I followed our moving van over Boston’s Tobin Bridge from Gloucester, Massachusetts. I was newly divorced; my four-year-old boy was belted into his car seat. I had no experience raising a child alone, no job, and little money. My mother’s lifelong advice swam in my head: Never get married. Never have kids. And if you don’t know what to do, say the Hail Mary until you find the strength to hang on. I had done the marriage — it flopped. I’d had a child — the best thing I’d ever done.
Hang on, I told myself as we swung into the city. When I saw the blue skyscrapers I felt Boston welcome us. Here we would have a chance at a new life.
I rented a tiny attic apartment under the eaves of a Victorian house. The floors were dark and scratched. The kitchen had one tiny window so high I couldn’t see out of it, yet it let in the roar of traffic below. I thought I would cry at its ugliness, but it was all I could afford. “Hang on,” I told myself. “I’ll fix it up.”
To my surprise, the postage-stamp apartment was two blocks from one of the greatest athletic events in the world — the Boston Marathon. I held my boy’s chubby hand the first time we crossed Beacon Street to watch. College students barbecued while others hung out of windows roaring, “Run! Run!” Music blared from restaurants and radios. Everyone was smiling and chanting, “Run!”
As the day grew longer, the shouts got stronger, with all of Brookline yelling, “Hang on. You can do it, hang on!” My son and I felt triumphant, too.
Soon, I got a job teaching writing and literature at Suffolk University. Every day on my way to class, crossing Boston Common, I passed the woman who sat in a battered lawn chair, her head wrapped in a bright cloth, singing, “I need your gift today, I need your generous gift today.” Every day I gave her a dollar.
And Boston itself felt like such a gift — the commuters swarming out of the subway for work, the way the Common filled with light in the afternoons, the sense that a city this alive could hold us. Still, I worried about my boy at his new school. Would he make friends? Would he be bullied? How could I be so confident in front of a class, yet so fear-filled raising my boy alone?
* * *
Five to ten years life expectancy, the doctor said when I learned I had leukemia. “But you’re lucky. The cancer you have is slow growing. You won’t need chemotherapy for many years.” My son was no longer four — he was a skinny eleven-year-old kid who insisted on crossing Beacon Street traffic alone each morning to walk to school. We had moved again, and I watched from our orange kitchen window as my plucky boy in his FC Barcelona soccer jersey dodged four lanes of traffic and two Green Line trolleys between our apartment and his school. My own marathon was to live with a cancer that could be managed but not cured — and to keep that knowledge within my close circle until I needed treatment. Then, I would tell my boy. Hang on, I thought. Hang on.
I ran miles on the treadmill every day, drank green tea, devoured barrels of broccoli and kale to stay healthy. I had never wanted to run the Boston Marathon — I loved watching it, being held by the crowd, the collective will and joy of it. But now I was running my own kind of race, to save my life, it seemed.
Always, in spring, there was the fun of the Boston Marathon. The bedraggled, the struggling runners. Everyone yelling, “You can do it, come on, keep running.” Each year we cheered on the Jimmy Fund runners, the Dana Farber Cancer Center runners. My son handed out bottled water from the curb.
Years flew by. My son became a teenager, obsessed with stopping soccer balls as goalie. I was still a few years from treatment, so kept silent about my cancer. Let him have his childhood, I thought. Then came April 15, 2013. We stood on Beacon Street once again, for the Boston Marathon. Four neighbors tooted trumpets and banged drums as they did every year; college students leaned out apartment windows yelling, “Come on, Come on.”
My son and I stood beside my new husband and visiting family. My brother-in-law Adam was running the marathon. A whippet-thin scientist, Adam jogged daily from his Ottawa home to his university lab. We formed our own cheering section, holding water for him; he stopped, drank, and ran on.
At a little past 2 p.m., exhilarated and satisfied, we walked back to our house and waited for Adam to come home.
