Olympian
If you can’t fly, then run; if you can’t run, then walk; if you can’t walk, then crawl, but whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
July 2013: Sweat beads on my brow, dripping to pool above my lips, gathering in droplets on my nose. My breathing grows more labored, my muscles burning as I pump my legs as fast as I can manage in a final sprint. The seconds tick by like hours, my legs on fire, my lungs bursting for fresh air. The road rises in a gradual incline and my speed slows, although I am pushing as hard as before. I just need to pass that blue house on the corner, then the mailbox, then I’ll reach the driveway, and I’ll be done. Just a few more steps and then it’ll be over, at least for today. Just a few more steps . . .
March 20, 2017: I lunged forward in the birth pool, sloshing water over the sides, grasping the slippery handles with fingers numbed from exhaustion. With the little strength remaining to me, I strained against the handles, bearing down against the unrelenting pressure of the baby working to exit my body. I let out a primal groan as the contraction eased, and I fell backward into my husband’s arms, quickly drifting into a few more minutes of blissful sleep. Again and again, I awoke to contractions, lunging forward, and bearing down, moaning like an animal. All sense of time had left me hours before. This struggle was all that I knew, all that I was. Was the baby feeling this much pain? Was the baby experiencing this same, endless tide of excruciation and release? Just once more–then again. And again. I am losing the strength to push, delirious as I am with pain and lack of sleep. Only one thing penetrates through the thick haze of suffering: my midwife’s voice, saying “The baby’s heartrate has dropped. We need to get this baby out–now.”
April 2, 2019: I lay on the linoleum floor of the hospital, curled in a fetal position around my 8-month pregnant belly, but I was not in my body. I was floating somewhere above, the fluorescent lights buzzing in my ears as I watched the pathetic, devastated form of myself wallow in tears and streaming mucus. I watched as I begged someone to go and find out whether or not Lizzy lived or died, whether or not they were able to attach her to the life support machine. I watched as my body relived the shuddering nausea of the helicopter ride, the numb terror of the ambulance ride, the useless, endless waiting of this never-ending nightmare. I watched my body shake and heard again the doctor’s voice, “Lizzy is the sickest child in this hospital. We cannot put her on ECMO if she has no heartbeat. Her heart hasn’t beaten in eight minutes.” I watched, and I heard, but I did not live. I could not breathe. And I would not reenter that body. That place where all that was known had become unknown, where hell had burst forth from the bowels of the earth and consumed my child is its ravening, bloody jaws. I could not go back, and there was no life after this. No time. No ability for the clock to tick or the chest to rise or the feet to step. There was nothing left, and I was no one. With a detached certainty, I prayed from my perspective on high, “Just let me die. Just let me die with Lizzy. Or lobotomize me. Anything so that I don’t have to go back in that body.” But it was April 2, 2019, and on this day, no prayers were answered.
January 13, 2020: Cecilia screamed her betrayal at me, raging with all the strength in her tiny, eight-month old body against the restraint my sister and I exerted, pinning her down against the machine that would theoretically tell us whether or not her retina functioned. With electrodes attached on either side of her eyes and fine filament passing between the lids of each eye, Cecilia writhed, red-faced and sobbing against her bonds. The machine took its time, emitting perpetual, incomprehensible beeps interspersed with flashes of light that briefly illuminated the dark room and the terrified face of my baby. I pushed with all my strength against Cecilia’s furious attempts to escape, as the technician repeated again and again, “We didn’t get a clear picture; we need her to stop moving.” He needed her to stop moving, and I needed to rip these wires off of my baby and draw her to my aching breasts. He needed a clearer picture, and Cecilia needed the warmth and comfort of my body and my milk, protecting her against this uncomprehending torment. Her need and my need had been subsumed within the omniscience of the medical industry, and all that remained was the choice to sit and attempt to immobilize my traumatized infant so that they could finish their test. It didn’t matter to them how long the test took or how much Cecilia screamed. What mattered was the data, and what it could tell them. So I clamped my shuddering jaw and silenced my shredding mind as Cecilia screamed, lights flashed, the machine beeped, and the seconds stretched like hours.
