Running Toward Healing

I wrote this essay while watching the coverage of the terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon. The Burlington County Times published a version of it, but they edited it so much that it was almost like a different piece. So here's the full version, for posterity:

When times are hard, I run or I read. So after I heard about the attack in Boston, I laced up my shoes and headed out. I’d already gone for my run that day, but sitting and watching people suffer when I can do nothing to help them eats at something deep within my heart. There are really only two horrors in this world: suffering, or watching others suffer and being helpless to stop it. So in the absence of anything more productive to do, I went out and ran until my knees ached and then I went home, and when I got there the television was still on and nothing had changed. So I looked to books, whose words have always brought me solace in troubled times.

I walked to my bookshelf and picked up A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway’s classic novel about love and war. I knew the passage I was looking for, but I needed to see it printed before my eyes. “The world breaks everyone,” Hemingway wrote, “but afterwards many are strong in the broken places.” I watched the people on television in the process of being broken. The video of the blast repeated on endless loop. Shock waves washed over a man, an old man, an inspiration, just trying to run a foot race, and I watched that man stumble and stagger and finally fall to the ground. The delusions of distance and safety I’d managed to reconstruct after 9/11 collapsed with him onto the Boylston St. asphalt. The day they flew planes into the World Trade Center I was starting my second day at a brand new job. I remember the same helpless feeling, wanting to help but having no idea what to do. My company sent us home, and I sat and watched the city burning until long into the night. Just like today, I wanted to get up and walk away. I wanted a break from the suffering, but I couldn’t tear myself away, and besides I felt guilty for even wanting a break, for thinking there is any such thing as a break at a time like this. Although my family are Yankees diehards, at that moment I wished I had a Red Sox hat. I checked my Facebook for updates on the runners I knew who had run the marathon, hoping they were okay. On the television there were people crying and broken bodies and spilled blood and severed limbs littered across the sidewalk like dead leaves discarded by an autumn chill.

On the news they were showing a still picture of that same old man after he fell. He was lying on the concrete, and above him stood three police officers, bright yellow vests over their uniforms. Hemingway hadn’t been the comfort I’d hoped for, but suddenly I remembered exactly the book I needed. It was the police officers that reminded me of it. Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007, but after his death his son released Armageddon in Retrospect, a book of his previously-unpublished short stories. A single line stood out for me when I read it the first time, and it came back to me now:

“The wreckers against the builders. There’s the whole story of life!”

I didn’t feel better. Vonnegut’s words are appealing, but they are too simple. Life cannot be so reduced. Yet in the midst of chaos, simplicity has a certain seduction. There will be time later for complexities, for the arduous task of rebuilding, for the impatient slog of moving on and starting anew, for rage and for justice. But when disaster strikes we need to cling to something. We need support lest we be crushed beneath the weight of an all too heavy world.

So let us be simple, and let us remember those police officers who rushed to protect a fallen old man. And let us remember the countless people, builders all, running towards fire and death to help strangers. And the people whose pictures will not be taken but who will scrub the innocent blood from the pavement, the people who will offer words of comfort, the doctors who will mend the broken bodies, the countless anonymous public servants whose names we will never know but who will find and bring to justice the wreckers who changed a day of dreams into a hell of nightmares. Let us remember all of us who pick up the pieces, full in the grim knowledge that the work of centuries can be leveled in seconds; who build anyway, each time higher, newer, shinier, glittering beneath a fickle sun, all of us whose languages are confounded, whose ephemeral works are prey to metaphysical and worldly and human depredations. We who know all this and neither flag nor fail in the face of inescapable transience, and so accrue a dignity accessible only to those who are builders, who know, before the first brick is laid, that their work will not, cannot, last. We build. We fall down. We build again. There is nothing else we can do. It is absurd, this life of perpetual construction, but it is who we are, the meaning and the purpose of our existence: we build.

I closed the book, filled a bag from the freezer, and sat down to ice my knee. Tomorrow there is another run. Wreckers do not rest. Our only victory is endurance.