“Suicidal thoughts?”
“None.” Never. By the time I was ten, both my parents had threatened suicide in front of me. You make me want to put a gun to my head. It inoculated me against any personal interest in that path.
“Hopelessness?”
“None.”
“That’s good.” She writes something on her legal pad while I watch the late-afternoon sun bounce off the Space Needle.
“I mean, futility, yes,” I say. She looks up. “But in, like, a Sisyphean sense. I wouldn’t call it hopelessness per se.” She raises an eyebrow. “‘Hopelessness’ is a very specific word,” I explain.
“Maybe we should come back to this,” she says.
* * *
Later that week I drive to a park near Kirkland to watch people run the Pigtails Challenge, a 200-mile trail race. To be fair, only the crazy people are running all 200 miles; the normal ones are just doing 100 or 150. The course is a 10-mile loop of packed dirt, so you run it once, and then again and again until your life is over. The first time I ran a half marathon, at the end of mile one I thought, See, that was easy, and you only have to do it twelve more times!—a thought I immediately regretted. I imagine some of the Pigtail runners finish the first loop, say Only nineteen more! to themselves, and then tear their clothes off and spin around in circles, weeping.
The Pigtails Challenge is so long and hard that, as with many ultramarathons, you’re allowed to have people run parts of it with you. Officially, they are meant to help you stick to a certain pace, but any ultra-runner will tell you it’s also about helping you keep your shit together in the later stages of the race. At least that’s how our friend pitched it to my husband when he asked him to be his pacer in miles seventy through eighty: “I just need you to talk to me and help me go slow enough.”
“I can talk and be slow,” John said. And now they’re out there together, somewhere on the Lake Youngs Watershed. I’ve driven here to cheer them on, but I might not even get to see them—so much depends on when the friend started, how fast he’s going, how long I stay. And it doesn’t much matter, because I’m not really here to be a fan. I’m a tourist: I came to see what futility looks like and how people go on once they’ve figured out there’s no point to going on.
I’ve only run big races with corporate sponsorship. Those have a slicker vibe, with massage tents and shoe-sensor timing and kids’ dashes and all the free glucose gel you can stand. This is not that. This is a few rented tents, a whiteboard for tracking time, and half a dozen people, mostly lanky forty-something guys in fleece, grilling hot dogs. The only way I’m sure I’ve arrived at the right place is the large electronic clock that says this race started twenty-six hours ago. I wouldn’t even think they had a permit except that one guy says, “Should we get out the beer at some point?” and another guy replies, “Yeah, except I told King County we weren’t bringing beer, so let’s wait till dark.”
It’s a typical late-spring Seattle day: gray, cool, and drizzly. Perfect running weather but less ideal for standing around watching. I have a mild case of Raynaud’s syndrome, meaning one of my arteries sometimes freaks out in cold weather, and one or more fingertips turn deathly white. It’s happening with my right index finger now, so I grab a cup of hot water at the tent to warm it up. I wait for someone to ask who I am and what I’m doing there; I am always sort of waiting for people to ask who I am and what I’m doing there, even at the movies or the grocery store. But they just smile and say, “Hey.”
I smile back and wander to where the trail emerges from the woods, on the lookout for human suffering.
I expect the first sufferer to be white, sinewy, and sort of Jesus-y looking like the guys in the tent, because that’s mostly what I see on my own trail runs, not to mention in the streets, offices, restaurants, and retail establishments of the entire Pacific Northwest. But it’s a robust black woman in her forties, and she’s smiling. “Hey, girl, hey!” she calls out to the tent dudes as she jogs up.
“Hey, girl, hey!” the tent dudes call back. She hangs out for about ten minutes, eating pretzels and chatting about the new truck someone just bought, then heads back out while we clap. She’s so cheerful and energetic that I think it must be early in her race. But no: “Just three laps to go!” the keeper of the whiteboard calls after her. That means even if she’s only running the hundred-mile distance, she’s seventy miles in. I am a stoic animal who hides her pain, and even I would have stopped hey-girling by mile sixty.
