My biology teacher in high school was also the track coach, and I remember him as a kind man, one more concerned with his students’ characters than he was with winning. He encouraged me to become a long-distance runner, probably because he noticed that I had a problem with team sports and their drill-sergeant coaches. Long-distance running meant running practice, which meant spending six- or eight-mile runs in ragged pain, locked in your skull with your own dark thoughts, and with no one to blame for your situation except yourself. Our cross-country team, now that I think about it, was a collection of people who recognized pain as a condition of life. We had been recruited because we all had problems with authority, anger issues, and didn’t play well with others.

In the face of these character defects, our coach taught stoicism. If you complained that you would never win a race, he would deadpan, “We’ll adjust.” There wasn’t much you could say in response. Over time, you realized that complaining was just another thing that caused you pain.

“We’ll adjust” has remained part of my internal vocabulary for almost sixty years, and it has eased me through agonies far greater than the last half-mile of a cross-country race. It also revealed that escaping a sullen and miserable adolescence involved making intelligent internal decisions. It involved finding out what worked and what didn’t.

From the get-go, I mostly found out what didn’t work. I discovered I couldn’t like my own half-formed self by trying to be likeable. I couldn’t become an adult by becoming what teachers and coaches and military recruiters said was an adult. I couldn’t have a self without having faith that other people had selves too, and it was hard to know, with some people, if anyone was in there.

Adulthood meant acquiring an enormous amount of painful self-knowledge. It meant admitting mistakes, sometimes the same ones, over and over again.

It was a journey without end. Moving away from home, graduating from college, getting a job, and getting married were all milestones on the way to adulthood but they were still a long way from it.

Now, if I look at all the coaches in my high school, I can see that their self-knowledge was in inverse proportion to their need to win. Winning, for some of them, was a way of fixing losses only they remembered. It was more important to win the next game rather than to competently teach their classes. (Our football coach taught U.S. History. The year I took his class, the football team won the conference championship. But we didn’t even make it to the end of the Civil War in our textbook.)

 

My years in high school spanned the years 1964 to 1968. During that time, the idea of winning got a lot of kids killed in Vietnam.

My running coach’s “We’ll adjust” kept me in college. I can remember telling myself that I had gotten myself into a miserable, lonely, dark, soul-killing winter night in Boston, in a cold and barren dorm room, deathly homesick, with mid-terms coming on and unwritten papers due—and I could damned well get myself out of it.

At that moment, the apparently easy thing would have been to drop out and get drafted and maybe kill somebody and be able to blame Richard Nixon for my trouble sleeping.

It wouldn’t have been the easy thing. I would never have become the semi-adult I’ve become if I’d left college. If I had lived through my year in Vietnam, I would have become someone so different from the person I am now that neither of us would recognize the other as a friend, much less as a winner.

 

Julie and I took Juno to the vet in Ketchum last week. Juno’s hips have begun bothering her, possibly because we took her skiing in snow too deep for her last year. She’s fine out hiking, but after she’s back home and has been lying in front of the fire for a while, she has trouble getting her hind end off the floor. We don’t take her in powder snow anymore, and it’s an awful, guilt-ridden experience to tell her she can’t go with us as we’re getting dressed for the backcountry.

“Hold down the fort, Juno,” we say, as we go out the door. “If any burglars break in, bite them.” Juno gives us a look that suggests that any biting she does will be dedicated to ripping our throats out the next time we’re asleep—at least we suspect that’s what she’s thinking. She wants more than anything to keep on being a ski dog, and no doubt, if we took her skiing, she would stay with us however high we would climb, however deep the snow. She just wouldn’t be able to move the next day.

Juno, as usual, was terrified in the vet’s office, and crawled under chairs to hide. She remained inconsolable in the face of kind words, gentle throat scratches, and treats. Her expression was one of pure get-me-the-hell-out-of-here misery, and it didn’t change from the start of the appointment to the end.

The vet examined her, moved her hind legs, felt her back and hips for any displaced or broken bones, and told us there was no reason to take X-rays. “It’s arthritis,” he said. “It should respond well to an NSAID.” He gave us a prescription.

He was so kind to Juno and so professional that when the appointment was over, I wanted to hug him. Juno, however, was so glad to get out of the office that she strained at her leash all the way back to the car, and jumped into the back the second the door was open far enough for her to squeeze in.

She’s not an old dog. She’ll only be seven in May. She’s half Red Heeler and half Australian Shepherd—not a mix known for hip problems—and she should live another eight years or so, if we can keep the vet visits to a minimum.

