Born to Run
By Kasey Butcher Santana
My father died so unexpectedly that a panicked part of my brain froze, thinking it was still August for months afterward. I caught myself incorrectly dating documents until a new calendar year shook me loose. While doing routine tasks, I replayed the day in the back of my mind, searching for some way to change the outcome. Those times would come later, after I left home and tried to resume my normal life. Running along a backroad, retracing my father's last bike ride, I was still in the initial shock.
Homesickness and grief both rearrange your relationship to time and space so that an environment that once felt so familiar becomes foreign, and quirks that once annoyed are cherished. I often felt homesick for this humid, tree-lined terrain, but I came home in a haze of grief. After living in Denver for three years, I was no longer used to muggy Midwestern summers, and my lungs felt thick. At the corner of Wait Road and State Road 150, I bent over, hands on my knees, gulping water, Rod Stewart singing in my ears. I knew that the sign saying “Wait” was just a road marker but, breathless and alone, it was hard not to wish it was a message.
*
Dad had his last day off work to see the doctor about some mild symptoms—fatigue, mostly. The doctor thought there was an issue with his heart, a blockage maybe, and they discussed placing a stent soon, but he did not think it was an emergency. Dad went to church, called Mom, and rode his bike.
In the aftermath, some of us dwelled on that bike ride. Examining his Strava account, I noticed that Dad rode the same route frequently—a short winding path through the neighborhood, then a big rectangle on state and county roads, made longer or shorter by crossing back at different points, riding between ten and thirty miles. The day he died, he rode 22.1 miles. My brother pulled the record from his heart monitor and saw that Dad had not raised his pulse higher than the doctor advised. Still, he came home, ate lunch, sat down on the couch, and died. The headline in the local paper read "Radio Icon Dead at 61." I was 31 and a bit of a mess.
I fixated on the route. What were the last things that Dad saw? What were the last smells he smelled? On that morning, where did he go? This route seemed to hold the answer to a question I did not know how to ask. Deep down, I knew that he must have smelled cow shit, but I was still curious.
In the following days, after the funeral, I sorted through Dad’s emails and accounts. In six weeks, he planned to ride the Hilly Hundred, an annual bike race in Bloomington, Indiana. We searched for his hotel reservation and never found it, but the race organizers refunded his registration. Later, they sent his bib and swag bag, with their condolences. I was training to run a half-marathon the same weekend as the Hilly Hundred, and the idea to run Dad’s last bike ride locked into place before I remembered that the furthest I had ever run was ten miles. I told myself I could muster enough stubbornness to make it through 22.1.
I took a couple of practice runs to build up to the full distance. On the first attempt, I ran three and a half miles out and then turned the wrong way, making a short square oriented in the wrong direction. The next time, I went further than I meant to and I got so thirsty that I had to call my mother and beg her to pick me up on the side of the road.
I had one more chance to complete the run before I had to drive back to Colorado to return to work. I tried to correct mistakes from earlier runs: I bought a water backpack and I allowed myself to take a headstart, making the distance more manageable by cutting the part I already ran twice. Mom dropped me off at the first turn to start the rectangle for a now-15-mile run.
As I jogged over the first miles, I enjoyed the beautiful, dewy morning. My legs felt strong and loose. The breeze and the sun at my back kept me cool. I surveyed the country roads, greeting the horses, cows, and deer as I ran past. A pair of dragonflies flit overhead and hundreds of butterflies danced over the surface of a soybean field like fog hovering over a pond. While I ran, I listened to the playlist I made for the funeral home.
*
When we sat down with the funeral director, many decisions felt arbitrary. Would Dad care what color his casket lining is? I can’t even remember what color it is, and I helped choose it. As I sat in a cramped conference room with my mother, brother, and grandfather, selecting items off a menu displayed on a big-screen TV, all I knew was that the music had to be good. I remembered the online memorial sites I had visited featuring sad, plinky psalms set to autoplay when the page loaded. It was unacceptable for a stranger, let alone my father, a beloved local DJ. “Any way we can get the website to play AC/DC?” I asked. The funeral director twitched, unsure if I was serious. I could not recode the website, but he offered to let me play whatever music I wanted during the visitation.
