Almost before I wake, there are tears in the corners of my eyes. It’s like the emotions from dreams, or even empty sleep, are squeezing my body’s container and must find the release valve. Like my air mattress here in the NYC guest room.

Deflate me, God. It’s a lot.

I’ve sometimes wondered how any person can go though a regular day without hot tears behind the lids ready to spill. For me, it’s always an easy access route – my cheeks are near perpetual puffery.

I just want to live the day to the full.

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There are two times in a woman’s life where she must go it alone – rely completely on herself, her own body, with singular pain and endurance, to achieve the goal. Both journeys are mental, physical, and emotional – and are basically solo.

Two marathons.

Birth and death, you can shuffle them up and place them on the table in any configuration.

My daughter is in the final stretch of hers – in the 38th week of pregnancy. If she asks about specifics, I want to be articulate when I attempt to describe the experience of giving birth, but I can’t. I don’t remember that much.

And it doesn’t matter anyway – it was a solitary pain, custom-fit to my own body. But what we will share is the birth narrative, and her experience will be the notes of her own book.

An account about a rugged trail that is never short (not really), is never a breeze and is almost always a gruel.

But then there is the finish line, thank God.

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Last weekend I went up to NYC to watch my son run the NYC Marathon.

It was a vivid swirl of colorful bodies – wheelchairs, workers, police motorcycles – so many blew past me that I couldn’t identify the faces. 50,000 runners flew, ran, jogged, walked, stumbled and collapsed along the 5 boroughs of that city.

And even though it was a crazy mass of humanity – packed tight, jostling and elbowing – each runner was still alone. Even though they were cheered on by the deafening multitudes of family, coaches and strangers, each one had only an individual body to see them through to the finish line.

For me the marathon is the clearest metaphor I can find today for life – from birth to death – the practice, the struggl, the pain, the transcending of all of the body’s physical, mental, and emotional limits.

That’s why we’re drawn to it. We watch even if we’ve never run around the block.

It is a display of bare-faced human grit and steel will to keep going, to keep living.

When things are so hard, when days make no sense. When negativity fights to block our airways. When we feel no strength in the legs, when we can’t see any road markers or even get a sense of what we’re running towards.

When we doubt we’ll ever want to run a race again. Or run at all.

And always there is the question, squinting toward the blurry finish – why?

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Last night, back home in my own bed, I wake to the weird conclusion that I am all alone.

And that both of my kids are alone too, even as they live their full, active lives with partners.

But in the best way, we each sit in the stands and we cheer for this growing, changing family to keep on going.

I take deep breaths in the quiet kitchen, I cry into the bath towel.

No words, just a fullness in my chest that I honestly believe can rise and coalesce and take flight – and travel like a runners legs sprinting across a dirty city street, or like the tremor of a muscle contraction that builds and lengthens and brings a child.

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My enormous emotions swing and catch and blow across the autumn yard, into the sky.

I see the Cooper’s hawk circling above the near naked oak tree.

And I think about the backyard honeybees.

They are packed in the hive, one atop another, and their tiny lace wings rise and fall in a quiet cadence as they brush against one another.

All winter, they will converse and socialize, and develop, even in that tiny home.

And they wait.

And come spring, the delicate new wings will power them for miles and miles to do what they must.

The raptor and the insect, so different, but alike in a way, too.

Each will traverse on the jet stream of nature’s migration, alone, but also part of a huge dance, one that’s too complex and mysterious for me to fathom – but one that sweeps me up nonetheless.

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