Running on Empty

by Marshall Ulrich

  The fictional stories fired my imagination, while TV coverage of the true-life exploits of the early Everest mountaineers made me want to test my farm-hardened strength against the natural world. I was two years old in 1953 when Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay ascended the 29,035 feet, the first men to reach the top and come back alive. Before my adolescence, more than a dozen summiteers had conquered Mount Everest, and many, many more have done it since. Not without paying a price, however. Images of their hands, so dramatic on our black-and-white television’s screen, fascinated me: Nails and knuckles swollen and darkened by severe frostbite, they had clawed their way down the mountainside as the wind blew, sounding an unyielding, eerie, and violent noise. Indeed, many climbers returned with fingers and toes frozen off, sacrificed to the gods of great adventure on the highest mountain on earth. Clearly, not just anyone would do this, but it was equally evident to my young eyes that it could be done. Besides, Mom was always telling us kids that we could accomplish anything. At five years old, I’d already decided that I wanted to climb mountains. Someday, I’d be one of the elevated few, keeping company with those exceptional people who brave the elements, tough it out, go the distance. Someday, I’d be a man who, as Jack London put it, “sounds the deeps of his nature.”

  Yet the demands of the farm kept me in the here and now. There was always work to be done. Crops to be tended, harvested, stored. Cows to be milked, fed, moved. Sheds to be cleaned and filled with straw. Machinery to be maintained, fixed, and, on incredibly rare occasions, junked. Dad, a real no-nonsense businessman in addition to being a farmer, was loath to throw anything away or buy anything new. The one time we told him about our neighbors’ suggestion that we get a new conveyor chain for the manure spreader, because they replaced theirs every couple of years and never had trouble with breakdowns, he looked at us like we’d lost our minds. His stern expression said it all: “You boys get on out there and use the links I bought you to fix that chain we’ve got.”

  When I graduated from high school, in 1969, no one was surprised that I’d achieved less than a 2.0 grade-point average. Homework had always been a low priority, somewhere between visits to the barbershop and cleaning my room. In other words, I rarely studied, and my results reflected my schoolwork ethic.

  That August, a month after my eighteenth birthday, a dairy farm much larger than ours was home to the Woodstock Festival in New York. No, I didn’t attend, but I was well aware that we were in an era of free love and draft cards. By then I was seeing Jean Schmid, a girl I’d met a couple of years earlier on a blind date at a church hayride, and we’d go into Boulder to listen to the Freddie Henchie Band and gawk at all the hippies on “The Hill,” which was Colorado’s answer to Haight-Ashbury.

  Jean and I had fallen in love quickly, proving that opposites attract: She was as socially outgoing as I was shy. She had a crackerjack mind, hazel eyes, and an infectious laugh. She also knew what she wanted, enjoyed a joke, and was nurturing in a way I’d never experienced—all traits I found irresistible. A slight young woman at four feet, eleven inches and eighty-seven pounds, she’d climbed onto my lap on our second date and started making out with me, letting me know exactly how she felt. I was completely taken with her, and by the time we were seventeen, I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with Jean.

  A few years later, after I’d done my time in a junior college, and put in a year of basic training with the Air National Guard, she agreed to marry me. She transferred to the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, where she continued to study journalism and I went into the fine arts program. In June 1974, we received our diplomas, tied the knot, and started my first business, all in the same week.

  Although I’d spent the last few years working on weaving, sculpture, and painting, I’d decided to go into the family business, and opened a rendering plant. Buying cattle carcasses and processing the dead animals to make dog food, I jokingly referred to myself as a “used cow dealer.”

  Because I was so busy with the new operation and Jean was pursuing a law degree, we put off having children for a while, but as soon as she had that locked up, we were ready. In fact, Jean sat for the bar when she was eight months pregnant, and as expected, she handily passed the exam.

