Whatever Held

The pink arch went up over the finish line in San Francisco, and there were cameras, and there were my friends beside me and there, finally, were all three of my kids. It was my tenth walk. It was my son’s birthday. And it had taken me ten years to get to that picture.

My mother died in 2005, right at the end of my own treatment. Three years later, my sister and I signed up for the Avon walk, 39 miles over two days. I don’t fully remember how it came about, only that we
wanted to do something. Something to put all that grief into that wasn’t just sitting in a house missing her. So we walked it.

The next year, my sister didn’t want to do it again. I signed up by myself. I went anyway. My aunt came. My boyfriend at the time came. My sister drove up with her family for the finish on the second day. And somewhere in those miles I made myself a promise: I would walk for my mother until I couldn’t walk anymore. I meant it as a vow. I did not know how literally I’d end up keeping it.

The year after, I switched to Santa Barbara. On day two I fell into step with a woman I’d never met, and we walked and talked for something like ten miles. Both of us professionals. Both of us mothers. Her parents were sick; my mother was gone. There’s a specific kind of intimacy that happens when you’re thirty miles into something with a stranger and your feet hurt and there’s nothing to do but talk. We exchanged numbers at the end.

The next year in Santa Barbara there were four of us. And then it just kept growing. Every year after that, three to six of us would meet up, with our partners and our families, and we’d walk it together. Women I only ever saw at the walk, and yet, I knew them. I knew what they were carrying. They knew what I was. I went out alone, and I came back with people. Nobody had signed up to stay in it with me, so I went out and found the ones who would.

It cost something. It should. That was part of the point. There was the training. The fundraising, year after year, asking and asking. And there was what it did to my body, the body that had already been through cancer, that I put through this again on purpose, ten times. One year I forgot my walking shoes and had to buy new ones down there, and walked thirty-nine miles in shoes I’d never broken in. The blisters were unbelievable. I never made that mistake twice. Another year, driving home from Santa Barbara, I had to lie down in the back seat. I was so dehydrated I should have seen a doctor and didn’t. I just lay there in the back of a moving car, wrecked, having done it to myself, for her.

I cried a lot on those walks. I wanted so badly to do something she’d be proud of. That’s what you do when the person you most miss is the reason you’re walking.

The tenth one, all three of my kids were there. It had never happened before. Custody, logistics, the ordinary impossible mechanics of
my life had always kept them away, my youngest had come once, but the other two never had. And then, that year, all three of them stood at the finish.

It was my son’s birthday weekend. He’d been young when she died, but he’d been close to her; she was his grandmother in the real way, not the distant way. And there he was, at the pink arch, on his birthday, watching his mother come in for the tenth time for a woman who had loved him. I was so proud they were there. Ten years of walking toward a finish line, and finally, all of my people were standing at it.

Here’s how it actually ended. I didn’t stop because I couldn’t walk anymore. Avon cancelled the walks. The thing I’d built ten years of my life around, the arch, the miles, the women, the whole structure of my promise, just went away. So I kept the promise by myself.

I started running. Los Gatos Creek Trail, mostly. Some days I ran and some days I could only walk, but I went. And every time, I took a photograph of the trail, the water, whatever the nature was doing that day, because nobody was watching anymore and I needed something to keep me accountable to a woman who was gone. I got to five hundred. Five hundred photographs. Five hundred times out on that trail for my mother, with no pink arch, no cameras, no crowd, no one at the finish line at all.

And then I stopped. Because I’m tired now. If I’m honest, there was something else in it too. The donations had thinned out. I’d post the photos and the same five people would comment now and then. It wasn’t that I needed anyone to make a fuss. It’s just that at some point I noticed it didn’t really matter to anyone but me, and it turns out that’s a hard thing to keep carrying by yourself indefinitely.

I don’t say that with any shame. I said I would go until I couldn’t anymore, and I went, ten walks, and then five hundred more days out there alone after they took the walks away. I kept it. I kept it longer than the thing itself lasted.

Mom, I walked until I couldn’t. And then I ran. And then I rested.