This is one in a series of columns about the Boston Marathon by the Register’s Jeff Miller, who ran in and immediately wrote about the 2013 race and bombing and will run it again Monday.
BOSTON – It happens, but it’s not the goal.
Who would set out with the sole purpose of making another person cry?
You’re in the business of telling stories and sharing opinions, and, sure, the idea almost always is to make the reader feel – compassion, sorrow, anger – feel something that would cause them to read again next time.
You want to move the reader, but move the reader to read, not to cry. You’ve never once sat down behind your laptop and contemplated the most effective way to activate the tear ducts of a stranger.
Yet, some of your recent writings have in fact produced tears. A couple columns, in particular, have resulted in sobs. You know this because they were your sobs.
No, it’s not the goal. But it can happen anyway, in a stampeding rush. That’s just how it works sometimes, with tragedy.
Now, imagine what this must be like for the people less fortunate than you. For the families of the three killed. For the more than 260 injured. For the thousands who weren’t lucky enough to be two blocks away when the 2013 Boston Marathon was attacked.
Imagine what this must be like for Marie Lavallee and John Henry Downing, an Aliso Viejo mother and son who were only feet away when the first bomb went off, waiting for Dad, John Downing, to cross the finish line.
Their story will be detailed in this space on Monday but, for now, you certainly can understand why, after recounting their experience seemingly thousands of times, tracing and retracing their staggering steps, Marie and John started telling people that John had finished long before, that they were nowhere near the horror.
But they are back now. And so are you, back in the greatest running city in the world for the first time since people lost limbs, since a town was gripped by fear for four days, since former Boston mayor Thomas Menino asked, “Why would somebody have so much hate?”
You’re back to run again because this is Boston and Monday is Patriot’s Day and this is the marathon, and how could anyone be foolish enough to think they could hold back 72,000 pounding feet, never mind the 36,000 hearts pumping life through the very tips of all those toes?
Betty Spurgeon of Orange qualified for her first Boston Marathon at a race in Sacramento a few years back. She qualified in the rain and cold and despite a heart rate monitor that, as the end of the race neared, began beeping at her to stop because her heart beat was dangerously high.
Instead of stopping, though, Betty reached down and turned off the device.
“I always thought that I couldn’t really identify myself as a marathoner until I could do Boston,” she says now. “It was the one carrot I thought was worth chasing. It’s a gem. It’s a gem of a marathon. So old. So historic. So special.”
And, this year, so necessary. We have to run Boston – this Boston – after what happened last spring. After having this most iconic of events violated. After the physical devastation and the mental torment, the flashbacks and nightmares, the festering fears of everything from crowds to backpacks to wailing sirens.
We have to run for Marathon Sports and its employees. The store, located near the Boylston Street finish line, was damaged by the first explosion but reopened only 10 days later, reopened to a small gathering of onlookers who simply stood and applauded.
“I was screwed up by the things I saw,” store manager Shane O’Hara says. “I was emotionally exhausted and physically exhausted. It reached a point where I couldn’t talk about it anymore.”
Last week, Marathon Sports received an anonymous delivery – a single yellow rose.
Yes, the 2014 Boston Marathon on Monday means that much. And it’s not just starting the race the matters but, even more so now, finishing it, completing those final deliciously agonizing strides that nearly 6,000 runners last year were denied to take by the attackers.
There’s a reason why organizers have altered the post-race procedure this year so that runners – before receiving any water, Gatorade or snacks – will first be given their finishers medals.
During their championship parade last fall, the Red Sox stopped and placed the World Series trophy on that finish line, an acknowledgement of the healing this city had undergone, a recovery notably aided by something as silly as sports.
“We needed to be together,” says Clippers coach Doc Rivers, who, at the time, was coaching the Celtics. “We needed a gathering. We needed a giant church. If you wonder why sports is important, you saw the reason.”
And you’ll see it again Monday. Running – the most individual of athletic endeavors, the loneliest sport of them all – making teammates of an undeniably bonded community of complete strangers.
It will be historic. It will be special. It will be emotional. Desperately, painfully and wonderfully emotional.
And that’s another thing to understand about tears. No matter what causes them, when they all run together, they become one.
Contact the writer: jmiller@ocregister.com
