Month: January 2019

When our kids were younger and would complain about being bored, I would tell them to be grateful for an ordinary day. “It can all change in the blink of an eye,” I would say like some wise, old sage. I even said it when they became adults, but of course I always meant for someone else, not us, not on a Tuesday afternoon, not with such awful news.

This drastic, new change in my life affects me every waking minute of the day. There is nobody to share the coffee, nobody to bitch with about current events, nobody to cook for, no flipping off the light switches that Mark always left on, nobody to chat with on long walks around the neighborhood, no extra clothes to wash, no LaCroix to buy, no jockeying schedules when Mark needed the car, no hearing about how things are going in the lab, the department, or the med center, nobody to pick up from the airport, no flying out the door in the morning and yelling “have a good day” behind me. Except for the constant banging of my thoughts about him and that day, my life got instantly quiet.

Mark and I didn’t talk on the phone very much during our regular work days. Besides having plenty to do at our jobs, we just weren’t good at it. For most things, we texted or emailed each other. Mark had far more responsibilities than I did, and so I always tried to put something attention getting in the subject line to make him laugh and to get him to respond. When things were in flux in his department because of the egos that some in academia have, I put Boom Goes The Dynamite as the subject. He thought that was hilarious and we emailed back and forth about who was losing their shit and why. On that Tuesday, when hours went by and he hadn’t answered my email I knew something was very wrong.

Now I don’t know what an ordinary day is, I’m still trying to figure that out. So far it’s going to work, solving ongoing insurance problems, and thinking of somewhere to go after work so I don’t have to come home too early. And crying, more crying than I thought possible.

A few weeks ago my friend who lost her husband right after Mark died, texted me that she was sitting in the Costco parking lot listening to old voicemails from her husband. Is that crazy? Despite our preferred manner of communicating I have many voicemails from Mark that I have listened to over and over, so if it is then I am also an active, dues paying member in the Crazy Club. It’s not just the sound of Mark’s voice that does me in but the sound of an ordinary day – him calling to say he had to work late, leaving a message with his flight info, asking if I could swing by and pick him up, calling to tell me he wanted to take me out to eat, calling with great news in the lab.

Despite the gut wrenching loss of Mark, I think every day about the wonderful run I had with that guy. There were the usual marriage ups and downs, the making of a life in Illinois, Maryland, and finally Kansas City, three great kids (each one born in a different state), the trip we took together to Spain many years ago and Portugal last year, the week we spent in Montana. The highlights will always stand out as they should, but looking in the rearview mirror it will always be those ordinary days I miss the most.

When Mark and I became empty nesters, we had an agreed upon split of evening chores. I always got home before him and so I’d make dinner, and sometime between Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow, Mark would clean up the kitchen. Mark was a constant whistler, and no matter where I was in the house I knew when he was cleaning because I could hear him whistling. He’d load the dishwasher, put the leftovers in containers, hand wash the pots, and wipe down the counters. If he was feeling really ambitious he’d mop the kitchen floor. The last thing he’d do is get the coffee ready for the morning so that it was brewed and ready as soon as our alarm went off.

Since he died those things have become my duties. I don’t cook very often these days so there isn’t much to clean in the kitchen. The times I have it lacked the joy and purpose that Mark brought to the job, and there definitely isn’t any whistling. When I had made something in the crockpot and let it sit a few days, the crusted remains stayed put. I tried soaking it in hot water a few times without much luck. Mark would have taken that as a challenge and wouldn’t have given up until he had scrubbed off every bit of hardened chili. My method was different. After a few days of aggravation and half-hearted trying I gave up and took the whole crockpot outside and dumped it in the garbage.

Now I make the coffee every night before I go to bed just like Mark used to, albeit a much smaller pot. After a few weeks it seemed to me that the coffee grounds shouldn’t be in a cabinet on the other side of the kitchen but next to the coffeemaker. Mark would have admired the efficiency of this move and likely would have told me, “Kath, this is so brilliant,” a few dozen times.

It was one of those dumb things that neither one of us had ever thought to do before but that made more sense. Nothing about this life without Mark does as loss permeates everything.

You can even taste it in the coffee.

Since Mark’s death the replay of the last weekend of his life and the events that led up to it are on a constant loop playing over and over in my head. Even on the rare occasion when I am engrossed in something else the loop will start up – a reminder that it is in control and not me. It is exhausting to pick apart every detail in hopes of finding something that was missed earlier, a clue, an off-handed comment, anything that would unveil what he was thinking that morning. Sleep is my only escape and even then there are no certainties, because despite how tired I am when I get in bed it is the replay that calls the shots.

