1K Miles of Hope | Ep. 09: Ninth Day

Ninth day. Midnight. The avenue is empty.

Around the seventh kilometer the ankle starts. Not badly — just enough. My stride shortens. I run badly, always have — I move like something that learned from a manual. I slow down. If it gets worse tonight I won't be able to walk tomorrow. That part I've already figured out.

The moon is low. I look up. It's enormous.

Earlier I'd seen a story about a man who died. Stomach cancer, advanced, not more than fifty. He was known as a good person, everyone said so. Months before he died he called his family and friends together. Not to say goodbye — he called it a living wake. He stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by everyone who loved him, knowing what was coming, and he smiled. I watched the video on my phone that morning. He wasn't performing. It was the smile of someone who had stopped pretending.

I thought about Pau Donés for a long stretch of that run.

Spanish singer. In 2015, abdominal pain, diagnosis: colon cancer. Surgery, chemo, more than thirty concerts cancelled. Then clean scans. Then in 2017 a relapse — tumors in the peritoneum. He lived with it for five more years. Never stopped making music. Said once: "Cancer made me very happy, because I was losing many things in life." He meant it. Before the diagnosis he lived in airports and tour buses. The cancer stopped everything. He spent time with his daughter. He paid attention.

He died June 9, 2020. Fifty-three years old.

He and the man in the video never met. They both ended up in the same place.

The ankle loosens somewhere around the eleventh kilometer. I pick up the pace.

Then there was the car.

White Fiat Argo. Two men inside. Midnight. It passed me once — slow, staring. Then came back. I'm tracking it from the corner of my eye. Second pass, third, fourth. On the fifth it pulls over, signals, sits there honking. Engine running. Stopped.

I thought: no one I know does this. I'm not famous enough for a stranger to recognize me. I ran through the other explanations quickly and none of them were good.

I ran faster.

Eventually the car was gone. I was heading home.

17 planned. 4 to chip away at last week's debt. 21.02 total.

Pau Donés is from Zaragoza. The good guy was from somewhere around here. I don't know their full names. But both of them made this run mean more than any kilometer I could have planned.

If you want to be part of this — not for me, but for the chance that a story like theirs one day doesn't have to end that way — donate. Any amount. Cancer doesn't have to be a sentence. Not in the future we're building.

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Any questions, write to me at contact@hanielrolemberg.com.