Marathon Therapy--For Me, for the City

I am not the only person who runs as a form of therapy. In fact, it's a common enough motivation that it inspires t-shirts. I was always a runner as a kid, but I slowed down a lot after the police academy because, well, the police academy will make you sick to death of running. I would run two or three miles on a treadmill as a warm-up to weight training and because doctors say you should have 20-30 minutes of cardio a day (or has that gone up now?) but that was about it for ten years. Then, in October, we put our house on the market and I turned into a basket case. I wasn't sleeping, I had ridiculous anxiety, I was not eating well. I'm a bit high-strung anyway, and the stress of buying and selling houses, packing, and moving sent me over the edge, despite the fact that the whole process went remarkably smoothly. I was actually to the point where I thought it might be time to seek professional help. Instead, I went running. And I kept running.

As my distances began to get longer and my times faster, I began to think I might like to train for the half-marathon. After all, the twentieth anniversary of the Murrah Bombing would be coming, so the Memorial Marathon seemed like a natural fit for my first timed distance run. So I began to take it seriously. Until two months ago, I wasn't sure I'd make it. I kept getting sick over the winter with stuff my kids were bringing home, so my training was falling off. But when it warmed up and I got up to eleven miles, I signed up. A couple months later, the Half Marathon medal hangs in my closet, the 13.1 sticker is on my rear windshield, and  like many newly initiated distance runners, I'm hooked.

The Memorial Marathon was especially meaningful for me because the Memorial Half is a running tour of the neighborhoods where I've spent most of my career. I love these old neighborhoods: the tall buildings and shadowy streets of downtown, the stately approach toward the capital building, the handsome old houses of Mesta Park, Heritage Hills, and Crown Heights. Throughout the run, I got the sense that I was doing something I would never forget in places I love to remember. The whole run was very touching and meaningful for me.

I would be remiss to neglect the stated purpose of the Marathon itself: a fund raiser to support the OKC National Memorial, and an event explicitly dedicated to the memory of those lost in the Murrah Bombing. I have been reluctant to write about the events of April 19, 1995 for a number of reasons. For one thing, I am suspicious of the common "where were you when you found out," kinds of conversations. I understand the importance of public memory and take seriously the realness of public grief, but I also fear the temptation of making the event about myself, when so many, some that I know well, were effected much more personally than I. For another thing, with months of buildup by local media outlets, I fear exploitation of the event and its victims. I don't want to be simply adding to the noise, noise that a great many people, including some that I love very much, are trying as hard as they can to avoid. For some people, the notion that "We Will Never Forget" is not a well-meaning promise, but a horrifying curse.

Nevertheless, the event was a large part of my motivation to run. In 1995, my father was a crime scene detective on the Oklahoma City Police Department, and my step-father, who I lived with, was an Oklahoma City Firefighter. Both of them are strong, courageous, and empathic men, and both were caught up in the Hell of that month. My step-father spent nearly a month digging through the rubble of the bombed out building, and my father spent that same time assigned to the Medical Examiner's Office processing the bodies of the victims. Unsurprisingly, the event had a singular impact on them and on our family in ways that are, frankly, no one's business.

My dad's were and are exceptional men. They both went into their respective professions for all the right reasons. They are brave and caring, and what they experienced in that month hurt them, probably more deeply that I actually understand (they both hold their cards pretty close). I have always felt a debt to them for spending a month in a place they would not allow me to even go see. For this reason, I saw the run as a way to honor them. When training was tough, when my body was breaking down, or I felt sick, I pushed on by telling myself, "they spent a month in Hell; I can spend a few hours running." It's an empty ovation, I'm sure. A run that many people do for fun cannot really repay for the sacrifices made by any of those who were forced to sacrifice in 1995 and in the years since, but it's all I can really do: to endure in order to honor their endurance.

Beyond this, (and I didn't really think about this until during the run) it became a way to reclaim the month and the sight. April is no longer the month, and NW 5th and Harvey is no longer the place that tried to destroy my fathers and my family. It's the time and place where I accomplished something really difficult and important. In a way that is admittedly imperfect and which may or may not be lasting, at least in my own psyche, I've taken back my family. At the very least, I've reclaimed the month of April.

This notion occurred to me as a ran up Lincoln Blvd, with the field of flags in front of the capital on one side, and hand-written posters with the names of victims on the other. The Marathon itself hangs signs on light posts with the names on all 168 victims along the course, but far more touching are the hand-written signs that people along the course hold. Friends and family of victims participate as spectators, make home-made signs, hand out medals at the finish line, serve as board members, and run the race. In fact, the whole city is involved in the race. Spectators line the entire 26 mile course, stand in front of their houses handing out food and drinks to runners, and cheer for people they don't know. Neighborhood associations decorate their neighborhoods and line the streets in ridiculous costumes. Two local T.V. stations preempt programming to carry the race on live television. This communal effort speaks to the meaning of the Memorial Marathon for this city. The city was injured, horrified, and changed forever in April of 1995. But through the Marathon, we've taken back that time and place. We've reclaimed it for ourselves and for our community. Downtown in April is no longer a place of defeat, fear, and injury. Instead, it's a place of celebration, strength, endurance, and triumph.

