Dear Friends and Supporters,
 
I write to update you on my progress and that of my blog Run Unashamed.  I signed up for the 10 k. race in Portsmouth and made arrangements for my visit to Maryclaire’s family.  I want to thank every person who contributed moral support to my endeavor and also money to the scholarship in Maryclaire’s honor.    
 
In these past five months, I have taken time to reflect on the past thirty years of my life and Maryclaire’s significance in it as I have grown and evolved.  These five months have been a time of great sadness...and also of gratitude, this last due to my realization that I had a caring friend in my life when I really needed one.  
 
I am a different person now than before Maryclaire’s passing—more honest with myself, more honed in on what is important in my life and why.
 
However, I have felt of late exhausted from sharing my story in a public forum.  I have reached a point—six weeks earlier than I had intended--where my mourning needs to be more private, with friends, therapist, and soon with the Paullis family.  Although the connections that I have made with people who read the blog and emailed me has been very special, and certainly a critical part of the journey, I am now in an emotional place that merits a discontinuation of the blog.
 
You have all been wonderful, and I am grateful.  I will send a photo of the Big Day on 11 June at the Market Square 10 k.
 
Blessings, as my dear friend Maryclaire would write, in ending such a note,

​Stacy

In central Indiana, the weather is perfect approximately four days each year.  On any one of these sunny days, Lafayette seems kinda like Santa Barbara, sans the Pacific Ocean. This was particularly true last weekend, when the temperate weather occurred while spring flowers were in bloom. These pleasant days offer a stark contrast to the 348 days of the Hoosier calendar when we complain it is too hot, too cold, too damp, too snowy or just too dreary.    

When I woke last Saturday to “Santa Barbara Weather,” I committed myself to my first run since my return from a challenging twelve-day trip to Morocco.  I wanted to get back into the swing of running.  I put on black shorts and a white tank top and headed out the door around 11 am.  As the 1980s pop tunes blared through my headphones, I actuated a pledge to practice self-care and engage in positive self-talk.

My running app—MapMyRun—had just informed me that I had completed one mile when the run turned south.  As I passed a stand selling barbeque chicken, I tripped. I may have been distracted by the site--and the yummy smells--of this Midwestern culinary custom occurring in my neighborhood.  Or, maybe, I was just tired, but, trip I did, and in a big way.

Maryclaire has been dead for four months, and my grief comes and goes in waves.  Day after day, as time moves ineluctably forward, I can no longer predict when and where I will find solace from or exacerbation of the emotions wrought by the loss of my longtime friend.  In one instance, as I posted in January, a normally tedious e-commerce pitch in my inbox from Ann Taylor, one announcing a shoe sale, spun me back in time, and the sight of sparkly silver flats—a pair that Maryclaire would have loved—made me weep. The truth is, I treasure these emotionally chaotic moments, whether I laugh or cry, because they allow me to be close to a friend I’ll never see again. 
 
One unexpected instance of deep emotional impact occurred when I read The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759) by Samuel Johnson.  This task  was accomplished for the Early Atlantic Reading Group at the university where I work. The only detail that I remembered about the author as I read his book is that he wrote the celebrated work within one week, and he did so as his mother lay dying in the next room. In fact, Johnson wrote Rasselas to pay for his mother’s funeral. Of course, I found myself questioning how the author’s emotional state affected the text. 
 
Rasselas is the name of a prince from Ethiopia—in this instance, a highly idealized and ahistoric kingdom—who lives in the fictive Happy Valley.  There, all his physical wants are tended.  However, he is restless and so escapes with the poet Imlac, his sister Nekayah, and her servant-cum-friend Pekuah.  They seek interactions with people and places in nearby Egypt that will allow them—an ultimately futile search—to understand contentment and cultivate a sense of well-being, which is their ultimate goal in life.         

"Progress, not perfection.”  If I go to—and I admit I rarely do these days—a 12 Step Meeting, I always wait for this line.  It is recited out loud, and I suspect I am not the only person who wants its healing words to wash over them.  The phrase offers its benediction, and I feel each time as if I had never heard “We seek progress not perfection.”
 
As I reflect on this phrase today, I wonder if I can live with myself as I am, without the negative comparisons to an idolized idea of whom I “really” want to be?  Can I forgive myself for not being the “Stepford Stacy” built up in my mind?  I don’t want to be a perfect bleached blond spaced out on valium in suburbia, as the term “Stepford” might suggest.  Instead, I use this metaphor as shorthand for the unachievable version of a romanticized self to which I constantly compare the real deal.  I worry that I can be more highly organized, more of a creative intellectual, a more hyper-efficient housekeeper, a better dresser, a more caring pet steward, a loving partner who gives emotionally without making demands (fuck that one, actually), and, especially, a much better friend.
 
The catalyst for this post is my desire to be a more consistent blogger.  I want to help readers embrace their vulnerabilities…and to raise money for a scholarship in Maryclaire’s honor at Sparhawk School.  My raging negative self-talk is rendering me vulnerable and anxious: I am failing in my goal, I note with dismay, of writing consistently and so, I continue, I am failing to honor my longtime friend so recently deceased. 
 
Alcoholism and eating disorders do not go away, and recovery is not a linear process.  And so, once again, I need to remind myself that I seek progress, not perfection. 
 
