Running With My Mom: Nowhere to Go but Up – The New York Times

Welcome to the Running newsletter! Every Saturday morning, we email runners with news, advice and some motivation to help you get up and running. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.

Dear Readers,

When my mom called me last Saturday morning, she was a jangle of nerves. We were taking the train from Philadelphia to Manhattan that afternoon to tackle the New York City Marathon Training Series 18-Mile Run the next day. It would be her longest training run for her first marathon. It would also be her longest run ever, so the nerves were understandable.

When she asked me how I was feeling, it wasn’t just out of politeness. My grandmother on my father’s side had died two days before. She was 85, and my last living grandparent.

“Like I don’t want to go,” I told her.

“You know, that’s not exactly what I want to hear,” she said.

My parents had been divorced for more than 20 years, so she hadn’t been part of the last two days of unwinding what my grandmother had left behind. I hung up on her and put my head down on my dining room table. I’d just spent two days propping up one parent. I didn’t think I had anything else left to give.

I’ve run through grief before. I trained for my first 10-mile race soon after my grandfather on my mother’s side died in 2007. I finished the 2017 New York City Marathon days after the death of my paternal grandfather.

He’d wanted no funeral, no service, no memorial, so there was not much else to do but go out and run a marathon. But I did it alone.

My grandmother — who had been married to him for nearly 60 years — had expressed the same wishes, so there was no ceremony to mark her passing. Again, I had the opportunity to pound out my grief through running. But I couldn’t do it alone this time. I’d promised Mom that I would run the marathon with her, and do at least one long training run with her too.

She called me back, but I didn’t answer. She texted me and said we didn’t have to go. But we’d already paid for the run, the train and the hotel, and I knew how important these 18 miles would be for her confidence going into the marathon, so I shoved some clothes in a backpack, put on my headphones, flipped up my hoodie and went.

The training run is three loops of Central Park. Mom runs about four minutes per mile slower than my easy pace, so I knew I could cover the distance. My challenge was to make sure not to push her too hard, and to figure out what she needed from me, that sweet spot of being supportive but not annoying and let her run her own race.

My grandmother had gone to the hospital on Sept. 2 for what was supposed to be a straightforward gallbladder removal, but her health had taken a downward turn. I’d been listening to the soundtrack of “Mary Poppins Returns” nonstop during the last two weeks (though I skipped the songs about loss) because it’s peppy and bright, and familiar without having the land mines of memories of listening to the soundtrack of the original, which I’d watched many times with my grandmother.

So when Mom said she was going to listen to Enya through one headphone (which is music that calms her down while running), I put on “Mary Poppins Returns” and sang the songs to her even though I only knew three of every four words. I thought it would be funny.

“You’re singing off key,” she said.

On the second lap, we fell into a groove. I stopped singing. I walked next to her when she ran uphill. At crowded aid stations, I ran in first to make a path for her to follow. If she wanted to talk, she did. If she didn’t, I ran by her side and let my mind unspool across my memories of my grandmom, which were tangled up with memories of the other grandparents I had lost before.

“They were really very different,” I said as we passed the statue of Alexander Hamilton for the second time.

“Who?” she asked.

“Your parents, and dad’s parents,” I said.

“Well sure,” she said. Her father had served in World War II; his in Korea. Her parents were strict but loving Catholics. His were the life of the party. One of the last coherent things Grandmom said to me was that after surgery, she wanted me to bring her a big glass of wine with a lot of ice — just how she liked it. She never got better enough for me to fulfill that promise.

“I miss all of them,” I said.

“I know she wasn’t young, but it’s never easy, Jenny,” she said. “And remember: It’s only been three days.”

Then, after a pause, “Thank you for being here.”

On our third lap, the crowds fell away — a lot of runners finished all three laps in the time it took us to do two. Mom looked fine, but she said she was tired — still running, but tired.

“Do it again,” she said. “Sing me the soundtrack.”

So I did — leaning in to the fact that I didn’t know all the words, that my British accent was worse than Dick Van Dyke’s in the original “Mary Poppins,” and that yes, I sung off key. It was a sunny day with temperatures in the 80s, and my phone screen and finger were sweaty, so when I wanted to skip the songs about loss, I wiped my phone on the one patch of my mother’s shirt that was not soaked with sweat. I added dance moves, to the point that my mom warned me not to throw my arms around to avoid hitting another runner.

“What other runners? There aren’t many left,” I said, flinging both arms open wide and smacking her in the shoulder.

The last song in my medley was the movie’s finale, “Nowhere to Go But Up,” a rousing song about how things can only get better from here.

I skipped in front of her then ran back to sing, “And if you don’t believe just hang onto my sleeve, for there’s nowhere to go but up!”

The word “up” reached up and caught me in the back of my throat. Yes, I was putting on a show, but I was still so tired and so sad, and proud of her too. I could tell she was struggling: the tightness in her shoulder, the grim forward stare, but she kept putting one foot in front of the other. Three miles to go, then two, then one, then none.

“Here comes Jen Miller and Mary Miller, maybe they’re related!” the announcer at the finish line called as we crossed. We were among the last people to finish that day. We did it in four hours, 48 minutes, 49 seconds — well under my mom’s goal of five hours.

The night Grandmom died, I asked Dad what he thought she was doing. We settled on her and my grandfather at a Frank Sinatra concert, with Rosemary Clooney as the opening act, held in a big, glittering ballroom of the Atlantic City of their youth.

After showers, nachos and naps at our hotel, Mom and I walked to Grand Central Terminal to stretch out our legs. Maybe, I thought as I stared up at the constellations on the ceiling, that concert was not in Atlantic City but here in New York City instead, where they had gone on their honeymoon. They were two kids from New Jersey then, about to start a new adventure, one that had just ended.

“Let’s go back,” I said to my mom.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m tired. I’m ready to go to bed.” And dream.

Run Well!

— Jen A. Miller

Author, “Running: A Love Story”

Like this email?

Forward it to your friends, and let them know they can sign up here.