The Funeral Run
I feel ambivalent about naming inanimate objects. For one, it feels counter to non-attachment, a Buddhist philosophy I’ve embraced and committed to practicing to the best of my ability. Another reason is the implied materialism of such an action. Again, it feels incongruent with the narrative I’ve created about myself. But a few weeks ago, the "death" of my five year-old running watch surprised me. I know this sounds bizarre, and the strangeness starts with its intensity and climaxes in the way I responded to it.
I bought the most basic running Garmin in 2019: the Forerunner 35. This was about a week after my iPhone 5S, which slid out of my running shorts, got run over by a tricycle. Intimidated by the price of iPhones, I decided to buy an Android. What I saved from settling on a more affordable phone would allow me, for the first time in my then nine years as a runner, to buy a running watch. Since moving back to my home campus a year prior, I had renewed my commitment to the sport and was logging considerable miles. A GPS watch made perfect sense.
One fine Sunday, after several days of research on running watches, I marched into the Glorietta 5 Garmin store and bought the thing. I wore it for the rest of that day at the mall. I caught myself glancing at it, trying to catch the minute turn, checking to see how it looked on my left wrist, preening in the mirrors and windows I passed, happy to have assumed this new self. Before the purchase, my vision of who I was and what I did was clear: educator, writer, and runner. Now, I was still all three, except now I was a runner with a GPS watch! In an effort not to name my things, I simply referred to it as “Garmin.”
That day at the mall, there was just no way of knowing what was to come. By my best estimate, Garmin had accompanied me to about a thousand runs since its purchase. Not just this: it had seen me through two falls (the scars from which have already faded), the COVID-19 pandemic (and my shortlived shift to cycling), my tenure, four heartbreaks, countless lectures (both given by me and given to me), classes, students, faculty meetings, committee meetings, meetings with big wigs, awarding ceremonies, speeches, and a whole lot of firsts that would be impossible to contain here. Garmin has monitored my heart rate, informed me every time I hit my step goal, and congratulated me—six times in the past year—when I breached the half-marathon distance.
Garmin stopped working on the morning of June 9th, 2024. My family was in Taal for my parents’ 37th anniversary celebration. Confident of its durability and the many instances I’ve swum with it, I wore it to the pool, ignoring the peculiarly intense scent of chlorine as we approached the water. My guess is that it suffered undue pressure, being caught in between my arm and my mother, whom I lifted from the water as a dare. The high chlorine concentration must have ruined the already worn-down waterproofing. When we got back to our room, I was distressed that it no longer showed the time. I held on to hope for a few days. I buried it in rice. Left it under the sun. Wore it to work for two days despite its uselessness. When I was convinced it was safe, as my last try, I charged it. I left it in an upright position on my bedside table. It still didn’t work when I checked it after an hour. And my heart sank when I saw a little pool of water right where I had picked it up.
What ensued was an intense week of mourning. My attachment to Garmin was such that on the day I accepted its death, I decided to run with it for the last time. One for the road. I ran a kilometer for each year it had spent with me/I had spent with it. At kilometer three, looking at its blank screen and remembering our years of togetherness, a lump began to form in my throat. Cooling down, I held my left wrist up before me, Mt. Makiling in the background. As I studied Garmin, my now really dead inanimate running watch, I whispered a thank you. I then pressed it to my right cheek. It stayed there for a while, as the tears rolled down my eyes.
Back in my room, I placed it in a rectangular black box, where my other old dead timepieces were. Each of them displayed their time of death, clear and final. Only Garmin had a blank screen, its time of death a mystery. Later that night, I stared at the ceiling, awake in the darkness, wondering about my strange behavior, my absurd response. And in the end, I understood the things I was grieving for and over: unrecoverable versions of myself, time and distance past, and the end of a story that brings with it the excruciating, inescapable start of another.
