Uncommon grief, Uncommon Courage; Or, What the real Top Gun School looks like; OR where I was last weekend.

I have been stopped everywhere lately by bloggers wondering whether I was "slacking" on the job Friday, Saturday and Sunday, because there were no posts. Normally, I don't go reverse chain of command, but I will respond to my blogger commanders. I was on the job observing the Twin City Marathon in St. Paul. First a little background.

My best friend in college was Mike Wraneshay. We had met in high school physics class where he handled the experiments and I wrote the reports. It was a pattern to follow always. In his senior year of high school, his dad, a superstar salesman, died suddenly of a heart attack. Mike then moved into the Midway area of St. Paul to live with his grandparents, and close to my family home, on Dayton Ave, almost identical to my current home on East Main, except there were historic lights on both sides of the street. When he graduated from college he became a Navy officer. His love was photography. I learned later that he was in Navy intelligence.

On completion of his Navy stint, he went into the Navy Reserve. One of the requirements of the Navy reserve was that everyone had to complete the 5 mile run and pass the eye test. Each year, both became more difficult. One August, when he was 40, I got the call. He had died suddenly after completing the 5 mile run. He left a wife and two small children. His friends and family were devasted. Navy pilots from all across the country, almost 100 of them, came to the funeral at Ft. Snelling.

A month ago, Mike's mom announced that Matthew, his son, was running the Twin City Marathon. Laverne was now 82 and she and a friend were going to the 22 mile mark to cheer him on. I explained that this was the "wall" and it might not be pretty. I felt I needed to go to be there with them.

I knew that Mike had died of an unusual clotting disorder. I hoped that Matt had gotten new medication that they had developed over the last 35 years. I dared not ask.

As I watched the runners at the 22 mile mark my mind went back to the last time I spent a week with Mike. It was the time I flew to Pensacola to drive with him home and tour the facility. It was a special weekend. The pilots were competing to see who would go to Top Gun school. It was a scene right out of the movie Top Gun. Except there were no female flight instructors. There were a lot of guys that looked like Tom Cruise.

Then Matt appeared at the 22 mile mark. We had a sign that said, "Hey, Hey, Wraneshay" . I gave him the ice and facecloth. Told him he was good to go and looked great. He did.

I wondered all the way home, how in the face of adversity and grief, Matt could gather the courage to run the marathon, or rather whether he had to run in order to conquer the fear. In any event, the words of the flight instructor in Top Gun came to me, "Up here, we have to push it. " Somehow he, and many others who have faced huge grief have found the courage to thrive beyond the grief. I salute Matt and all the others like him. For me, that is what Top Gun is all about.

When he had left, his grandmother, Luverne just smiled. "Well," she said, " You did good with the sign, Dick." "Let's just save it for next year and change the bib number."