After my first book, Do They Have Bad Days in Heaven? Surviving the Suicide Loss of a Sibling, was published, a fellow sibling survivor told me she didn’t like all my track/running references because she couldn’t relate to them. She was the only person who said that, but it made me stop and think how many times I talked about how life felt like a series of hurdles in front of me.
But it also sparked thoughts about how much running cross country and track had taught me lessons that would serve me well coping with loss and navigating grief experiences.
It wasn’t just about those hurdles, the challenges we face in life, but learning to keep forging forward when we don’t believe we can run another step (aren’t there days that feel like that for all of us, even without a death loss?) I remember during my first cross country season in seventh grade, learning how to run a mile without stopping and then another mile and another mile. We were taught, when we wanted to stop, to look for an object like a mailbox, a tree, a stop sign, to run to. And then keep running by looking for another object. Slowly, we could run a longer distance by training our minds to keep going.
With such an intense grief experience ahead of me, not just the loss of my younger sister (wasn’t I supposed to outlive her?) but a suicide, too, it was like my brain reached into the files of lessons learned in the past and began to use them to keep me from not just stopping and standing still, but to keep forging forward.
As I was planning this blog in my head, I also began to wonder how many other experiences in our lives have helped us, have taught us, how to cope with something ahead, something unknown. But when it happened, the lessons were there and the skills ready to be accessed and put into use.