  Life seemed full of promise. Both of us had worked hard for what we’d achieved, and with a baby on the way we felt as if we had everything we’d ever hoped for. In 1979, after twelve hours of labor, Jean gave birth to our daughter by cesarean section. It was considered unorthodox at the time, but I was allowed in the operating room when the doctors pulled our girl, healthy and squalling, from her mother’s womb, and I took many, many photographs of the birth. Calling such a moment miraculous hardly describes the joy and intimacy of it, but that’s what it seemed to us. Our parents, siblings, and friends came by to celebrate our baby daughter, Elaine, the first grandchild for both sides of the family. I was sure life couldn’t get any better, and I was right. Everything was perfect.

  A year later, just after we’d bought our first house and little Elaine was starting to toddle around the yard, we got the devastating news: Jean had invasive breast cancer, which had already spread to her lymph nodes. Telling us about it, the doctor tried to remain professionally detached but was visibly rattled by what he’d seen on the mammography films. He scheduled Jean for surgery immediately, and within just a couple of days, she underwent a double mastectomy. By the week’s end she began chemotherapy.

  During Jean’s first treatment, she made small talk with the chemotherapist and mentioned that we were looking forward to having more children; little ones make life so rich, take you outside yourself, and help you to keep things in perspective—they even make trials like this one bearable. Tending to her IV, the doctor offhandedly told her we should wait. Well, of course, we’d hold off until Jean was feeling better . . . No, that’s not what he meant. He explained that he didn’t know if she’d be around to raise them. That stunned and silenced her, and I could imagine what she was thinking: Would she live to see Elaine get out of diapers, much less become an adult?

  We were both quiet during the seventy-mile drive back home from the hospital. Neither of us could say it out loud: We might never have another child, and Elaine might grow up without a mother. Jean might die. What we’d heard in that sterile room overwhelmed my wife; although she’d known, on some level, that her cancer could be deadly, she hadn’t really accepted that fact until she realized that her future as a mother was threatened. The realization knocked Jean off-kilter for a few days, but she eventually regained her footing, deciding that what she needed to do was take this one step at a time, try to get well, and then we’d figure out what to do next. Everything had become incomprehensibly complex.

  After Jean healed from the surgery, our lives changed, but not as drastically as you might expect. We kept up our normal routine as much as possible: Jean went to her office and continued to practice law five days a week. I took Elaine with me to Fort Morgan early every morning, left her with a friend, and then put in a long day at the rendering plant. Sometime around six or seven o’clock, I’d pick up Elaine and head back to our house; occasionally, I’d stay later than that and Jean would get Elaine, or I’d go back to the plant in the middle of the night, depending on my workload. Jean never brought work home, so she could focus her attention on the family, and was always eager to have our daughter back in her arms. We dealt with this crisis by compartmentalizing: There was home, work, and the medical merry-go-round—which we desperately hoped would solve this problem for us. We tried to keep it all as separate as possible, acting as if everything would be okay if we kept moving forward, just as Jean had resolved, taking one step at a time.

  She was a trouper, although it’s true what they say about cancer: Sometimes the treatment is as awful as any illness might be. Jean lost both of her breasts and some tissue under her arms to the radical mastectomy, and then her hair fell out from the chemotherapy. She was often weak, nauseated, and off balance, and she had no app
etite, so she dropped weight, yet she was puffy from taking prednisone. She worried about what I thought of her appearance. Honestly, I couldn’t have cared less about that and was simply grateful to have her home with us, no matter how much this cruel disease might change her. It did make me sad and angry that cancer could attack my wife so viciously, so senselessly, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

  Jean was mad, too. “Why me? I don’t smoke or drink. What have I ever done to bring this on myself?”

  Staring blankly, I was completely incapable of answering her, but I could empathize. “I understand. I’d be furious if it was me.”

  And what if it was me . . . next? I couldn’t help wondering. Her illness made me acknowledge my own mortality, along with my powerlessness and the vulnerability of everyone around me. If this could happen to Jean, such a good person, so smart and loving and health conscious, who was safe? What about Elaine? Could I really protect anyone I loved?