Both Julie and I grew up with working animals, and we know about putting down dogs and horses when they get sick and broken and old. We know that it’s the humane thing to do. We don’t dwell on it, but now and then, especially after a trip to the vet or when we’re going out the door to go skiing, we think about it. Having a dog means loving a dog, and loving a dog means you’ve got an appointment with a broken heart.

 

The trip to the vet brought up another memory of my running coach. He said something else I’ve remembered since high school: “We treat our animals better than we treat our family members.” He said it in biology class, where the lesson had been on Mendel’s experiments with pea plants but had devolved into a discussion of hereditary diseases and the grief they caused.

He used the word grief. I was tempted, at sixteen, to say, “We’ll adjust,” but I’m glad I didn’t. Several years later, when I heard that his wife—a beautiful, intelligent, athletic woman who had sometimes shown up to watch our cross-country meets—had died of ALS, I was glad I had kept my mouth shut.

The last time I saw my coach was on my thirtieth birthday. It was the day I ran in Ketchum’s ten-mile race, an event put on every fall by a local sporting-goods store. The race is really ten-and-a-half miles, and I hit the finish line in an hour and eight minutes, a little under six minutes and thirty seconds a mile, which is a respectable time for that distance. I came in twenty-third, because Ketchum was full of athletes who had trained harder and longer than I had. But it was better than anything I had done in high school.

I had seen my coach in the crowd at the finish line, and I went looking for him after I had recovered my breath. He was gone. The last I heard of him was that he had taken up with a loud fat woman who smoked incessantly and drank to excess and who must have seemed a dark opposite to his wife who had died.

 

Yesterday I put my skins on my backcountry skis, gave Juno a pill, loaded her into the car, and drove to the parking lot where the highway intersects with the Redfish Lake Road. She was happy to be out of the house.

Juno does fine on packed snow, and we made our way up the groomed road to the lake and sat on the dock for a while, enjoying the sunshine and the solitude. Then I pulled my skins off and skated back to the car, with Juno running ahead of me, barking and growling whenever I caught up with her. It was a good workout for both of us. Juno was stiff and sore at the end of it, but the next morning she was running around the house like a puppy. I wasn’t moving too badly myself. Grief was at bay for another day.

 

Our conference-winning football coach died a year ago. From what I could tell of his obituary, he died single after divorcing at least two women, an ironic detail, considering one of the reasons we never reached Reconstruction in U.S. History was because once or twice a week, instead of talking about the assignment, he would lecture us on the value of raising kids in intact families. The obituary went on to say that he died after a happy old age devoted to fly fishing. He had become a high school principal after coaching. He liked being in charge. He had kept in touch with his old football players.

Grief had not crushed his life like it had the life of my running coach. He had kept looking to the future, to his next love rather than his last love, and of all his loves, he was most loyal to fly fishing. I can understand that.

Fly fishing won’t die on you. It won’t get pissed and leave you for someone else, and if you love it enough, you won’t get bored with it and leave it for something new. Still, it’s a poor substitute for a human being, or a dog.

 

Grief is pain. We’d be happier if it didn’t show up in our lives, but it exists everywhere love does, and if you explore the long-term effects of a loveless existence, it exists there, too.

I’m lucky enough to love many of the people in my life, and luckier still to have them love me back. I wouldn’t give up love to avoid grief, and I suppose that settles the matter, except for when I see people, like my running coach, whose burden of grief is crazily out of proportion to what they have done to deserve it. Grief can kill you or drive you mad or put you in desperate incongruous situations where the person you were has no connection to the person you are.

Grief has no place in morality tales, because it teaches that the more you love (a good thing) the more you eventually suffer (a bad thing). Give your love to fly fishing, or skiing, or your baseball card collection, or conspiracy theories (a shallow thing), and you’ll have less grief in your life (another shallow thing), but you’ll also live a less conscious existence (a really bad thing).

Julie and I talk around grief. We seldom talk about our deaths. We never say that if Juno dies, we’ll get a puppy, although we probably will if the world seems too empty when she’s gone. A long time ago Julie agreed to smother me with a pillow if I ever got feeble enough for her to do it, but now that such a scenario isn’t all that farfetched, she’s said she won’t. I’ve quit thinking about how I’d live if Julie was no longer in my life, because my imagination hits a blank wall when I do.

We’re not in total denial. We know life goes on until it doesn’t. Grief can hit any of us hard, any day, no matter how good or honest we’ve been. If it hits Julie or me, we’ll face it like adults.

We’ll adjust. We’ll hope that adjustment leaves us bent but not broken, still able and willing to love.