Mike and the author in October 2022 at their favorite race: the Detroit marathon.

Robyn lost her husband the same day I lost my best friend. We sat across from each other at Mike’s hospital bed, moments after he passed. She caressed his forehead while I looked away, trying to ground myself as the room spun. I couldn’t bear to see my larger-than-life friend drained of colour for fear I would remember him this way.

My friendship with Mike dates back to 1989, when we were teenagers growing up outside Detroit. Our lives revolved around the restaurant where we hustled for tips to pay our way through the local college. Left behind by our peers who were off to their dream schools, we forged unlikely friendships with the collective of just-passing-throughs and lifers who made up the restaurant staff.

Mike and I were each other’s wingmen, him setting me up with the hot cook du jour, who inevitably broke my heart, and me setting him up with the hot waitress du jour, whose heart he inevitably broke.

When Mike met Robyn, the playboy in him gave way to a hopeless romantic. Mike and Robyn were friends in high school, but a misunderstanding led to a falling out, leaving them estranged. A couple of years after graduation, they ran into each other at a funeral and found they had forgotten why they hated each other so much. He was smitten.

Robyn humbled Mike. He was a charming, wise guy, addicted to the thrill of the chase. Robyn was a tough customer who could see through the act and right into his soul. I’d never seen him so in love. Our ragtag restaurant crew danced the night away at their wedding, and shortly thereafter, I moved away for graduate school. It was the end of an era.

Mike and I lost touch until he called me on a Tuesday 14 years later to tell me he’d be in Boston for business. At the time, I was a single mom spiraling from a breakup. Mike’s reappearance in my life felt like the universe sending me a rescue. He was reeling too, from the one-two punch of his father’s death from ALS, and then infertility, which robbed him and Robyn of children.

We discovered we had both found healing through running and so we spent the next 16 years chasing finish lines together around the country.

Robyn was relieved that Mike had friends to occupy his desire to run dozens of miles through trails and mud puddles, an activity that, understandably, held no appeal to her. I was thankful Robyn lent him to me and our running crew for adventures that occasionally occupied entire........

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