A Time to Blush

Today is the anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing. Meanwhile, the situation in Boston is out of control.  So as many people that I care about are remembering the ways in which we were changed forever, another set of people I care about is seeing their own city changed forever. So this is a heavy day. And it should be. It's the kind of day when we are bombarded with stimuli that should make us want to turn away, and yet, with our twenty-first century addiction to the twenty-four hour news cycle and social media, with our movie-mania-desensitization, many of us are instead transfixed.

A couple days ago, a photo collage featuring gory pictures from the Boston Marathon finish line went viral. It was composed of pictures of bloody streets from varying distances and, most notably, a picture of a man with the bottom half if his leg missing, his femur exposed to the open air. My father, a now retired twenty-five year veteran of the Oklahoma City Police Department, and former Crime Scene Investigator, tried to remind others of the tastelessness of such pictures going public. He reminded us, in not o gentle terms, of the fact that such photos are disrespectful to the victims and their families and added, "I spent a career taking these kinds of photos, and I don't care to relive the experience on facebook." To my chagrin (I've reached an age where I feel responsible for protecting my parents, so I feel righteous anger about this) he actually received some flack for his hard line, including one passive aggressive questioning of his masculinity (of the type common on Facebook--that is, which may or may not have been directed specifically at him). Such a suggestion is a clear sign to me that many people just don't get it.

To my father, a police officer, and to my step-father, a firefighter, and finally to me, a second generation police officer myself, there is great honor, humility,  and a sense of gravitas in knowing that seeing these kinds of things is part of the sacrifice we make. Both of those men, the two most important men in my life, bear both the physical and emotional scars of April 19, 1995. In fact, I am often telling people that all first responder suffer from some level of PTSD; to what extent is only a matter of degree. But those of us with the introspection to be aware of it take a tremendous amount of pride in the fact that we run toward things others run from, and take care of things that others can not--and should not. We see things that humans are not supposed to see in order to shield others from it. And we take that responsibility seriously.

You see, humans aren't supposed to see horrible things happen to other humans. It's against the way we are wired. It does, despite our imagined toughness, effect us. Which is why, for decades, the media edited such horrible images. Consider the highly anesthetized newsreel footage from the Second World War:

To us, this footage may seem unrealistic, even sweetly quant. We may, God forbid, even see this as a sign of how much more "with it" we are in our generation, how much more realistic and world wise we are. But do we really think we were tougher than the Greatest Generation? This is a generation who lived through the Depression, the Dust Bowl, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the most politically complex and technological war in human history. These videos aren't designed this way because this generation lacked toughness or wisdom, but because it possessed humanity and a basic sense of proper revulsion.

To this generation, one tried to hide that which should not be seen by others. It's not that people watching at the theater didn't know that what was happening "over there" was horrifically violent; the stars hanging in their neighbors windows would have stood as a constant reminder of this. It's that they knew that these were not things to be witnessed. For them, it was improper that the president should be seen in a wheel chair. Twenty years later, it was improper that a president's brain matter and skull should be seen in TV (The first time I saw the Zapruder film without blurring to hide the president's fatal injury was when my dad was teaching a forensics class. Not long after, the History Channel began showing the film unedited--a move I took as a sign that something important had happened--things had shifted.)

My minister friend, Ryan, tells a story to his youth group to emphasize the extent to which our own desensitization has cost us some of our humanity. As he drove one day, he saw an accident at the side of the road. He looked to the driver's seat of one of the cars, where he saw an injured woman from whom, "blood was flowing out." Ryan though, wow, that's bad, and drove on. He made it a few blocks when he suddenly felt overwhelming shame. He had just seen a horribly injured woman, and the most he could think was, wow that's bad. It cost him nothing, barely even slowing down his commute.  He had felt no emotion. It hadn't bothered him that he had just witnessed the suffering of another human being. And that shamed him. It should cost us when another person suffers. It should bother us. He stopped the car and prayed, both for her, and for himself.

You see, we need to feel revolted. Because revulsion suggests that we understand the human cost of these violent tragedies. The people in these photographs are not actors, they are not objects for our own voyeuristic catharsis. They are not bloody puppets in an Artaudian play. They are human beings in incredible pain. They are someone's wife, husband, son, daughter, mother, father. They are people who will be dealing with these scars, both physical and emotional, forever--not just until the screen fades and the credits roll. 

So, when my father lectures about the insensitivity of posting these pictures, people would be wise to listen. He speaks from hard earned experience about the tolls this violence takes on a human being. My call to any of us who still can, on this day in which we remember what happened in 1995 and pray for what's happening in 2013, is to keep what my two dads have lost. Keep your ability to blush.