A Silly Goodbye

​Men have been known to hold onto things much longer than is practical or rational. Old t-shirts, an old car we may hope to restore at some vague point in the future, or an old baseball glove we can never fit into again. Things that we won’t use, but things that hold memories of our past. Things that become totems of times we aren’t ready to let go of just yet.  In my case, it’s an old pair of running shoes. I wore them for every work out and race for two years following the death of my son. Five half marathons, smaller races and miles of alone time when they were my support in more ways than protecting my feet. This letter is my good bye to them. A silly good bye to things.
 
My son Miles was born on this day, April 17, 1990. He would be 24 today had he not died in a car crash almost five years ago. I ran before he died. After he died, running seemed like a good way to force me out of bed when I didn’t want to get up. The friends I ran with, and the races, helped me to move through that terrible grief to a better focus on how I could live the rest of my life without my firstborn. I didn’t think about it until looking back, but the Asics running shoes in the picture were one of the few constants in my world that was marked regularly by turmoil.
 
Running with these shoes gave me a chance to be alone with my thoughts and emotions. Thoughts and emotions that almost always circled back to the primary feelings of loss, sadness, anger, fantasies of vengeance, failure and judgment. Without the running and time it provided, I don’t know how I could have moved beyond these destructive drivers to more aspirational feelings of forgiveness and redemption.
 
I believe few things are as central to my life than forgiveness and redemption. But I also know my trust in them being true in this circumstance was axiomatic to their ever being true in any other area of life. This was where the shoe hit the road. It would take miles of running and lots of time to begin to understand if I was capable of embracing these better truths. The shoes provided a literal support for me to find the grace to move forward and understand that forgiveness and redemption needed to be at the center of my loss.
 
Harder to let go of than any fantasies of vengeance against the driver that killed my son, the anger with him, the frustrations with the circumstances, or the sadness of never seeing Miles live his life was letting go of the anger, judgments and failures I felt as a parent. We all hope that our children will go in certain successful directions with their lives. We try to guide them, attract them, or coerce them to say ‘yes’ to the right things and ‘no’ to the wrong things. Parenting with goals in mind, means we’ll see advances and retreats in both their life as well as our relationship with them. What is left unsettled one day often gets smoothed out the next. The loss of your child takes away that next day. It takes away forever that chance to see everything work out. Whatever back steps in your parenting, whatever failures – however small – become all you think about as you are forced to measure your parenting against the death of your child. These feelings of failure weighed so heavily on the loss as to make getting up in the morning seem like a herculean effort.
 
One of my first acts on these mornings was to lace up the shoes. I wore them as I moved on the path from anger to mercy, judgment to forgiveness and irreparable condemnation to some level of redemption. Going to jail to visit the young man who killed my son helped me in letting go of those feelings toward him. Running helped me feel the grip of judgment loosen its hold on me. The eclipse that hid anything I did right as a parent eventually began to move, and I could see the better things I did with Miles. The goals I had as a parent, time with him, travels, laughter, prayers, discussions, and activities began to be seen again. Our last words together were always our last words together, “I love you,” and “I love you too.” This was always sealed with a hug that I hoped he always appreciated.
 
Perhaps my hesitancy in throwing out the shoes (the right shoe is clearly blown out after being worn while I walked around on crutches for six weeks this year) stems from the fear that when these symbols of a time gone by are removed, my memory of this time will begin to fade. They have served their purpose and I’ve memorialized them through this letter and photo. The photo will go into a collection where it will continue to be a memory jogger of my journey from a crushing grief to a purpose filled grief that can benefit not only my memory of Miles but also the students at Sunny Hills that get a scholarship in his name. The picture will be a reminder that sometimes we are lucky enough to feel some form of forgiveness and redemption in this life.
 
The shoes carried me through a terrible time. One I know I don’t want to forget but one I hope to never relive. These Asics became old friends in a way no thing have ever come close to before. With the shoes, I found the path of running from despair to running toward hope. So it is a significant passing for me to discard them. A silly good bye to a thing that helped me get through the loss of a son.