, self-possessed, strong woman with a dedication to and passion for her life's work. Of course, I promised Jean I would do all I could, though I insisted she'd be around to do it herself.

It had become obvious that Jean was dying, but I couldn't confront that reality. I sought solace in increasing distances and thinking about faraway places. The mounting mileage was intimidating but exhilarating, and on race days, I was regularly finishing in the top 5 or 10 percent. As the distances grew, I spent even less time at home. I ran until I was emptied out, and then I ran some more. Until I could come back to my wife and not start screaming or crying or explode into a million pieces at the sight of what the cancer was doing to her.

Jean was supportive, as she could see that this outlet was becoming increasingly important to me, giving me a way to cope. In June 1981, I competed in an especially tough race, a 14.5-mile slog on the highest paved road in the United States, running up nearly four thousand vertical feet—my first attack on serious elevation gain—and Jean came out to cheer me at the finish. Atop Mount Evans at 14,264 feet and weak from a recent chemotherapy treatment, she still jumped up and down, excited for my achievement; I'd earned the Mount Evans Trophy Run prize for those of us who finished in the top 10 percent, a chunk of rock with a plaque commemorating the effort. Seeing her this way was incredible: It looked to me as if she'd finished America's highest road race herself. In those moments, she was vibrant, happy for me, alive.

There was one day, though, when Jean lay in her bed at home in a darkened room, battered and exhausted from all that the disease was doing to her. The gloomy scene made me claustrophobic: my wife wasting away in a lightless cavern.

I wanted to run and told her so.

“How can you leave me right now? How can you be so callous? I need you. I'm so tired. Please stay.”

I have to run.

“Don't go! Please. God, I'm so alone . . .”

I looked at her, desperate to go.

“Marshall.”

I left.

I did: I ran, and I still regret it. I never could admit and talk honestly about my own fear of being left alone, without her, although both of us knew how sick she was. I'm embarrassed to admit that the one time she asked me, straight out, if I thought she was going to die, I couldn't bring myself to say yes.

“No.” It felt like a betrayal, but I lied to her anyway, and I tried to lie to myself.

The cancer metastasized to her brain and crossed her eyes, then ravaged her lungs, her bones, and finally her liver. In November 1981, when the doctors said there was nothing more they could do, we took Jean home to her parents' place in Greeley, where we stayed for a couple of weeks, her pain mitigated by morphine shots a hospice nurse taught me to give her. One night I carried her into bed, and we lay down together for the last time. At about one o'clock in the morning, I heard an unearthly gasp as my thirty-year-old wife took her last breath.

In the days after, our family surrounded Elaine and me. I never talked with anyone about it, but my mind was racked with despair and fear:
Why did this happen to Jean? What am I supposed to do now? How will I take care of Elaine by myself? Will I be the next to die? Is life even worth living?
Although I agonized in private, it was clear to everyone around me that I felt lost and was struggling to feel whole again. In the last couple of weeks, I'd dropped ten pounds, and I looked gaunt. With a sunken chest, a collapsed face, and an eerie emptiness in my eyes, I must have appeared a shrunken shadow of my former self.

Ever the practical person, my mom counseled me to move on. It's time to get on with your life, son. Put away your tears. Be a man. Stand on your own two feet. Depend upon yourself. What you need to do is get back to work.

So that's what I did.

—Robert Frost, “Desert Places”