OUTRUNNING GRIEF
Can you outrun a hellish reality? It was this question that resounded in Poorna Bell’s mind as she put one foot in front of the other after her husband took his own life. In this moving account, she reveals how she exorcised her demons – one stride at a t
For Poorna Bell, running was the only way to keep going
Anyone walking past my window that morning would have no doubt heard the creaking, the grunting, the breathless intonations of Oh. My. God. The sweaty encounter taking place in my bedroom was anything but sexy. I was using every ounce of strength to manoeuvre a heavy, unwieldy mattress – and I was doing it alone. The delivery guys were none the wiser, of course. They probably assumed that anyone ordering a king-size mattress would have their bedfellow on hand to help. How could they know that this represented the latest goodbye, in a long line of goodbyes, to my husband Rob, who had taken his own life the year before? There would never
again be a bed that we’d share, nor a mattress that would bear the press of his body. Among the million other things he was to me, Rob was my chief lifter of heavy things. And while the grieving process was largely taking place inside my head, out in the real world, life was marching on, and physical strength was an urgent requirement. Every deadlift, barbell squat and tricep dip had led me to this moment. I wasn’t just sweating out my sadness in the gym, I was building a body that would help me forge my way in this scary new world. When I finished, and collapsed sweating on the floor, I laughed. Then I started crying. Because here’s the thing with grief: it doesn’t respect your milestones. I met Rob on a blind date, set up by a mutual friend, at a time when I was fed up with men. I didn’t expect him to be any different from the other losers who
‘I WAS BUILDING A BODY THAT WOULD HELP ME FORGE MY WAY IN THIS SCARY NEW WORLD’
had messed me around. I knew he was a science journalist from New Zealand, but that was all I knew. Over sushi in Brixton, South London, I learnt that Rob was a man of contrasts and contradictions. He was a punk rocker in a Ramones T-shirt; a nature lover, with hands calloused from gardening; a tall, broad-shouldered skinhead, who held the door open for me and stood up when I went to the bathroom. I knew I was falling for him the day he brought chicken soup to my sickbed. He offered to leave it on my doorstep – I looked like something dredged from the bottom of a well. But, touched by his kindness, I begrudgingly let him in, and he told me I looked beautiful. I’d heard rumours of big love: the kind where someone sees you as you are, and loves you anyway. But I’d never felt it first-hand. A few weeks later, as we held hands across the back seat of a taxi, Rob told me he had depression. He seemed responsible in the way he managed it, and he assured me that he’d get help when he needed it. But I was
already in love with him and he might as well have told me he had athlete’s foot. A year after we met, we got engaged in Malaysia, and we got married 18 months later in a pretty country house in Surrey. But after the wedding, Rob began to spend more and more time in bed. He seemed exhausted, withdrawn, and he walled off his feelings, venturing out from behind them only occasionally to say: ‘I’m fine.’ It was obvious to anyone that he wasn’t. I hadn’t prepared myself for what loving, and living with, someone with depression actually meant. But I was convinced that if anyone could coax him out of it, it was me. Love conquers all; Disney taught us as much. So it was unbearable to discover that it doesn’t. Alone for much of the time, I was tasked with keeping the household ticking over – restocking the fridge and paying the bills. But I wasn’t just alone, I was lonely. A year into our marriage, I was spending whole weekends just waiting for Rob to get out of bed, and I was starting to unravel. It wasn’t just the looking after him; it was his denial about how crippling his illness had become. I was patient, until I was angry, and then guilty. I was a human volcano. One October morning, I felt a sharp sense of dread. It was 11am, and Rob was still in bed. I knew how the day was going to play out – it would be another day of feeling like I was married to a ghost. I badly needed to get out of the house, but I couldn’t face putting on a fake front with friends, nor being somewhere public, like the gym. I needed to do something for myself; something that wasn’t worrying about Rob and whether he was alright. So I put on my trainers and went for a run. Outdoor running is part sweat, part psychology. I’d been meaning to do it for months, but the doubts always kept me indoors – one louder than most: what if I couldn’t physically do it? This time, I pegged it out the front door before my brain had a chance to catch up. My lungs began to burn and my brain felt crowded with thoughts. But I slowed down until I was going only marginally faster than my walking pace, and as the landscape unwound itself into columns of trees, duck ponds and ice cream trucks, my mind became quieter. I noticed the curve of the trees, the glance of the sunlight on a puddle. By the time I made it back to the house, I’d created something: a moment in time just for me. But it was only a moment. The following year, life – already testing – became even more difficult. In an admission that shook me to my core, Rob confessed that he wasn’t just depressed, he’d also been hiding a crippling addiction to heroin. I knew he’d dabbled in drugs over the years, but nothing
