On the morning of September 4th, my husband ended his life. There was no warning, no chance to beg him to stay. This is what I read at his funeral the following Wednesday.
Mark always told me that I should write a book. I was never convinced I had enough material to do that until I tried to write this. Sometimes I think that people who had never met him thought I embellished my stories of him with a heavy dose of comedic flair but I promise you that isn’t the case.
As most of you know, Mark biked back and forth to work every day. This started in 2001, and he was so out of shape when he started that he’d stagger in after work and make it to the stairs where he would sit trying to catch his breath. I’d make dinner with one hand and hold the phone in the other because I was certain that one day I would have to call 9-1-1. He got better and better at this means of transportation and pretty soon he was going back and forth with ease, driving in on the weekends to swap out his work clothes. During those early biking days, I became especially concerned about his underwear. I was doing the laundry and it seemed to me that there wasn’t enough rotation of boxers and briefs. As I am prone to do, I became obsessed with it. Was he turning them inside out and wearing them twice? Was he washing them in the sink of the men’s bathroom and hanging them to dry in his office? Was he even wearing underwear? His mind was always on bigger things, and whenever I brought up the subject he waved me off and said he had that part of his life under control. I knew I was thinking about it way too much when on the way to work one day I saw a pair of underwear in the middle of the road, and hours later on the rainy drive home it was still there. Mark came home from work a bit later, drenched from head to toe. He took his computer out of his bag, set it on the dining room table and plugged it in. Then he walked back to his work bag, unzipped a different compartment and pulled out a pair of wet, white underwear, strolling over to the kitchen sink to wring them out like it was the most normal thing in the world. “Kind of crazy, Kath,” he said. “I started thinking about this underwear thing and decided to stuff some in my bag to take to work. So I’m riding home tonight and I see this pair of underwear in the middle of the road, and I say to myself hey I think that might be my underwear.” I listened in fascination and horror. “So I rode over to them and picked them up off the ground and held them up and sure enough they were mine.”
“That underwear,” I said, “has been on the street since this morning. It has been rained on and cars, CARS, Mark, have driven over them all day long.” “Well,” he said, “I guess that means I’m going to have to put some muscle into bleaching out the skid marks.”
For those of you who know him professionally, I will tell you that his mind also worked in overdrive at home. When some friends of ours had come to visit us, Jim told us a story over dinner that was featured in the Cleveland paper. A local kid who had no interest in college had started reading about raising tilapia. His dad was so happy he was interested in something that he jumped in with both feet and provided his son with everything he needed to start this business. Before long, all the best restaurants in Cleveland were buying their tilapia from him and he was making bank. Jim pulled up a photo from his phone that showed the young businessman in the basement with plastic wading pools full of fish. I was amused. Mark thought this couldn’t be more brilliant. A few days later, he’d looked into the startup on this and for a few hundred dollars we could get into the tilapia business. He’d taken some measurements in the basement and said we had enough room to start with twelve wading pools. “You cannot be serious,” I said. “Kath, this science gig doesn’t exactly have us rolling in dough,” he said, “so I’m thinking that with some commitment to this, we could be this close to becoming thousandaires.” I told him it was the dumbest idea I had ever heard. A few days after that, he came back to me and said he would settle for six plastic wading pools and we could use the kids’ red wagon and put the tilapia in buckets and roll them up to the Blue Moose to sell. “Here’s what I’m thinking,” he said. “You could hang out in the basement with the tilapia, making sure they’re not banging into each other cuz I think that might affect the price, and you can take a laptop down there and write since basically you’re just babysitting fish, and I think in no time we’ll be loading up the money truck.” “So let me get this straight,” I said. “We take the dumbest idea you’ve ever had, cut it in half and go forward with it so now we have a half dumb idea instead of a whole dumb idea.” “Well, you’re the one who is good at math so I’ll let you figure the fractions out,” he said. I told him the answer was still no. The next day he said he’d be perfectly fine starting out with three plastic wading pools to launch this business and even if they all died we weren’t out a bunch of money. Finally I said, “Mark, let me put it to you this way. If we have three wading pools in the basement with fish in them, we are going to have a lot of humidity in the house. My hair and humidity aren’t a good mix so here’s what you have to decide. Do you want tilapia in the house or me and my hair? And as he’s been known to do a thousand times over, he slapped his forehead and said, “You are so right, I didn’t factor in the humidity but I’ll research that.” And the next thing I knew he was at his computer googling Residential Tilapia Humidity.
Over the last week, many people have said to me that they wished that they had done more for Mark. No one will ever wish that more than me, but Mark didn’t suffer fools or fakes, so if you are here it is because he wanted you in our circle. If you asked him how his research was going, you did enough. If you bought him coffee, you did enough. If you asked how his vacation was, how his kids were, what kind of lettuce he planted, how many miles he rode, how many steps were on his Fitbit, how his last talk went, if he could explain the entire last season of Westworld, if the Bears had any chance of doing well this season, and especially if you made him laugh…..you, my dear friends, did enough.
Mark’s needs were few. He never got tangled up in material things and he loved an engaging conversation on any subject more than anyone I know. He loved his work and often told me that he spent so much time on it because he believed it to be his legacy. More years were stressful than not, where the the regular process of getting funding for his lab felt like a recurring, bad game of Chutes and Ladders.
More than anything, Mark believed in basic research. He loved his coworkers and adored his students, and despite how hard this field can be, he would never want any of you to give up the commitment to the work. He thought research science was the noblest of professions, and for most of his life I think he believed that a guy who started as a roofer spitting nails out of his mouth won the career lottery.
Last summer, we were in Vermont for a biochem meeting and I picked Mark up late in the evening. The drive back to our hotel was pitch black. “I bet the stars are amazing out here,” I offhandedly said and he immediately pulled over to the side of the road. We both jumped out of the car and took a good long time gazing at that lit sky, and that sweet, quiet night will remain one of my favorite memories with him.
I would rather be anywhere but here today, but life had other plans for me and my favorite guy. So if you want to do more for Mark, behold the wonder of the world around you like he always did, and please tell our kids stories about their dad. Many years ago, a friend said to me that she wished her husband looked at her once the way Mark always looked at me. I pray I see those eyes again in my dreams. Last Tuesday, everything in my life got knocked off its axis, and at this moment the only two things that I am certain of is that Mark’s love could never be contained in one life, and that I couldn’t have been luckier to have had him beside me.
He took me on the ride of my life.