  Once, when Jean went to the hospital for a spinal biopsy, a long procedure that involved an intimidating surgical drilling device and a lot of waiting, a nurse took my blood pressure to kill some time. She deftly avoided telling me my results but talked with Jean about it later. The numbers were through the roof, something like 160/110. My wife urged me to see our family physician.

  The doc confirmed my hypertension and had one piece of advice: cardiovascular exercise. The problem was stress-induced, as my blood pressure had been rock solid until then. I was extremely fit from my work at the rendering plant and from my fairly recent foray into salt-curing hides, demanding physical work that had given us the money we needed to put Jean through law school. At five feet, nine inches and 148 pounds, I was lean and muscular, but the pressures of my personal life were squeezing my heart.

  My brother Steve liked to run and would enter a few races here and there. Jean’s boss at the law firm was a runner, too, and he encouraged me to get outside and blow off some steam.

  “It’ll do you good.”

  So I pulled on a pair of low-top canvas Converse shoes I’d had since I was thirteen, and I stepped out the front door of our house to go on my first jog. No music to accompany me, of course; this was 1980. (Not even an early-model Walkman, as Sony hadn’t introduced portable cassette players to U.S. markets yet.) I listened to the sound of my breath, pulling hard through my mouth, my jaw tight. As I picked up the pace, my heart pounding, I wondered why the hell any adult would run if he didn’t have to. I didn’t like that feeling of gasping for air, my leg muscles straining, my feet slapping the pavement until I turned off the road and into the woods, where at least the ground was softer. I ran a couple of miles.

  The next day I was sore and uninterested in ever doing that again.

  But I did do it again, of course. I took a break for one day, and then I got back out there because I knew I had to. After a week of off-and-on “training,” I entered my first race, the Fort Morgan Times 5K, and got done in just over twenty minutes—once again ahead of Steve, who was unamused. At the finish, I congratulated him, and he gave me a dead-eyed stare, then walked away into the crowd of runners, distraught. Soon after that, he quit running altogether, for which I sort of blame myself.

  Running provided an excellent distraction from my life, which was filled with the stress of my business, my little girl’s confusion about what was happening to her mom, doctor’s appointments, and the looming threat of death, coupled with the effort of maintaining my denial. While running, I could focus on something else: It provided mental relief and emotional release, an escape into physical effort. Sometimes, the real world would catch up with me, and I’d duck behind a bush and allow myself to indulge in sorrow and self-pity, crying openly, something I never did at home. But most of the time, I kept plugging along, fantasizing about something completely unrelated to my existence at the moment. In my mind, I explored other continents, scaled Everest, trod the jungles of Borneo and the Australian outback, paddled the rivers of Patagonia.

  In short order, the regular cardiovascular exercise worked to bring my blood pressure down and keep it in check. Nearly every day started with an early-morning run, which I finished by about 6:30 a.m. so that I could get back to the house for Elaine and then on to work for the day. It was also good for me to be able to go off on my own, both physically and mentally, whenever I’d reached my emotional limits. When I’d feel as if I was going to break down in front of Jean, who I believed needed me to be unfailingly positive and strong, I’d head out for a run, where I could think about her, admit my sadness, let the tears flow, dwell on something else for a while, and then come back to the house in better shape to care for my wife and child. I felt guilty about spending time away from my family, but I also knew I was literally running for my life.