I created a massive playlist featuring everything from classic rock to UB40’s “Red Red Wine,” which Dad loved, and “How Bizare,” used in promotions for his show in the mid-90s. The music played for seven hours while we greeted those who came to say goodbye—friends, family, and people who listened to Dad on the radio. Most of the time, the crowded voices drowned out the music, but occasionally a hushed lull came over the room, and someone would look up, just noticing Three Dog Night or CCR playing through the overhead speakers.
The visitation closed with a prayer vigil. After the funeral home staff set up the chairs, my exhausted siblings sat down. I followed them to check on my little sister, and Mom followed me. We unintentionally signaled that it was time for the remaining congregants to take their seats, but the deacon had not arrived yet. The room grew awkwardly quiet as the stereo still broadcast “Jive Talkin.’” The song ended and we sat in silence, thinking someone turned off the music until it crescendoed back to an audible level: “I want my…I want my…MTV.” Mom looked at me wide-eyed and mouthed, “Do something,”
I sprang up and walked briskly to the back of the room to turn off Dire Straits. I imagined that Dad, at this point in his open casket at the front of the room, would have smirked if he could. When the vigil ended, someone immediately turned the music back on. No sooner had Deacon Jim said "Amen," than the opening riff of “Back in Black” cued up, like an inside joke. It was the exact song I had in mind when I asked about replacing the website music. From across the room, I heard someone laugh, “It’s like Charly’s DJing his own funeral.”
*
While I ran the route of Dad’s last ride, I listened to hours of his favorite music, trying to stay in the moment, to feel connected to his last day. The first few miles of cornfields were beautiful, but as I jogged further from home, the scenery ran together. Separate farms merged into a blanket of sameness, and gnarled trees provided shade that broke up the heat, but not the monotony.
Perhaps the music most associated with this Midwestern terrain are the albums written and performed by John “Cougar” Mellencamp. A dear friend of mine best summarized his work by calling Bruce Springsteen “the John Mellencamp of New Jersey.” A strong working class ethos and images of rebels in the mold of James Dean (also from Indiana) permeate Mellencamp’s early music, but he sings, “I fight authority / authority always wins.”
Dad was the host of the morning show on a Top 40 radio station and songs like those by Mellencamp and Springsteen—hits in the 1980s and ‘90s—remind me of my childhood as strongly as home cooking does. In a way, that music helped put food on our table. Dad and his cohost even recorded a comedy album called Born for Fun, spoofing the cover art for Springsteen’s Born to Run and raising money for a local charity. I heard John Mellencamp’s music so much during my teen years that I started to roll my eyes at it. Then I moved away, and it became a balm for homesickness.
As an adult, I appreciate the stark contrast between the melodies and the lyrics in Mellencamp’s pop anthems. At any true Hoosier wedding, Baby Boomers pump their fists to the chorus of “Jack and Diane” appearing to miss how depressing the lyrics are: “Oh yeah, life goes on / Long after the thrill of livin' is gone.” Or do they know and choose to dance anyway? That contrast hits at the heart of Indiana, at once so beautiful and so dreary. Vibrant autumn leaves and perpetually overcast skies. Thousands of acres of farmland, forest, lakes, and abandoned strip malls. The kindest neighbors and the people who install billboards declaring that you’re going to Hell. “Gonna let it rock, let it roll / Let the Bible Belt come and save my soul.”
*
Running past “little pink houses,” listening to the music of my parents’ youth, the enormity of my father’s death eclipsed everything but the pain in my feet. My mind shifted from music to the checklist of what I still had to do. We buried Dad a week before. It was just under two weeks since he died. I had three days left in Indiana and I was not ready to leave. A few people had pulled me aside to tell me I should stay and care for my mother and sister, but Mom said she wanted me to go before she got too used to me being there. I was also out of paid time off, having used all the accrued time that I was banking for a maternity leave with the child I was struggling to conceive. There were meals to cook and papers to sort, and, still, the grieving before I left to deal with the rest of my life.
Back in Denver, I had a string of minor crises to work through. A rough patch at work. The question of infertility. And I was in the Emergency Room the night before Dad died. On that last morning, we exchanged texts about the hospital finding thyroid issues, the likely cause of the irregular heartbeat and fatigue that sent me there. My resting heart rate kept dipping so low that the monitor repeatedly triggered alarms.
