My friend enters the Dublin City Marathon. I offer to train with her to ten miles. Each week is like being in a pub at last orders. Ah sure, we’ll have the one we came in for, we’ll do a few more miles. The miles of pretend training clock up to twenty. Finally, I admit that throughout training, I have wanted to do this. I acquire an entry in someone else’s name.
This Marathon will mark the end of my bereavement after laying my parents to rest. My final symbolic letting go of Dublin, a city I left 25 years previously. It will be my pilgrimage. It will allow me to reassemble my circle, without parents or family home. I tried to catch the good memories when each of them died. They hid for a while and they may or may not come back.
There are twenty two thousand people on the start line this Sunny October Day. How many are happy or sad. I imagine their grief as a grey cloud, sweat running off bodies, sweat stuck to bodies, head hanging with loneliness, heads strong with relief or inside thoughts that are not visible.
We are off. I can’t believe I’m running by the iconic St Stephens Green as part of the Dublin City Marathon, only ever seen by me on telly. Now I’m in it. My head stands high. Crowds carry us with their cheers. I brim with emotions and struggle to identify feelings of pride, happiness, relief sorrow, nerves. A flicker of sadness: my parents are not here to see me. So far all is going to plan. Just like a funeral. You plan, you schedule, and you manage crowds and catering. I remember feeding the ducks with Mammy in Stephen’s Green, looking at the fountain, walking on the pond the year it was frozen.
The old t-shirt gets pulled off and dumped. It’s one I don’t like, but I earned it at an event, so held on to it for years. Emptying the house, it’s hard to throw things out. It takes a skill, a special sense or a good friend to tell you the time is right. You have to keep returning to things and they will tell you when they are ready to go. People are different. They generally don’t have a choice about when they will be tossed.
Gloves are off at mile 3. Next, the white, long sleeve top. Stripped to the core. Ready. I have to face this marathon myself. Like grief. We reach Stoneybatter. I toss my hat to the side of the street, unwittingly leaving a coded message for my daughter, my sole family supporter on this route. Our times are out of sync. Loneliness starts to stack inside me when I don’t see her. Later, she sees her childhood hat on the ground. I have already moved on.
Miles 4 and 5, I cruise Chesterfield Avenue. Trips to Cavan through the Phoenix Park on a quiet Sunday morning. In a rhythm now, we chat to pacers. We are all friends. I’m convinced we’ll be together forever. At least to the finish line. It is not to be. I am unaware of what is ahead. I never see any of them again after 13 miles.
Mile 6 has me coming out of the beautiful Castleknock Gates on this Autumnal Sunday morning. It could be a family trip in the 1970s if I was in the back of a car. The street is quiet. This road leads nowhere for me now. No Granny or Uncle Philip to visit, no Mammy to bring us there, no Daddy to drive us. No stopping in the palindrome town for bread (sliced batch loaf). An empty damp farmhouse. The last time I was there, ivy was growing in the window of the main bedroom. Aunty Anna let me take the heavy lace curtains. Today the road nudges me along my marathon journey. This is the only road I can go today. There will be no deviation. I will follow the course.
Maybe, just maybe I will see my cousin here. I keep my eyes peeled, looking out for someone who is not there. Loud music surges from a temporary stage. We wave and smile. We dance a little. Lonely spirits temporarily regenerated.
On strange roads again, around Mile 9 or 10, my running mate and I separate by mutual agreement. I go to pieces thinking about it afterwards. How could I consider doing any of this alone when I had an offer of company. But that is the choice I make. A simultaneous feeling of deserting and being deserted grows within me.
Time travels fast and slow on this marathon. Fast when I don’t know where I am, slow when I know where I am going. Grief assassinates you when you are doing something ordinary, it guts you out of nowhere, in the supermarket, driving along listening to the radio.
The familiar is harder. You think you know what is coming, but you are coming at it from a different perspective. The journey on familiar paths is different when you are running on a traffic free road. My Dublin feels skewed. I don’t recognise it. I‘m not comfortable. It’s not what I expected. I keep going.