like this. As painful as it was, I decided to forgive him and do whatever I could to help him recover. But Rob couldn’t break the pattern of lying and trying to fix things on his own, and after the last colossal lie, we separated. A week later, while visiting his family in Auckland, Rob took his own life. I oscillated between deep shock and feeling the full, undiluted horror of it all. I felt guilty for not being able to save him, and despair that he’d died this way, alone. I flew to New Zealand for the funeral. I got through it, but afterwards, I think people expected me to lie down and draw the curtains. I knew if I did, I wouldn’t get back up again. I had to cling to things that made sense, so, the next day, I put on my trainers. I opened my Nike running app without a thought for where I was going, and I ended up on a beach. With the swirl of the clouds and the crash of waves on the rocks, I felt something approaching normality. It was the strangest feeling, to be so overcome with sadness, and so glad to be alive. Back home, the shell of my old life remained, but without Rob in it. I knew
‘WHILE OUT RUNNING, I COULD CRY, WITH MY TEARS PASSING FOR SWEAT’
I had to do something – and running became my something. I forged a routine of going for a jog along the stretch of the Thames near Richmond. The crowd of tourists and geese strutting around for scraps soon gave way to quiet, leafy avenues where I could take the smallest pleasure in seeing a bird Rob loved or the trees by a little brook. I could even cry, with my tears passing for sweat. During those first few months, running anchored me to reality; it gave me roots to a world I felt like I was no longer a part of. But I needed more. With a house move imminent and no Rob to help me lift the boxes and cart the rubbish off to the dump, I not only needed to feel strong, I needed to be strong. With no idea where to start, I hired a personal trainer. His name was Tyrone, and he listened patiently while I told him what I wanted to do. When he told me he would get me deadlifting 100kg, I laughed. But as the weeks wore on, my time with him on the gym floor came to mean more to me than I could ever have imagined. Something borne out of practicality became an emotional lifeline. Here was a world that made sense; where I was in control; where I would get out exactly what I put in. Session by session, I created a strong scaffolding within myself, and the heavier I lifted (I managed 87kg), the more stable I felt. There’s a statistic that, to this day, I find shocking: people bereaved by the suicide of a friend or family member are 65% more likely to attempt suicide themselves than
‘IN MY DARKEST MOMENTS, IT IS EXERCISE THAT HAS KEPT ME HERE’
they would be if the person had died by natural causes. This brings their absolute risk up to one in 10. I’m not saying I was suicidal, but there were moments when I couldn’t imagine living with this much pain for the rest of my life. It’s important because recent studies have confirmed what we’ve all long suspected about exercise – and it’s not just about the immediate biology of the endorphins flooding the hypothalamus in your brain. A cohort study of 33,908 participants published last year concluded that doing one to two hours of exercise each week nearly halves your long-term risk of depression. The majority of this seemingly protective effect occurred at low levels of exercise and was observed regardless of the intensity. Researchers don’t know exactly why exercise has this effect, but one theory is that it enhances the body’s ability to respond to stressors; the idea that handling a gruelling workout is good practice for coping with a bad day. For me, now, a typical week involves some combination of running, strength training and yoga, all of which serve a different purpose. Strength training makes me feel less vulnerable, and less like I need a man; running helps me unload my worries into the river I run alongside; and yoga works out the knots created by both. When people tell me I’m ‘so good’ to be working out so much, I know they don’t get it. I don’t exercise to be ‘good’ – whatever that means. I don’t do it to fit into a pair of jeans or to help me run for a bus. Fitness has become part of the fabric of who I am. When I’m working out, my mind travels to a place larger than my sadness. I’m lucky to have such supportive friends and family, but in my darkest moments, it is exercise that has kept me here. Fitness was never just about flipping a mattress; it saved my life.