Angels Among Us

In 1996, I was living what I was certain was my happily ever after.

New husband. A lovely home on a cul-de-sac with great neighbors and kids everywhere. A career I loved. And if that wasn't enough, I found myself at the starting line of the hundredth running of the Boston Marathon. The hundredth. Everything, it seemed, was coming together at once.

The training had been months of early mornings and long weekend runs around Lake Sammamish — just me and my thoughts and the roads. During the week, a wonderful group of colleagues from the Seattle Times would join me on lunch runs, keeping pace and keeping me motivated. My husband would go ahead and plant water bottles along my route so I could hydrate on the long stretches. It felt like a full-court press of support, and I was grateful for every bit of it.

Race day, I was ready. Standing shoulder to shoulder with forty thousand runners from all over the world, the energy was electric. I remember smiling and thinking: this is it. This is exactly what I worked for.

For twenty miles, everything held. And then came mile twenty-one.

If you've run a marathon, you already know what I'm about to say. If you haven't — let's just say that mile twenty-one has a way of stripping away everything you thought you had left. Both of my calves seized at the same moment. The cramps were blinding.

I limped to the side of the course, grabbed onto a chain-link fence, and held on for dear life as the pain shot straight through my legs.

I started to think about quitting. Seriously. I was cold, I was hurting, and quitting felt completely reasonable.

That's when he appeared.

He was a crusty-looking man with a thick Boston accent and–I say this with absolute affection–a generous amount of beer on his breath. He got right in my face, looked me dead in the eye, and said:

"Keep going, sweetheart. You can do it. Just keep going. You've got this."

He said it over and over. I have no idea who he was. I never saw him again. He wasn't part of my training plan or my support crew. He was just a man standing on a sidewalk in Boston who showed up at the exact moment I needed him most.

I let go of the fence. I kept on running.

I've run other races since then, but none have stayed with me the way Boston has. Not because of the distance or the finish line or even the hundredth-anniversary part of it. It stayed because of him. Because of that moment. Because of what I've come to understand it was really about.

Life has a mile twenty-one. Usually more than one.

I've had several of mine since 1996 — moments when the thing I thought was my happily ever after revealed itself to be something far more complicated.

Times when I was gripping a different kind of fence, in a different kind of pain, wondering if it might just be easier to sit down and stop.

And every single time, without fail, an angel showed up.

Not always in the form I expected. Not always with good timing or good breath. Sometimes it was a phone call. Sometimes a single sentence from someone who had no way of knowing I needed it. Sometimes it was a person I barely knew, or a stranger I'd never see again.

What I've noticed, looking back, is that these moments of grace tend to arrive when I stop trying to hold everything together by force. When I finally loosen my grip on the plan, on what I thought things were supposed to look like, on the idea that I have to manage all of it alone.

That's when help finds me. Not before. Not when I'm performing fine. At the fence. In the cramp. In the quiet admission that I cannot do this by myself.

I don't think that's a coincidence.

I think we are surrounded by far more help than we allow ourselves to receive. And I believe the allowing is the thing. Not the deserving, not the asking perfectly, not the timing, just the softening enough to let it in.

If you're somewhere in the middle of your own mile twenty-one right now, I hope you'll consider this: the angel doesn't always know they're an angel. They're just someone who looked up at the right moment and said what needed to be said.

And maybe, on the days when you're not the one gripping the fence, maybe you're the one on the sidewalk. Looking up. Saying the thing.

We are each other's angels more often than we realize.

I finished that marathon. And I have finished every hard thing since then, too, not because I am particularly strong or special, but because I have never, in my darkest moments, actually been alone.

Neither have you.

Love & Light,

Michèle