In a few days, my mother would have celebrated her birthday and, this year, it is bittersweet.
While birthdays are the celebration of life, after someone dies they become reminders of absence – and that hurts.
Mum’s life is at a permanent stop, while the rest of us keep moving forward, whether we feel ready or not.
Last weekend, a few months after her death, I completed the Noosa Triathlon.
I have done it before and there was nothing extraordinary about the performance. I am in the middle-aged, everyday-entrant category, carrying the usual collection of aches, niggles and doubts.
I do these events for joy: my goal is to finish as best I can. Yet this event’s build-up was sharpened by awareness honed by loss.
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Endurance sport encourages us to focus on improvement. We note times, distances and heart rates. We are constantly measuring ourselves against who we were last year or who we want to become.
By our mature years, that comparison is particularly unforgiving as bodies no longer respond quite so eagerly to ambition.
But death shifts the purpose of training a little.
The swim, bike and run sessions stop being about just performance and became something much simpler: evidence that we are alive, healthy and able to move. Every kilometre carries a reminder that none of those is guaranteed.
On race morning, I looked at the hundreds of people preparing to push their bodies through an event that would leave them tired and sore.
Hundreds of ordinary people had functioning lungs, beating hearts and bodies capable of carrying them forward.
They had the ability to breathe hard during exercise and recover, and to be tired because they had pushed their bodies rather than because illness had ravaged it. None of that is promised. All of it is precious.
Death makes life’s brevity impossible to ignore. None of us knows how many birthdays remain or how many opportunities we will have to walk, run, swim, ride, dance, explore or simply move through the world under our own power.
The high from the event will fade, as it does. But what remains is a quieter lesson: appreciation matters as much as achievement.
Today, I can move. And that is enough.
Dr Jane Stephens is a UniSC journalism lecturer, media commentator and writer.
The views of the author do not reflect those of UniSC and do not necessarily reflect the views of Sunshine Coast News.