Sarsfield, Inchicore, Kilmainham. I have told my friend all about these old work haunts, when passing the time on our long Saturday morning runs. Today’s memories feel barren without someone to relive them with. I compensate by gorging on jellies handed out by spectators. I don’t like jellies. I spit them out, a litter bug. I am irritated by the tossing aside of small plastic bottles of water. I’m going against my normal tide on this one way road. I can’t work out if everyone else is with me or I am with everyone else.
What is pushing me on. I am afraid to stop. I may not start again. Keep going. Keep going. Don’t think. Avoid thoughts. Go. Go. Go. Among thousands, but alone in my own world. We run alone. Always. Our heads are ours and ours alone, we share what we can, what we are able, what we have the skills to share. Sometimes the sharing is not good for us or the by-standing company. I want memories of Dublin to come back. I don’t remember them. I try to get them back, they won’t come. I can’t control what memories come back. I am afraid, because I cannot control if they will be good or bad. Better not remember. They might make be sad or angry and then I will feel guilty. Must always think good of the dead. I want to find meaning whatever that is. I don’t know what I’m looking for. I have a purpose so I can’t be lost. I need someone to share my memories with me.
The long Crumlin Road. This is not how I imagined it. I feel alone, it’s a hill, its only half way. The chink has been made. The doubt is in. Go away. It’s okay, I’m told by other runners. Get to the hospital landmark and it’s easy from there. I’m confused. Disappointed. I’ve let myself down. I shouldn’t feel this bad so early. My rules say it will happen me at mile 18 or 20. Who am I to make rules. I have not made my rules of mourning. I just know the conventions. Make the arrangements, go to the funeral, organise the refreshments.
Please, please, someone call out MY name. But they can’t. I’m an impersonator. It is not my name on the race number. I am on a borrowed entry. There is always someone worse off than you. In this moment I am that worse off person. At death, people give you platitudes, but you can’t take them in at the time. My friend catches me.
Mile 15. My body cries inwardly. What is happening in this desolate suburb. Why has my whole world slowed down. I hear a girl beside me, running, crying, the urgency in her partner’s voice as he tries to help her find the resources in herself not to give up. He knows she can do it. She doesn’t. How can she not know. Why can’t he find the words to fix her. To give her back the joy of a running rhythm.
I tell my friend to go ahead because I am slowing. She returns for me, and I finally re-recognise landmarks. The green of Bushy Park, the Dropping Well Pub and the river Dodder. I feel comforted in the familiar. I’m doing what I wanted to do and revisiting childhood, teenage and young adult haunts of rivers, parks and pubs. The family of my friend cheer and clap. For the first and only time, my name is called. It is a hand of support. An opened full bottle of Lucozade Sport is put in my hand. I wait until we are around a corner and throw it aside after two sips. Endless cups of tea and sandwiches after the funeral. We give away the sandwiches and four hours later are hungry.
I’m less than two miles from my childhood home. After, I find out my three siblings are texting each other as they track my online progress from three continents. I want them physically beside me. I still keep the texts on my phone.
Mile 25, I rely on muscle memory, going through the motions, my head and body are no longer part of my legs. My legs have one cadence only. I would be quicker walking, but I will not walk. I tell my friend to go ahead. She listens to my pleads and keeps going. I am devastated. A less good friend would have stayed. I know I’ll make it, but this is not how I planned it. I will cross the finish line alone.
I have a mind, body, feet. It’s all there, just working slowly. Listen to my body. Listen to the world. In the end, what’s the rush. How much time do any of us have. Seize the opportunity and savour the time.
Mile 26.2. A final miraculous sprint.
I was always going to finish. Successfully achieving that line is the only way out of the marathon. With grief there is no success or failure, I have no choice but to roll with it as it encircles me. People sympathise with you when someone dies. Attending a funeral is the completion of mourners’ role. The journey of the bereaved is untried, unknown, maybe never complete. Sometimes an inevitable, sometimes a non-achievable process in life. It feels like a slow death turning to a new life, not yet ready to reach the finish. I don’t think I’ll ever find my final grief line.
Time or winning doesn’t matter. I try to convince myself.
First published Scrimshaw Journal Sligo 2021
ISBN: 9781907592171
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