Jenny Simpson Felt Held in the Dark and Never Found Peace

On June 16th, Jenny Simpson, an Olympic medalist in running, finished pacing runners at a community mile race, told someone on the infield that she did not feel well, and collapsed. The electrical signal in her heart had been interrupted and her heart completely stopped. Bystanders gave chest compressions and used a portable defibrillator, and responders used electric shocks to restart her heart at the track and again in the ambulance as her heart kept stopping.

She was placed on life support, went into advanced heart failure, and was flown to Duke, a hospital that specializes in hearts. She then spent five days in intensive care, heavily sedated, with a breathing tube and machines helping pump her heart, and she remembers none of the hospital room from that Tuesday until June 21st. What she does remember is a separate, inner struggle through those same five days, and it is why her account of nearly dying sounds nothing like the usual story of light and peace.

She described it as being trapped in a really dark, blacked-out room, where she had to solve a puzzle to get out. It was, she said, "so dark, and it was so violent." It lasted so long that she kept thinking, "How much longer?" Simpson, who spent years racing the marathon though she jokes she was not very good at it, said the marathon felt similar, an effort that stretches on while you wait for it to ease. Here, she said, it never eased, and it was like a dream she can kind of explain but cannot put into words that make total sense.

The strongest feeling, she said, was that she was not alone, that something was helping her navigate the darkness and holding her. But there was no floating above her body and no white light. It felt instead like work she had to do herself.

That surprised her. As a person of faith who had thought carefully about her life, Simpson said she could have imagined what fighting for her life should feel like, and what she lived through did not match it. In one way, that makes it feel real to her, because it fell outside what she would have expected. In another way, it has left her with something dissonant to sit with, a challenge to how she understood the world.

She also never found the peace that culture promises after struggle. She said she struggled the whole way and kept recommitting, determined that she was, in her words, "not gonna slip away." She is proud of that fight, and frightened by how little control she had.

What she carried out is a limit she had never met. She had always believed, as an athlete, that she could be the tough one who survives. This time, she said, "my incredible strength had to be met with mercy," the strength of other people stepping in. It took 100 percent of her, she said, and it still would not have been enough alone.