On bald heads & being unending

Although this post begins with a tragedy, it is a post about hope.

I was thrift store hopping in 2003 when I missed a call from a girlfriend. Stepping out from the thrift store I’d been shopping at, I dialed my voicemail access number. I knew something was wrong when my new voicemail began not with “Hi, Debbie!” but “Oh, Deb.”

Only a handful of seconds later, I sank to the sidewalk and thought, “No. No, this is a terrible joke. This can’t have happened.”

But it had.

Months later, I continued to struggle with how suddenly lives could be ended. I found solace only in my long nighttime runs, during which my thoughts ran even further and wider than my legs.

Finish line

One evening shortly before the 2004 marathon that would be my first, I noticed a car passing by me slowly and repeatedly. I started getting anxious about how dark it was, how long it had been since I’d seen another person, how if someone managed to get me into their car, there’d be no one around to notice.

I ran in the direction of the nearest police station and I prayed. The car fell away, eventually, but the adrenaline didn’t.

I wondered about what would have happened if the ending there had been different. Would my friends remember me for all the happy memories we shared, or would they remember only how my life ended?

The thought horrified me. As I wept while running homeward, I thought over and over again: We are so much more than the ways that we end.

Afterward, I endeavored to remember those who had died not for how their lives concluded, but for who they were while they lived. For their lives.

And yet, when my friend Karin began daily posting links to a blog series about a young girl’s struggle with cancer, I thought, “Gah, why would I want to read so extensively about a girl’s death?”

Donna the Fairy Flower (photo used with permission from Mary Tyler Mom)

It was only when I read Karin’s husband Chris’s Freshly Pressed entry about why they are going “Blissfully Bald” that I understood just how much I had misunderstood. This wasn’t a story about a girl’s death to cancer.

It was a story about a girl’s life.

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