My second chance to see a human being struggle not to implode in the face of nothingness comes a few minutes later. This woman is poker-faced and less chatty than the first. She visits the Porta-John, grabs a handful of potato chips, and gets right back on the trail. “Hey, you forgot to ask my race number!” she calls over her shoulder to the timekeeper.
“Oh yeah, what’s your number?” the timekeeper asks, though he’s already jotted down her time.
“867-5309,” she sings, and disappears around the bend.
What is up with these people? I think. Do they not understand that this is a desperate situation?
* * *
“Tell me more about the futility,” Carol says.
I pick up a throw pillow and clutch it on my lap. “Well, let’s say I finish writing this book and it does okay.”
She nods. “You publish a successful book.”
“‘Successful’ is a complicated word,” I say. “Let’s just say it earns enough money that the publisher wants another one.” Carol nods in assent, or at least acceptance. “Then I’ll have to write another one.”
“I thought you wanted to write another one,” she says.
“Oh, I do. But that’s not the point,” I say.
“Okay,” Carol says.
“And then there’s my job. I’m enjoying it. I feel genuinely valued. It’s going well.”
She smiles. “Certainly sounds that way.”
“But what happens when you do well at work?” I ask her. “They ask you to do more work. That’s the best-case scenario. Like the best-case scenario for writing a book is writing another book. Like the best-case scenario for running is you don’t get hurt and you can keep running.”
Carol leans forward a little. “But unless something has drastically changed, you love all these things.”
“I do,” I tell her. “But isn’t it kind of horrific that they just go on and on and on? And then, you know, after that I’m going to die.”
* * *
I was a death-obsessed child. I bruised easily, and the cancer-kid stories in Reader’s Digest always started with mysterious bruises. I’d read them and go to my mother with a lump in my throat and tell her I was worried I might have cancer. “Worrying about something won’t stop it from happening,” she’d say, “so you might as well not worry.” Which, in her defense, might have been great advice to give to another adult, but not an eight-year-old.
I got sick a lot, too—missed weeks of school with bronchitis and tonsillitis and stomach pain that crystallized my entire being into a single abdominal knot. Getting sick for real was a relief because how could I come down with cancer when I already had something else? Also, my mother was extra nice when I was sick, bringing me Archie comics from the drugstore and letting me watch talk shows all day. She got sick a lot, too, so it was nice to finally have something in common.
By the time I was in middle school, I worried less about dying slowly from cancer and more about being vaporized in a nuclear war. This fear peaked around the time The Day After aired on television. I was much too scared to watch the film, but I read everything I could find about it to learn exactly how I could expect to die and how long it would take and how much it would hurt. Every time I went outside, I looked up into the clear blue Florida sky for missiles. Finally, I broke down and asked my mother if she thought maybe South Florida, being remote from the rest of the country, might be unharmed in a nuclear war. “There’s not a damn thing I can do to stop a nuclear war, so I just don’t think about
it,” she said.
“Okay, but thinking about it now, do you think we’d be all right?” I pleaded.
“I have no idea, but I know worrying about it won’t stop it from happening,” she said.
Sometimes when I was at the public library reading up on nuclear war, I would also take a few minutes to research Alzheimer’s disease. My mother’s mother had been diagnosed in her early fifties and was by then in a nursing home, dying. Time magazine said the early-onset form might be hereditary. I wondered how long it would be until my own mother became confused and then hostile and then violent and then pale and skeletal and shadowy. I couldn’t ask her, so I returned obsessively to the same news articles, looking for the line I’d missed that said, “Oh, but of course none of this will ever actually happen,” or “But of course a cure is mere weeks away.” I made up an escalating strain of early-onset Alzheimer’s whereby my mother would be struck in her forties and then me in my thirties. I could spend hours almost physically frozen, imagining what it would be like to lose my mind in my thirties—an old age, yes, but young-old.
