Today is June 25 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “When you suffer, get defeated, or struggle, how often do you find your way out of the depths?”
Author Elisabeth Kübler-Ross noted “The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”
Gabriele Grunewald is one beautiful person. Grunewald is an American professional middle-distance runner who competes in distances from 800 meters to 5000 meters. She represented the United States at the 2014 IAAF World Indoor Championships and finished in tenth place.
She was the national champion in the 3000 meters at the 2014 USA Indoor Track and Field Championships.
Grunewald had a rare metastatic cancer. In 2016, surgeons cut a large tumor out of her liver, which left a purple half-moon scar that stretches across her abdomen. In the spring of 2017, physicians found two new tumors there. All by 30 years of age.
As Michael Powell said in his New York Times story on Grunewald “To receive a serious cancer diagnosis is to feel an overpowering desire to retreat within and to try to block out the chirpings of your mind. Grunewald made the decision to crawl out.”
She crawled out kept running and living until her death June 11, 2019, at age 32.
Grunewald considered her scars a sign of her ability to handle adversity and encouraged others on social media to do the same. “My scars represent survival,” she wrote on Facebook this year. “My scars teach me to embrace my body and honor its strength. My scars are a physical manifestation of what often feels like an invisible disease. My scars tell my life’s story, and I’m pretty glad it’s not over yet.”
As her husband Justin wrote on Instagram “people will remember that hard period in their life where they were losing hope but they found inspiration in a young lady who refuses to give up.”
For a while, Grunewald found a way out of the depths and demonstrated what Kübler-Ross observed in that “beautiful people do not just happen.”
How often do you find your way out of the depths?
How hard are you working at becoming a beautiful person?