As I stood in the kitchen chopping vegetables for dinner, we heard on the radio that a bomb had detonated at the Boylston Street finish line. Twelve seconds later, we heard that a second bomb went off. The kids were in the dining room — my niece and nephew snacking on popcorn. We decided not to speak of the bombings in front of them.
I chopped tomatoes — their soft flesh split beneath my knife, red juice spurting onto my fingers. I wiped the stains onto my apron. Where was Adam? Had he died at the finish line?
Adam’s wife went outside, trying to call him.
Two hours after crossing the finish line, having run 26.2 miles and survived the bombing, Adam walked into our house. At dinner we passed the salad, doled out pasta, re-filled our plates like nothing had happened, so we wouldn’t scare the kids. The silence held by the adults was heavy, yes — but lighter than the silence I kept about my cancer. This silence, about the marathon bombing, was shared by many. We helped each other hold it safe.
The next day I walked onto the Green Line train headed to Boston. Normally bursting with commuters, the train was only a third full. National Guardsmen in camouflage paced inside the empty stations. Copley Station was eerily dark and silent. Boston Common was almost empty.
Helicopters broke the silence in my eleventh-floor classroom that morning, buzzing over the State House next door to my building. “Poetry presentations,” I said, standing in front of the class, acting confident when inside I was scared.
Up they came, one by one — my Haitian student reading Langston Hughes, a shy girl with strawberry blond hair presenting Emily Dickinson poems. Up they came, to read Lucille Clifton, Martin Espada, Rita Dove. During their readings, the helicopters’ roar faded.
I looked at all twenty-five of them. They, too, had lost a sense of safety — not through a cancer diagnosis, but through seeing the damage wrought by bombs on a clear spring day. Yet in that moment of sharing, a sense of safety returned.
Poems couldn’t bring back those killed at the finish line; they couldn’t ease the pain of those who lost limbs; they couldn’t cure my cancer. But in the classroom we supported each other, and our fears lessened. Together, we were held by poetry.
* * *
“This year’s Marathon will have the most runners ever,” said Governor Deval Patrick one year later. I stood once again on Beacon Street, but with a changed heart. My husband and I would soon sit my son down and tell him I had leukemia and that I would be starting chemotherapy. A terrible day, but one out of which something beautiful would appear. My son took the news quietly, the way teenage boys do. He would graduate high school later that year, his graduation gown as blue as his eyes. I had six months of chemotherapy and emerged bone-weary — too weak to walk one block up my street. But I rallied, climbed the eleven flights back up to my college classroom, pulled out a book of poetry, and faced a room of cranky, eager eighteen-year-olds. I wanted to kiss the ground.
Six years after the bombing and my own treatment for cancer, I am once again healthy and thriving. This year, when I take my place on Beacon Street to watch the marathoners fly by, National Guardsmen in camouflage lining the streets, I think about all the ways we learn to endure.
My mother’s voice echoes differently now: “Hang on for the strength to hang on.” But I’ve learned that sometimes hanging on means gripping so tightly that we can’t move forward. Sometimes it means holding our breath until we’re dizzy with the effort of not letting go.
Watching these runners — some stumbling, some limping past, but all pushing toward the finish line — I see that the real marathon isn’t about clinging to what we think we need. It’s about releasing what no longer serves us. I had to let go of the marriage that wasn’t working. Let go of the fear that I couldn’t raise my son alone. Let go of the silence around my cancer that I thought was protecting him but was really protecting me. The silence had been like a door: on one side was my son, protected from years of worry about me before he needed to know I was sick; on the other side I stood, distant from others, often isolated and lonely, wishing I could share my fears about leukemia with more than my husband, siblings, and a few close friends.
Marathon runners know this too. They let go of their doubt at mile twenty, their exhaustion at mile twenty-three, their need to look graceful as they cross the finish line. They hang on to their next step, and the one after that — but they let go of everything else.
As the afternoon comes to an end, I walk home under the trees and think that the answer isn’t to hang on. It isn’t to let go. It’s the art of sensing which choice will carry you forward, step by quiet step.
Image by Felix yu on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
- The Art of Letting Go - April 27, 2026