On Monday, Allie Emond ran the Boston Marathon.
On Thursday, she was back in North Carolina, doing the school pickup run.
“Before the Marathon,” she said, on the phone, as she waited for her 7-year-old daughter, “people were asking, ‘Are you nervous?’ And I’m like, ‘Hey, I just buried my husband. Running a marathon is nothing.’ ”
Her husband, Eric Emond, a sergeant first class with the Army’s Third Special Forces Group, was killed in action last November in Afghanistan while on his seventh combat tour during a stellar military career that spanned 21 years.
Eric Emond, a Fall River native, was one of the founders of Massachusetts Fallen Heroes, which built the Seaport memorial that honors those lost in service since the 9/11 attacks.
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Allie was instrumental, too. Along with Eric’s sister, Laura Davis, she created Mass Fallen Heroes’ first database and helped raise awareness and funds to build the memorial and create an organization that helps veterans and Gold Star families.
Now, she and her three daughters — ages 7, 4, and 1 — are a Gold Star family.
Allie Emond feels so strongly about the mission of Mass Fallen Heroes that she has put aside a natural desire for privacy. She will return to Boston next month to speak at the organization’s annual dinner and to see her husband’s name added to the memorial.
She went into the Marathon, her first, with what she called incredibly low expectations.
“Frankly, I was more apprehensive about going back to Boston than running the Marathon, because that was our city,” she said. “That’s where we bought a house, where we were going to raise a family.”
They bought a cute Colonial with a mansard roof on Stock Street in Dorchester, after Eric was sent to Boston for lengthy medical treatment for wounds from a rocket-propelled grenade in Afghanistan. Eric, a former Marine, had been medically retired from the Army because of his injuries. During that long rehabilitation, Eric and Allie threw themselves into Mass Fallen Heroes. Eric essentially wrote the group’s mission statement, melding the idea of honoring the dead and supporting the living.
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As he did with most challenges, Eric defied the odds and got well enough to return to active duty. He and Allie moved to North Carolina, where his unit is located. There is some hard irony in his name going on a memorial that exists in large part because of his efforts.
“Eric didn’t want any recognition,” Allie Emond said. “He just believed deeply in the cause. I feel the same way, this constant struggle of wanting to go back to when no one knew us, but also wanting the world to know who Eric was and is, because he was not just a warrior but a good person.”
Allie Emond is alternately overwhelmed by pride and grief. An Afghan who admired Eric for his efforts to help villagers in the area where he was killed sent her and her daughters traditional Afghan gowns in Eric’s memory.
A Boston police officer approached her on the Marathon course, she recalled, and, with tears in his eyes, said, “Sorry for your loss.”
It was fitting that Allie Emond ran the Marathon alongside Mike Stevens, a protege of Eric’s and a teammate from Third Group. Stevens and his wife, Dana, have been at her side, literally and figuratively, since last November. An Army vet, John Mehr, ran with her, too, cracking jokes the whole way. They finished in 4 hours, 45 minutes.
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The average woman takes 62,926 steps to run a marathon. But Allie Emond is not your average woman. For her, these were just the first steps on a road she would do anything not to be on, one that will last the rest of her life.
“Getting home yesterday, after five days of people taking care of me, going back to the reality of life without Eric, that was rough,” she said. “This is the beginning of a different kind of marathon.”
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeCullen.