The life before grief, and the life after

There’s a life before grief, and then there’s the life after. Grief forever changes you.

In 1998, I was forever changed as a person. One Sunday in July, while I was working overtime in a law office, a phone call came in: my younger brother and my father had figured in a car accident. A drunk driver had swerved from the opposite lane and collided head-on with the car, then being driven by my brother’s friend.

My father was seriously injured. My brother did not survive. I’ve since come to understand that a part of me died with him.

Our lives were never the same after that. My father was subsequently diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s — a condition I’ve long suspected the tragedy of that day had a hand in. He passed away in 2023.

Last year, my mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. After a long and courageous battle, she passed away last week.

My own bout with a brain tumor in 2014 drove the point home further — how extremely fragile life is. It is safe to say that grief and death and I have been in close contact for nearly 30 years now.

But I choose to frame my life’s tragedies in a positive light. My faith in God has never been stronger. I have never been more grateful for the family He gave me. These events have forced me to constantly search for meaning. I have learned not to bother with superficial concerns and shallow connections — I simply don’t have the bandwidth, or the time, for them anymore.

What I have been given, instead, is clarity on what truly matters: mostly the people we love, and doing right by others.

In the midst of all this, I’ve learned that one of the best ways to fortify myself is through endurance sports. I run long distances. I put my body through difficult things, because by physically suffering, I arm my mind with the capacity to deal with grief — all forms of it. It gives me the ability to be calmer, more accepting, and to make better decisions.

There is a peculiar logic to this that only makes sense once you’ve lived it.

When you are out on a long run, somewhere past the point your body wants to stop, you are negotiating with discomfort in real time. You learn that pain is not the same thing as danger. You learn that you can keep moving even when every signal tells you to quit. And slowly, without quite meaning to, you start applying that same lesson to grief. Grief, too, wants you to believe you cannot go on. Endurance sport is where you practice, safely and on your own terms, the discovery that you can.

I found that the only way not to suffer from suffering is to be good friends with it. Not to run from it, not to numb it, but to sit with it the way you sit with the burn in your legs at mile eighteen — knowing it will pass, knowing you are stronger for having stayed in it, knowing that somewhere ahead there is still a finish line worth reaching.

I have buried a brother, a father, and now a mother. I have carried a diagnosis of my own. And still, I run. Not to outrun grief — you cannot outrun grief — but because the road has taught me how to carry it.