There’s more of this, as I’m sure you can guess, but I don’t want to relive it anymore than you do. I don’t want to relive it because these moments are not where life dwells. Life is found in between these moments, before things fall apart, and after the sun returns to banish the dark.
Life is found in the valleys between the mountains of work and suffering. Perhaps, occasionally, it is found at the peaks of the mountains, when it has taken all of your strength to ascend, when your breath comes in shudders, your lungs working to adjust to the elevation, and the view is more than you could encompass in four lifetimes. Perhaps, then, a part of your mind is on the trip back down, how it is fraught with a different kind of peril, how you are filled with a new vanity that may trip you up and cause you to go tumbling into a world of broken limbs, necks, or hearts.
But this compulsion to push forward, to build endurance, to keep going–this, I think, is what makes us most alive, and in these moments of persistence, perhaps we are more alive than in the moments of rest. Suspended in the limits of physical or psychological endurance, the only option is to continue to endure beyond your limit, or to end everything that you are and everything that you know. This is how we have survivors of the Holocaust.
We reach the extremes of endurance in exercise, birth, grief, disease. What matters is moving forward, especially when you feel you cannot. In natural childbirth, they call this phase transition–transition, that is, from active labor to pushing. It’s not marked by any specific dilation of the cervix; rather, it’s marked by the mother stating, unequivocally, that she cannot possibly go on. That the pain is beyond her. Then the midwives know the baby will be here soon.
Transition–from labor to pushing, from maiden to mother, from womb to world. The mother is eternally different following a birth, and this is also true for multiparous mothers and mothers who lose their infants in stillbirth or complications following birth. They are changed forever; they have transitioned into a new kind of being.
Suffering brings about transition because it forces change. Adaptation. Evolution. Endurance. It is an endless process of breaking and rebuilding into something stronger and better. It is the first little piggy’s house of straw dissolving under the venomous breath of a shaggy and slavering predator. The second little piggy tries a bit harder, works a bit more, and still succumbs to the voracious hunger of the wolf. It is only the third little piggy who learns from the suffering, the time, and the work it takes to build a house made of brick. A house that can–at least for a while–keep pain and death at bay.
Species who cannot learn to adapt and evolve become extinct. Species who once had gills and fins now have lungs and legs. And species who once crawled and walked now fly to unimaginable heights and crest on breathtaking swells.
If you can’t fly, then run; if you can’t run, then walk; if you can’t walk, then crawl, but whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was Olympian in his capacity for fortitude and endurance. But there are so many others–too many others–whose names will never be remembered and whose stories will never be told, and yet they are also Olympian in their quiet, unsung suffering. I’d like to remember them today: those countless women in black who have risen to face day after day in the wake of the deaths of their husbands and children. I want to speak of the men and women throughout history who have fought, suffered, and died in the extremity of want and isolation in an attempt to protect their families and their homes. I want to remember the suffering of those who fill our hospitals and our treatment centers, fighting an inglorious and emaciated battle against the morality of the flesh.
I choose to honor the suffering of human persons that have endured, persisted, and clawed their way, inch by bloody inch, towards a better tomorrow. There is a beauty in giving all that you have in a critical moment, and this beauty cannot be undone by compounding suffering and death. The beauty lies within the will to continue trying, and the inability to succeed cannot rob the trying of its innate beauty.
Trying is what makes us human and what makes our time here matter. I believe continuing to try in the face of failure, disease, grief, and fear is nothing short of heroic. It’s Olympian, but you’ll never watch it on television and cheer or clap with your heart in your throat. It goes unseen and unheralded, but it’s around us all the time. Sometimes it’s silent, sometimes invisible. But it’s also more real than nearly anything else. It’s real, and it defines us. It shapes us into the people we want to be, and perhaps into the people we were meant to be.
If you can’t fly, then run; if you can’t run, then walk; if you can’t walk, then crawl . . .
And when you can no longer crawl and your body is utterly spent, you may just wake to find yourself capable of a new kind of flight.