Promise Kept

I made the promise on our living-room couch.

Carrie was in the “red devil” stage of chemotherapy—the one that drains the color from everything. She had already lost her hair. She had not lost her will. She had still been running through treatment, stubborn miles in a hat and gloves, refusing to surrender a piece of herself to cancer.

But that day, she couldn’t lift our son Henry.

She tried, and her arms shook, and she looked at me with a fear I had never seen before—not fear of dying, but fear of not being here for her children. So I sat beside her and said something simple and impossible:

When this is over, we will run the New York City Marathon together.

It was a promise that she would make it through.

It was a promise that we would have a future.

This year, we will run for Sharsheret, for families like ours who have learned that cancer is not an abstract word. Carrie’s father died of cancer at 57. I turned 58 this February 11—one year older than he was allowed to be. Her mother is a breast-cancer survivor. Carrie herself survived stage-three breast cancer. In our families, cancer has names, faces, birthdays, and empty chairs at the table.

So when we run, we run for them too.

I will carry my mother with me. She died of lung cancer in 2020, in the lonely quiet of COVID. She grew up in Seagate, New York, a girl born in a displaced persons camp who came to America and found her future on the boardwalk. She met my father at Lincoln High in Brooklyn. To her, New York was not just a city—it was the Statue of Liberty, it was promise, it was the proof that life could begin again.

She taught me that being Jewish is more than what we believe. It is who we are. It is keeping faith with each other. It is showing up. It is remembering.

Running New York with Carrie is my way of carrying my mother home.

Training hasn’t been pretty. I’m fifty-eight with a J-pouch that forces me to think about hydration every mile. My heart rate still wants to sprint into the 170s even when I’m trying to stay in Zone 2. Carrie carries scars invisible to the world. Some mornings we are slow. Some mornings we are scared. But we lace up anyway.

Because our children are watching.

Henry and Stella are still young, Gabrielle graduated NYU and is finding her footing in the world, but they will remember this story someday: that their mother lost her hair but never stopped running; that their father made a promise on a couch; that together we showed them what strength looks like. Not loud strength. Not superhero strength. The quiet strength that gets up again, mile after mile.

At the start in Staten Island, we will be one couple among thousands. But inside our stride will be generations—Carrie’s parents, my mother, every family Sharsheret has held in the dark.

And when the race gets hard—and it will—I will think of Carrie trying to lift Henry and whispering through tears that she was afraid. I will think of my mother walking the streets of Brooklyn, believing America was real. I will think of our children waiting at the finish, learning what it means to keep a sacred promise.

And we will keep running.

Because hope is something you practice.

Because promises are meant to be kept.

Because love, like faith, moves forward—one step at a time.