Trembling With Fear 09/05/21

The Run by Alec Thompson

I went for a run. My first since all the bad news. Still early morning, the steam fog rose off the lake, drifting in through the tree-lined trail. Clouds of thin vapor curled through the dense cedar. It was a path I knew well—each rise and rill, each stump not cut flush to the forest floor, each blind curve and off-shooting game trail—I knew them. 

No one. I expected to see no one as I jogged through a morning made from black and white stills. The low, rising sun over the lake cast obliterating shadows across the path, interrupted flashes of smoky spotlight. Flashes of the past year ran through my mind. My mother, her prognosis, six months…

As her health waned, I didn’t run. I couldn’t. I had more important things to think about, had more important tasks. The paperwork and noose-tight preparations for her final days. Which color urn—which design would carry her remains?

Have you been running, Scotty? She would ask, always interested.

Yes, Mom. I’d lie.

Good, I know how you love it. It’s good for you, you know?

Yes, I know, Mom.

People who run live ’til their hundreds—I saw it on the Doctor show this morning.

And on she would go. That parental parallel delight. It was only ever she and I. My father died when I was young, a tragedy to hear it. Lost to some stranger’s highway drunkenness. It was only the two of us after.

Here she was, still, concerned only for me. With her cancerous lungs. Never smoked a day in her life, she was proud to say. No cigarettes, made me change the air filters every month, had the school check for asbestos in her fourth-grade classroom—she’d been savvy back in her day.

Still…death within six months. That had been over a year ago. The Jacobs are a resilient people…

Thud, thud. Thud, thud. The drop of my feet slapping the ground. My old Asics, with a new pair of socks, still with that fresh packed-in-Sweden cushion.

Two weeks ago, pneumonia spread through the hospital. It took her under its dark wing. Doctor’s spoke to me of fluid in the lungs, like this was a thing they spoke of often. I thought of cobalt, liquid blue-black, the color of a disturbed sea. Of the morning fog over the lake.

She fought it. Fought the melting parts of herself. The broken cells within, shattered from the chemo, cells flooded with irradiation and medications closer to poisons in any healthy person. Two days ago, as she lay in bed with oxygen delivered through her nose, with the threat of intubation looming, I spoke with her in the room.

“I want you to have a good life, Scotty.”

“Hush. You’ll outlive us all.” I said.

“You’re not running. You’re not taking care of yourself. A mother knows these things.”

“I’ll do those things when you’re better.”

“No…” she said, then began coughing, and I gave her iced water through a straw.

“Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Yes,” she said. “Don’t be attached to these old bones. Angels don’t need old bones.”

I lowered my head.

She patted me on the cheek. Kissed me with dry, cracked lips. “If I get better, you go for a run, okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

And she did. She got better. The nurse called last night. The pneumonia abated. Some leftover fluid but it should clear up and then she could restart the treatments. Though not a miracle, the nurse spoke of things ‘miracle adjacent.’ That I should be thanking someone upstairs.  

And so, I thought I could go for a run. I could do what she asked and get out of bed early. I drove the thirty miles out of town to the park on the lake. From my car I looked over the water in the dark, the cool air steaming off its surface. A localized mist over the still vastness. The warmth of my car held me. That moment, liminal, where I could stay in the comfort. I left the embrace, walked away from the car, and ran down the trail.

It was cold as I ran. Five minutes in I could feel my muscles buck from recent disuse. The warning signs of cramps and feet that would ball up in unbending arcs. I went on. The sun began to rise. Sherbet reds and oranges made their beginnings known behind the deep fog. But the time of color was yet to come.

A good run, I broke out of the initial torpor and trod on. Faster than a jog, slower than something usable in a marathon. I began to feel at ease. First wall down, thirty minutes in, and I was sailing over the ground as I turned past the two-mile marker. Past this, the trail wound down an untouched peninsula. Dense evergreen grew in incestuous mingling across the narrow plunge of land. Except for at the end there was a clearing with a primitive bench slapped together—a decorticated slab of oak. It, shrouded in a recess of the timberline, sat with sides facing both the trail and the lake.

I always took a moment at that clearing before the trail turned off and went down the opposite side of land. Sat and looked out at the lake. Watched its stillness and I would lose track of thought and go to a place beyond mindfulness. To a place of absent, inorganic thought.

There was a dark figure in the clearing—

My feet tried to stop. I skidded, then stumbled over a cedar bole sticking out of the path. Someone was sitting on the bench. I could feel the rabbit-beat of my heart. Blood turning cold, but burning…my heart burned, pistoned fire, as my vision corrected in the low light.

Sitting on the bench was a figure in a black dress and cowl. Sitting in profile, back to the lake. It raised a hand. Beckoned me. It wore a funereal dress. its face a mass of shadow under the boughs and wisps of fog—under the struggle of day to break. I walked closer and then a hand fell. I stopped.

Slowly, it brought its hand to its heart. Palm placed at its center. Everything froze in perfect tranquility.

BUZZZZ.

My pants pocket writhed with vibration and chirruping. The suddenness of my phone’s ring setting off all my stayed anxiety, I fumbled for my phone, got it out and dropped it in the dirt. I got down on my knees and searched, swiping away pockets of pine duff and loose earth. I grabbed it, stood up and looked at the screen—the hospital.

I pushed the green answer button, and when I raised my head—the phone alive with some practiced, not ungentle voice—the vision on the bench was gone. I looked out through the tree-limbed window to the lake, half hearing the voice in my ear, and then I walked to the bench and sat. 

Sitting, facing the lake, I thought of the trail and the tunnel of woods still dark behind me, and it filled me with dread. So, I looked to the stillness of the lake, to the drifting remnant steam. On the phone, the nurse continued asking if it were I, if I were there, if I could hear her.

“This is he,” I said at last.

And then I listened as she told the tale I already knew. Words telling of a resurgence, refilling fluid, of lungs so strained they could not perform any longer. She said they tried everything, all they knew to do, but still my mother had passed, this morning, some twenty minutes ago. As I ran along a trail in the dark…my mother died.

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In the end, she found a way to show herself to me, for only me. The single parent giving all of herself until the very end—and then some. An acknowledgment of the mortal form of our bond severing. That where she was going, she would leave me to live my life, to be both alone, and never truly alone—or so I choose to hope. I choose to hope for her to still exist on somehow, in some way. Maybe even as she believed…needless of bones.

And now when I run, I stop and sit on that bench. In the cold of winter, the warmth of summer, with the wind blowing gales, or in its absence, the surface stilled to glass. I look up to the sky, to what light there may be, and hope that my mother lives on in brightness.

I do what any good son would. I run. I keep on living.