I planned to call home in the afternoon. Dad went for his ride. I went for a run. He died. What if I had just called him before the run? I have examined the timeline over and over. I could not have changed anything, but at least I wouldn’t have had to search my phone to pinpoint when I last talked with Dad, wondering what our last spoken words were.
Gasping for breath, exhausted and overwhelmed, I stopped at the corner of four cornfields nearly ready for harvest. All of the open questions about the past and my future landed on me as my knees threatened to buckle from fatigue. I looked up and saw the sign: Wait.
The playlist shuffled to “Forever Young”—the corny Rod Stewart version, a love letter from father to child. When Dad and I picked a song for our dance at my wedding, I suggested the cooler Bob Dylan song with the same title. “But it was the Rod Stewart one that I dedicated to you and your brother on the radio,” Dad pointed out. That settled things. I never told him I had forgotten the dedication. When he mentioned it, the shadow of a memory came back, but I felt no real tie to the song. Now, almost three years later, the swelling, poppy rhythm propelled me forward in a made-for-TV moment that lasted a half mile before I slowed, crying, limping, melting under the sun as it rose higher in the sky. Losing my father was not something that a run and a well-timed music cue could heal.
I still had to finish the run. Mom had an appointment; my sister didn’t have her driver’s license yet; my husband was back in Denver; and no one else knew where I was. On my own, I kept negotiating with myself. If I just ran half a mile, then I could walk again. A quarter mile. To that stop sign. The water pack rubbed raw patches on my shoulders as it jostled side to side, no matter how many times I readjusted it. My feet and legs cramped.
A mile later, as I bent down to retie my shoe, I noticed a small frog in the road, its coloring blending into the pavement. Gently, I picked the frog up and placed it back in the grass, unsure if it was dead or alive. As I trotted along, I felt that I was being watched. Standing at a pasture’s edge, a spotted cow and her calf tracked me silently until I disappeared. The frogs, the cows, the trees—I am sure Dad enjoyed them all, but when on these rides, the movement was the point—just him and his bike, out on a country road, coasting or speeding ahead.
I eventually returned to a steady jog for the last three miles. I thought I had missed whatever I was looking for by retracing Dad's last ride, finding blisters and sunburn instead. I felt relieved at the end, but, despite the music and the beautiful summer day, the experience was more anticlimactic than I dared to admit. Still, when I remember those days after Dad died, I feel grateful for the privacy the route allowed me, running free for a few hours, alone to process the loss. Whenever I drive that stretch of road on the way to Mom's house, I can almost see myself running on the shoulder, the ghost of my grief compartmentalized to a stretch of pavement where a dead frog once cooked. She does not know how much healing lies ahead.
My brain is no longer stuck in the August when Dad died, but I remember feeling the sun beating down on me as I looked at the last things he saw, the breeze rushing past under a canopy of trees and a cloudless sky. I like to imagine his last day like that. As I suspected, it also smelled of manure. Dad saw beauty and the expanse of nature around him, wildlife and agriculture blurring together in the humidity. The scenery and the motion of the bike helped him feel free amidst worry, if even for an hour or so. I know because that is what I felt and I am my father’s daughter.
*
With timing too perfect to feel real, two years to the day after my near breakdown at Wait Road, my daughter was born, sprinting into the world, arriving too fast for us to put on the playlist I made to welcome her. I had prepared a mix of songs like “Push It” and “Takin’ Care of Business” to make my husband laugh, and classics like “Forever Young” and “Born to Run,” so she knows where she came from. She will never know my father, but through playlists and old demo tapes, she will know his voice.
END
Author Bio: Kasey Butcher Santana is a writer and co-owner of a small alpaca farm where she and her husband also raise chickens, bees, and their daughter. Kasey earned a Ph.D. in American literature and has worked as an English teacher and a jail librarian. Recently, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Split Lip, Great Lakes Review, Archetype, Passengers, The Ocotillo Review, and The Hopper. She is a nonfiction editor for Kitchen Table Quarterly, and you can follow her on Instagram @solhomestead.