Fortunately, by the time I was sixteen, I’d figured out that alcohol was the cure for all of my anxieties, and I stopped worrying so much about cancer and dementia and vaporization. It wasn’t until college that an agonizing death from AIDS came to seem like an inevitability, because I was having sex with a few different guys and only using condoms 98 percent of the time. I had read a story in People magazine about Alison Gertz, a young white woman from an affluent family who had gotten AIDS through a single heterosexual encounter. If it could happen to her, it definitely would happen to me, I reasoned. I also got it into my head that bad sex raised the likelihood of contracting AIDS, though if that were true, young women worldwide would have been dropping like flies. I walked around for months fairly sure I was HIV positive but terrified to get tested or even talk to a doctor about it. After all, there was no cure. There was barely a treatment. My best option for not dying was simply to refuse to acknowledge it.
Once I’d finished school, picked just the one best guy to sleep with, and moved a thousand miles away from my parents, my health terrors gradually faded. If you don’t count the anthrax and smallpox and super-flu episodes that sent me to the Internet for face masks and gloves and black-market Cipro, all of which still occupy a shelf in my utility closet. Because you never know. Alcohol helped to bury those terrors, too, as long as I paid close attention to the articles about wine preventing heart disease and ignored the ones about wine causing heart disease, plus cancer, depression, and liver failure.
My eventual sobriety, which I’d imagined would feel like a lifelong panic attack, turned out to be more like ripping off a giant Band-Aid: a moment of searing pain followed by wonder that I’d ever thought I needed that much protection. Now I rarely worry about the manner of my death, though I still take issue with the fact that it has to happen at all.
* * *
Finally, someone who fits my vision of an ultra-runner emerges from the woods—over fifty and well over six feet tall, with brown dreadlocks to his knees and retractable hiking poles strapped to his waist. He’s wearing the minimalist shoes that are supposed to be like running barefoot and has tattoos on the backs of his astonishing, tree-trunk thighs. At the aid tent, they ask what he wants to eat. I wait for him to pull a chewed-up root out of his shorts and say, I am nourished by the spirits of the trees.
“How about something to make me run faster, not feel pain, and be in a better mood?” he says. “A steroid smoothie, maybe.”
“We have pizza,” the guy manning the grill says.
“Even better!”
While the dreadlocked guy is eating, a woman comes in and heads straight to a white tent set up away from the others. “I’m going to sleep for a couple of hours,” she calls. Before she zips herself in, I see four white cots lined up inside.
Another man appears, the first person I’ve seen all afternoon who is full-on running rather than shuffling or jogging. He’s also the first one who doesn’t stop to eat, pee, or rest. “RUNNING SUCKS BALLS!!!” he yells as he flies past us.
The dreadlocked guy chews and swallows. “It’s hard to argue with that,” he says to no one in particular.
Over the next hour I start noticing that almost every runner is walking kind of funny. Their arrivals and departures are slow even by my standards. Aid-tent breaks seem downright leisurely, but no one sits down. I ask someone why and am told it’s for fear of never getting back up. I also learn that the trekking poles are for walking the uphills.
Wait. Walking the uphills? That counts? I walk sometimes during my runs and races, but I thought that just meant I sucked. Later, I ask an ultra-runner friend about this. “Well, yeah,” he says. “You have to pace yourself. You can’t just barrel through.”
“That’s not how I’ve been doing it,” I say. My version of pacing is to run hard and fast until I can’t anymore, then walk to recover, then run hard and fast until I can’t anymore (which happens faster each time), and so on.
Early in my running career—which is the wrong word, it’s more like a running internship—I said to this same friend, “When I’m running, I basically cycle through the five stages of grief over and over in my mind.”
He laughed. “You’re doing it wrong.”
“I don’t know how to do it right!”
“You’ll figure it out.”
“Why don’t you just tell me, Yoda?”
