Jeremy's Run

About a month ago I participated in a run in memory of fallen soldier Jeremy Kane, who died in Afghanistan in January of this year. The two mile run started at Jeremy’s high school, Cherry Hill East, and ended at his temple, M’Kor Shalom. Proceeds from the run benefitted the Student Veterans Association at Rutgers University to erect a memorial in honor of Rutgers veterans. I’ve tried for over a month to put this experience into words, each week thinking this would be my next blog entry. However, the task has proved far more difficult than I had imagined.


Maybe it was the weather. Sunday, April 25, 2010 turned out to be a dreary, soggy spring day. The kind of day gardener’s rejoice about when envisioning their lush plants that are sure to follow. I am told the same kind of weather showed up for Jeremy’s funeral. As a lapsed runner, I was secretly glad for the light rain and cool day-- the less sweating the better. You can’t help but reflect on a day of gothic drear. Memorializing a young man after he had spent one semester in college and a short time in the military is haunting. I couldn’t help but feel that God was trying to tell us something too important for words, so He sent in the clouds.

I can’t blame my hesitance to write about Jeremy’s run solely on the weather. I’ve also had trouble getting my brain to synthesize what people do and how we act in honoring life. That morning, sandwiched between a surface tension of loss and a somber background, life outside Jeremy’s former high school percolated. Young adults and their parents, professors, and friends gathered in clumps near the registration tables, sampling donated pastries and inquiring about majors and summer work plans. Over by some soggy looking shipping boxes, young women fretted over the sizes of the event tee-shirts. Inside the high school, military and civilians stretched their tendons, ligaments, and muscles by pushing and propping themselves on red locker doors and iron handrails. Just before 10 a.m., politicians dressed in suits and trench coats spoke solemn words about the meaning of Jeremy’s sacrifice. A woman with neatly bobbed hair spoke, Jeremy’s mother, I supposed. Then the microphone fell silent, so those of us in the back didn’t hear her words. We had to read her face instead. I saw her smile and laugh once. Mostly the woman appeared happy with a touch of nerves, like any mother would be on her son’s graduation day, but this wasn’t that. Everything we did and said seemed so important because we could. We were able. We were alive.

Several days after the run there was a memorial service on campus for Jeremy, and I felt compelled to go even though I hadn’t known him at Rutgers. A former student of mine and current president of the student veterans group on campus had invited me to come to the run, so I did. I went to honor him (a Purple Heart recipient) and the many other students I have known who were veterans in Iraq or Afghanistan. I also, admittedly, saw the day as a kick-start to my latest workout resolution.

I wasn’t really prepared, however, to see the slides of this kid’s life. Snapshots of a funny kid, a slight boy sticking his tongue out, wrestling with his brothers, juxtaposed military pictures; I felt the breath of what he must have been like, who Jeremy still was for many. In one photo he and another squad member somewhere in Afghanistan held up machine guns Rambo-style and smiled. Lots of the pictures showed Jeremy at play. And then there was the somber stuff. Young guys moving somewhere in a blank, hot background of sand, terrain so foreign to me, I can’t even translate its bleakness into words. The woman from the benefit run spoke again (it was his mother, I found out). All I can remember her saying was that Jeremy hadn’t been a good athlete and had trouble finding his identity. Then his father passed away; he felt an incredible urge to be the “man” of the family. At this point I felt like I was eavesdropping.

My unease over Jeremy’s mother’s words has been further complicated by a conversation I had with some students afterward. The same week as the benefit run and memorial service, I had started one of my classes by asking students why women are going to college at higher rates than men. Guys are groomed to be financial providers still, trained in sports and not with books, they told me. The economic pressure is on young men to make up for any gaps in household income. Women don’t face these same pressures. I still haven’t been able to get over their instant insight into the issue. I can’t help but think they know something profound about Jeremy.

Whatever it was, in opening up to this young man’s life, I have not stopped thinking about men and identity. What avenues do adolescent males have in shaping themselves for the future? What pressures do they experience to be providers and heroes? How can we as a society broaden or reformulate what it means to be a masculine male in our culture? All of this has all been part of the mind cloud blocking this entry from happening. And now it’s done. I guess I should feel relieved.