Safe Suicide

On Aging

178 safe suicide On Aging The ninety-four-year-old Johnny Kelley is the patron saint of the Boston Marathon. Richard Wilbur once mentioned him in a poem called “Running.” Every year for the decade of the 1990s, at least, he has appeared on the local news coverage at the start of the race in Hopkinton, beaming and in apparent good health, singing “here is the best part; you have a head start, if you are among the very young at heart.” Several years ago a statue was unveiled in his honor at the foot of the renowned Heartbreak Hill, at mile sixteen, where Center Street crosses Commonwealth Avenue. The statue depicts an eighty-year-old, shrunken, stringy Johnny Kelley running and holding hands high with a twenty-one-year-old Johnny Kelley in his prime, and is called “Forever Young.” I find this inordinately moving, and on the eve of my sixty-first birthday, I had my son take a picture of me standing on the pedestal with one arm around each Johnny’s shoulder. R Between the ages of fifty-one and fifty-seven, I struggled to run the Boston Marathon each year. I was encouraged the first time by a younger colleague who had finished it the year before and told me it was an unforgettable experience. I had been running only five-, then ten- mile loops around the Charles River bike path, but I started training day by day, week by week, and discovered that I could go farther and longer. From my home in Watertown, the river as it meanders into Boston is punctuated by a series of bridges. The Harvard Bridge marked a twelve-mile loop. The BU Bridge marked a sixteen, the MIT Bridge an eighteen, and all the way around the Science Museum and back to my house was twenty-five miles. I trained and trained, the longer runs taking me three hours. My friend told me that the adrenalin of the event, of the crowds, and of the other runners in the marathon would carry me the 26.2-mile distance even if in my longest run before the race I had only reached eighteen miles. 178 I’m not a natural athlete, and certainly not a gifted runner. The goal here wasn’t competition. I took as gospel the sentences from Galloway’s Book of Running: “In your first marathon, don’t worry about time. Just run to finish. Staying on your feet for twenty-six miles is a feat in itself.” On my long training runs, I would sometimes hit my wall five miles from home, falter to a painful walk, call and ask to be picked up; or once, I actually had to take a bus. I was sweaty and given berth by the other passengers. R Race day, my friend and his wife picked me up at 9 am. Another young friend of his, Ray, was in the car. My colleague himself wasn’t running, as I had thought he would be, but this other man, Ray, had run the marathon twice before and would be running. They drove us out the turnpike to Hopkinton, then dropped us off and took our picture. I was wearing a red poncho that I would never take off and later would regret, with a bag of jellybeans in the bib. Ray led me from the drop-off point. Hundreds of other runners seemed to materialize, walking the mile or two with us. I didn’t realize it then, but Boston was the only marathon anywhere with qualifying times. Those who met those demanding times in another legitimate marathon were eligible to be “official runners,” paid an entry fee, were given a bib number, and were bussed from downtown Boston to Hopkinton. The thousands of others who were “unofficial” were so-called “bandits,” unable to qualify, but attempting to run off the record. As we had, they had made their way to Hopkinton under their own power. Ray was friendly, but distracted. He had his own race to think about. He was looking out for friends. As my guide, he would at least show me to the start. He reassured me that the dreaded Heartbreak Hill wasn’t as bad as everybody said. He said to start out slow, and not to let the crowd force my pace. Everyone around us seemed nervous, some bragging and protesting too much; others taciturn. We passed a parking lot where some Canadian college kids...