I would describe my running through the spring of 2012, the year that I lost my husband, as mostly angry running. While I was devastatingly sad, I was seething in anger. I ran hard and forceful to try to work the anger through my body so that it did not manifest in a more dangerous way.
As spring turned to summer another emotion started to creep up, guilt, and it altered my running. Angry, hard pounding runs turned into guilt laced runs where I would often be weeping and whispering “I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry” to match the beat of my feet on the pavement.
Everyday I would find something else to feel guilty about. The majority of my guilt was about the difficulties that plagued our marriage, particularly in the last year of his life. I felt guilty for the times I had wondered if I should stay married to Gordie. I felt guilty for things I had said to him. I felt guilty for putting my walls up that last year. I felt guilty for not telling him I loved him enough. I felt guilty for not kissing him good night the last night of his life. I felt guilty for not giving him a hug the last morning of his life.
But all of those things were minor compared to the one thing I beat myself up most about: not being there on Friday, March 2, 2012, the day that Gordie died.
Grief counselors will tell you that guilt is a natural part of grief. It’s a natural part of the process and the goal is not to get stuck. The difficult part for me was that I found it impossible not to get stuck in the negative feelings of grief without the assistance of my Therapist and I was not ready to voice these things I felt guilty about. I felt so guilty about these things that I had convinced myself I was a bad person and to articulate to another human these things that I thought were such an awful reflection of myself was frightening.
So, I kept quiet and kept running, literally trying to outrun the guilt. As the season turned to summer and the days heated up, I started running at night after putting the boys to bed. It was always just before dark when I started out and by the time I got halfway through my run, darkness had fallen. I ran the streets of my parents’ neighborhood with my ipod playing but barely hearing the music. My mind would be finding and reliving every mistake I thought I made in my marriage, every wrong-doing. My mind would relive the day he died and I would beat myself up for not working from home that day. The day that Gordie died, I shocked myself on a power strip at work. During these guilt laced runs, a voice in my head would scream at me for not taking that shock as a sign to go home. It was irrational but I blamed myself for not being there…for not saving Gordie. I would sometimes try to punish myself on those runs by making myself run faster up a hill or by running longer than I had planned. I would tell myself “you fucked up big time, now you have to pay.” Part of me was pleading with myself to not listen to the guilt but it was smaller than the part of me commanding myself to feel the guilt.
And no matter how hard I tried, I could not quiet the voice inside my head that screamed at me as I ran “you should have been there!” or “your boys are paying for your sins”.
The only thing that silenced the guilt and the voice in my head was physically and mentally exhausting myself on those night runs, coming home, taking my little white pill and blissfully falling asleep.