I had assumed people who ran a hundred-mile race would be preternaturally in tune with their bodies and minds. But everything I’ve seen today says they’re just good at adapting to conditions. They do what works, whatever and whenever that is.
I think back to my first six months sober and how clear it became that I needed my life to not, as the man said, suck balls. It hit me within weeks that I needed a happier job, more practice saying no, more sleep, more time outside. More time in general, for walking the uphills.
And it felt futile. The notion of stacking up sober day after sober day until the occasion of my funeral felt fucking pointless. All that effort, just to die. I didn’t know then that eventually I’d stop stacking days. That I’d just be living a life. That I wouldn’t have to pay close attention to every root and rock on the path in front of me. That I’d be sure-footed enough to also notice the trees and the wind and even the occasional owl and to realize that both time and space were far denser than I ever knew.
* * *
Carol can’t really argue with the fact that I’m going to die, though she looks as if she might like to. “Yes, after writing lots of books and running lots of miles, you’ll die someday. We all will,” she says.
I shrug. I have decided to prioritize worrying about my own death over the death of everyone else except for close family members, my dogs, and, for reasons I don’t fully understand, Michael Stipe.
“Do you think you’re going to die young?”
“Not really, but I guess it depends what ‘young’ means.”
She stares at her bookshelf for a moment. I think she might be looking for a heavy book to hurl at me, but when she speaks again, she speaks softly.
“You are perilously close to having the life you’ve always wanted,” she says. “It’s not surprising to me that you would panic.”
“I know,” I say as I grip the throw pillow tighter. “I know.”
* * *
For thirty years I watched my mother closely for signs of dementia. Dropped words, illogical statements, a tendency to jump wildly from topic to topic. “I think it might be starting,” I’d say to John, who would respond gently, “I think it might just be how your mother is.”
Two years ago, my parents were at our house for dinner, and my grandmother came up in conversation. “I’m so relieved you didn’t get early-onset Alzheimer’s, too,” I said to my mother.
“Oh, Mother didn’t have that,” my mom said. “Didn’t we tell you?”
“No?” I said.
“She had Pic
k’s disease,” my father said. “It has the same symptoms, but it’s not genetic. Well, not usually.”
“How do you know this?”
“From the autopsy,” my dad said. “I’m sure we told you this.”
“You did not tell me this,” I said, staring across the table at John.
“It doesn’t sound familiar,” John piped in.
“Huh,” said my father. “I guess we just forgot.”
“For thirty years I have been waiting for a devastating genetic brain disease to strike Mom, then me,” I said.
“I really thought we’d told you,” my mother said. “Sorry, baby.”
“I guess we just figured you would know,” my father said.
After dinner, John and I wave in the driveway as my parents drive off. When they’re gone, he turns to me and says, “I guess they just figured you would know,” and we laugh so hard we can’t talk.
* * *
While I’m texting a friend and distracted from the race, John finishes his pacer loop. I find him eating a Clif Bar at the aid tent. “Oh, hey,” he says casually. He seems pretty chipper for someone who just ran ten miles. “It was great,” he says. “I think I could do another one. I mean, literally another one.” His friend is already back out there alone, with thirty miles to go.
“I think part of me thought you were going to have a heart attack and die,” I tell him.
“I know, baby,” he says.
It’s raining for real now, and at home the dogs are waiting for dinner. John walks me to my car and sees the bag I keep there with a set of running clothes and my second-best shoes, for times I’m seized by the urge to head out. That bag has saved me from drinking, panic, yelling at John, upending a conference table. Once I start moving, everything trapped in my head flows into my body, where there’s space for it to soften and diffuse. It’s still mildly shocking to me that my body can take on the pain of running and the pain of my thoughts and thrive. Maybe all those years I was waiting for it to fall apart, it just needed a job to do. “It seems like if we can, we should,” a friend once said about running. That’s what I come back to when I find myself slogging down a muddy trail or up a steep hill, thinking, Why are you doing this? Because I can. Because for now, my legs are willing.
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