  Jean’s treatments seemed to do the trick, at least for a while. But less than a year after her surgery, the cancer returned with a vengeance, and she stopped working as the disease consumed her body. She sought comfort in being with family and friends, spent time reading the Bible. Her doctors tried an experimental treatment that brought her white blood cell count down to dangerous levels, leaving her susceptible to infection. Any visitors had to wear face masks, and Elaine was banned from the room. Many times before, though, when Jean had been in the hospital and in better health, Elaine had played on the white bed, chattering and singing and showering her mother with kisses. Now, when I had to come alone, the pleasant distraction was gone and the disease became more present, the nearness of Jean’s death more real. At these times, we’d talk about Elaine’s future, and what we wanted for her. During one of these hospital-room discussions, Jean asked me to promise that I’d secure a place for Elaine at a college on the East Coast, where Jean imagined she would have gone had she not decided to put our romance and then our family first. (Not that she had any regrets, she assured me. She wanted Elaine to have opportunities she might have pursued herself.) She especially liked Wellesley College, a school she believed would help our daughter become the kind of person we both aspired to raise: an educated, self-possessed, strong woman with a dedication to and passion for her life’s work. Of course, I promised Jean I would do all I could, though I insisted she’d be around to do it herself.

  It had become obvious that Jean was dying, but I couldn’t confront that reality. I sought solace in increasing distances and thinking about faraway places. The mounting mileage was intimidating but exhilarating, and on race days, I was regularly finishing in the top 5 or 10 percent. As the distances grew, I spent even less time at home. I ran until I was emptied out, and then I ran some more. Until I could come back to my wife and not start screaming or crying or explode into a million pieces at the sight of what the cancer was doing to her.

  Jean was supportive, as she could see that this outlet was becoming increasingly important to me, giving me a way to cope. In June 1981, I competed in an especially tough race, a 14.5-mile slog on the highest paved road in the United States, running up nearly four thousand vertical feet—my first attack on serious elevation gain—and Jean came out to cheer me at the finish. Atop Mount Evans at 14,264 feet and weak from a recent chemotherapy treatment, she still jumped up and down, excited for my achievement; I’d earned the Mount Evans Trophy Run prize for those of us who finished in the top 10 percent, a chunk of rock with a plaque commemorating the effort. Seeing her this way was incredible: It looked to me as if she’d finished America’s highest road race herself. In those moments, she was vibrant, happy for me, alive.

  There was one day, though, when Jean lay in her bed at home in a darkened room, battered and exhausted from all that the disease was doing to her. The gloomy scene made me claustrophobic: my wife wasting away in a lightless cavern.

  I wanted to run and told her so.

  “How can you leave me right now? How can you be so callous? I need you. I’m so tired. Please stay.”

  I have to run.

  “Don’t go! Please. God, I’m so alone . . .”

  I looked at her, des
perate to go.

  “Marshall.”

  I left.

  I did: I ran, and I still regret it. I never could admit and talk honestly about my own fear of being left alone, without her, although both of us knew how sick she was. I’m embarrassed to admit that the one time she asked me, straight out, if I thought she was going to die, I couldn’t bring myself to say yes.

  “No.” It felt like a betrayal, but I lied to her anyway, and I tried to lie to myself.

  The cancer metastasized to her brain and crossed her eyes, then ravaged her lungs, her bones, and finally her liver. In November 1981, when the doctors said there was nothing more they could do, we took Jean home to her parents’ place in Greeley, where we stayed for a couple of weeks, her pain mitigated by morphine shots a hospice nurse taught me to give her. One night I carried her into bed, and we lay down together for the last time. At about one o’clock in the morning, I heard an unearthly gasp as my thirty-year-old wife took her last breath.

  In the days after, our family surrounded Elaine and me. I never talked with anyone about it, but my mind was racked with despair and fear: Why did this happen to Jean? What am I supposed to do now? How will I take care of Elaine by myself? Will I be the next to die? Is life even worth living? Although I agonized in private, it was clear to everyone around me that I felt lost and was struggling to feel whole again. In the last couple of weeks, I’d dropped ten pounds, and I looked gaunt. With a sunken chest, a collapsed face, and an eerie emptiness in my eyes, I must have appeared a shrunken shadow of my former self.

  Ever the practical person, my mom counseled me to move on. It’s time to get on with your life, son. Put away your tears. Be a man. Stand on your own two feet. Depend upon yourself. What you need to do is get back to work.

  So that’s what I did.

  PART I