Sackcloth and ashes hang in my closet, a well-worn outfit that fits no matter how my eating disorder might affect my weight.  I could be in the midst of a long period of food deprivation--or coming off months of binge eating--but these clothes still seem to cover a seemingly chronic desire for penitence.  I want to put that outfit on today so as to manifest my remorse over not having blogged for six weeks.  My return from Santa Barbara was difficult, and the reentry into Lafayette life was bumpy at best.
 
Progress, not perfection, I remind myself, noting that I kept all my therapy appointments, even when I didn’t feel like it.  Progress not perfection, I repeat, and allow myself to feel a sense of accomplishment over the completion of a paper that I presented last week in Casablanca.  Progress not perfection, I say again, and allow images of the walk that I took with Mark and our dog Wulfie at the Celery Bog to flit through my mind.  Progress, not perfection, I allow, and come to the realization that maybe, just maybe, I needed to take a break from emotional purging for the last six weeks. 
 
And so, I cut myself some slack today and move on a wiser person.  But, I must admit that I am glad to be back posting on the blog!  That, my friend, is progress...

This is a creative non-fiction essay, discussing the last five days before my friend Maryclaire passed. I was in Yuma, AZ and learning a lot about the place and myself. ​

Yuma is an idiosyncratic city unlike any I had yet experienced, and it brought out the best in me.  I have lived in many different places, from cosmopolitan Paris to its African foil Bamako, where, though capital of Mali, most buildings are one floor and all roads but one are unpaved.  Yuma has a singular identity premised in part on its complex past, one that fights Starbuckization tooth and nail.  There, I found beauty in a regional center that others cast aside as remote and boring.  I also took the first steps in a personal journey that would bring me a deeper understanding of my own past as well as a new understanding of the need to be more fully present in the here and now. ​

The sudden and bewildering death of Maryclaire provides the cataclysmic moment of what just may be my life's principal storyline.  Henceforth, there is what came before 12 December 2015 and what came afterward.  This sudden and startling tragedy forced me to break free of the complacent manner in which I treated relationships, because I realized, too late, that I had presumed that I could catch Maryclaire up with my travails--depression, eating disorder--at a future date.  Her death represents a low point propelling the denouement: do I pull the covers up over my head and give in to the darkness, or do I allow myself to heal and to grow.
 
The deep feelings wrought by tragic events forever change us.  In her emotionally astute essay "This Is It, My Pet Pachooch," Bonnie Friedman notes that she had been "drifting" before the death of her sister, but Anita's passing helped her understand that "life is short and mustn't be wasted."  I, too, choose to honor Maryclaire by effecting positive change in my life.  Since her passing, I have reengaged my creativity via wordsmithing, begun a running regimen, and focused a lot more attention on relationships that are important to me.  Like Friedman, "I only wish it hadn't taken the loss of my sister to rouse me." ​

I am a professional historian, and a nearly obsessive eye for detail serves me well as I reconstruct, for example, systems of urban labor in nineteenth-century Morocco.  As I grieve the loss of my friend, I find myself sifting through the past--this time my own--with the keen eye of a practiced expert.  I search, desperately at times, for tangible evidence--documents, photos, material objects--that reveal something of the ways in which my life connected with that of Maryclaire.    
 
In one instance, only days after Maryclaire's passing, I spend an hour, maybe more, searching for a worn blue tank top that I borrowed from her around 1986.  It would be a coup to find something physical that could be touched and passed around to our high school friends Susan and Cindy.  But I can't find it.  Its petite size, I vaguely remember, had taunted me, reminding me that I had gained seventy pounds.  An unwanted reminder of Binge Eating Disorder, the shirt, I am forced to conclude, had been relegated --carelessly, I now chastise myself--to the rag bin.                 

​I received what would have been--pre-the-passing-of-Maryclaire--an innocuous promotional email from Ann Taylor that I would have sent straight into the trash.  But a flash of silver and gold caught my eye, and it stirred memories.  I had to investigate.  As I thought, this company was promoting an end of the season sale on flats.  I looked at the simple design and the matte metallic surface, and my mind turned to Maryclaire again.  The shoes reminded me of her signature look when we lived together in Boston.  Was there ever a time when we shared an apartment on Knapp Street in Somerville or Fairmont Avenue in Cambridge that she didn't have a pair of silver flats?  No.  Like an exotic bird, she was drawn to shiny objects that sparkled and so made her stand out from all the sparrows that tend to populate the American northeast.  

Running on a river contributes to my physical and mental well being.  Today, I reflected on the riparian visions grounding me in times of crisis.  I then thought about how and why rivers came to play such an important role in my ability to remain (relatively) calm in the face of emotional confusion or unhealthy urges.  In doing so, I recognized a need to return to a schedule of regular runs along my present home river, the Wabash.     
 
I spent twenty years calling the city of "Dirty Water" home before moving to Lafayette, IN.  The years collapse and intermingle and then come together again, making life in my twenties and thirties a series of random flashes, much like a meteor shower.  At some point in the late-1980s, I lived with Maryclaire and our red-haired friend Amy in a brownstone in Cambridgeport.  Amy, whom I once touted as my soul mate, introduced me to some of the most important things in life, like folk music and noodle kugel.  In our apartment at Fairmont Avenue, we attempted the impossible: squeezing three independent and individual women into two and a half bedrooms.  It was more than the low rent that led us to perform this herculean and ultimately impractical feat.  It was also the exquisiteness of the well-placed apartment.  The turn-of-the-twentieth-century structure had open faced brick walls, hardwood floors and an old-fashioned tub with feet.  It was an irresistible space, in part, because Amy's dad, the landlord-carpenter, was inspired by the simple lines of Shaker design.