The replay rarely changes, repetitively wondering the same thing. If only I had woken up during the night, if only I had heard him leave the house, if only I had seen something that concerned me enough to stay awake with him, if only I had made a plan with him the night before to get some help.

If only if only if only.

I know that there is nothing to be gained by replaying things over and over but his death has obliterated the life I knew. Most of the time I feel like I have been through an earthquake and am on the floor picking up rocks where my house once stood. By continuously playing the loop, I can turn the rocks over and over and know that this one was the foundation, that one came from the kitchen, the pebble from the front steps. As if closely examining the rubble will result in a rebuild of the life I had where he comes waltzing in the door just like before.

Many people have asked me if I am mad at Mark. My reality is that I fell hard and fast for him on a blind date forty years ago. He was unlike anyone I had dated before and there was nobody that I would come to love more. Empathy, brilliance, and wonder oozed out of him. His curiosity about everything was contagious. At the time of his death I was going to physical therapy and after a month long absence returned. My therapist spent the hour listening to me tell her the events of that day and said, “When I heard what happened all I could remember was the time you told me a story about him and said that nobody made you laugh as much as he did.” He always did and yet died broken and alone, so how exactly am I supposed to be mad at him?

In the years since the kids have grown and left the house, we settled back into being two again. We went out to eat more, we saw more movies, we traveled, we sometimes grocery shopped together. I could even get him to go to Target on the weekend, bribing him with Starbucks. Because those things had been few and far between for so many years, I’d often look over at him and think, “lucky me to fall for that guy and to have him to myself again.”

Because the replay is unforgiving it also repeats the last thing I said to him as he walked down the stairs the night before. “We’re going to be okay, Mark.” I meant him and me but since then have wondered daily if he thought I meant me and the kids after he was gone.

One day the kids and I will be okay. For now we are in the weeds of a loss we couldn’t imagine, weeds so high we are unable to see a sliver of sunlight that would guide us out. Mark used to tell me how the Indians on the plains rode horseback through the tall prairie grasses so they would be obscured from enemies but have a vantage point to see what lay beyond. I think about that often. How one day I will see a life beyond loss, a life where empathy, brilliance, humor, and wonder will lead me where I am supposed to go, Mark’s spirit showing me the way.

On a Saturday night last winter, Mark and I went out to dinner and then stopped by the med center for him to pick up something from his office that he wanted to work on over the weekend. Weeks before he had told me that he had been working on cleaning his office. “You would be so proud of me, Kath,” he said. “I just pick up stacks of paper and throw them right into recycling. I don’t even go through it. I put it right in the bins.” That’s good, I tell him like a professional organizer, they say a cluttered office equals a cluttered brain.

I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe a cleaned off desk or less coffee mugs or not the ever-present piles of paper, but when I walked in I was taken aback. Surveying the place like a judgey shrink on an episode of Hoarders, I moved a pile off one of the chairs to sit down. “I thought you said you were cleaning this place,” I say. “What did you even clean? It doesn’t look any different.”

He gave me the finger. I roared with laughter.

“I swear to god, Mark,” I tell him, “if you up and die and leave me with this mess I’m going to be so pissed off at you.” He imitates me in a high-pitched voice. “I swear to god, Mark…..,” and he keeps giving me the finger and I keep laughing and fast forward seven months and that’s exactly what happened.

I showed up in his building on a Saturday morning to meet his boss and a friend to go through his things and it felt like my chest was being split wide open. The sadness, the 26 years of his life there, flashbacks of the kids so little going to see daddy at work, the clothes he changed into from his biking gear, his notes, his box of change, coffee pods, his shoes, photos of me and the kids. I held it together to get the job done but when the last box was loaded in my car and I went back one more time to get my purse, I could not stop crying. That place was his life and then it was over and crammed into boxes, and the pain of that has not relented for a single minute.

The boxes were piled in an empty bedroom with all the other death related stuff and it would take weeks for me to open the door and figure out what to do with everything. I brought the box of clothes upstairs and sat on the floor near his closet to go through everything – making piles of what needed to be washed, what needed to be folded, what should be hung back in his closet. I picked up one of his tshirts and put my face in it and with sweet relief I could still smell Mark, so I put everything back in the box and taped it shut, hoping that the scent of my once beautiful life remains.

The kids and I made it through Christmas. We made it with plenty of crying and “aren’t we just the saddest bunch,” and gifts that had more meaning this year than any other. We made it with invites for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, outfits that had some sparkle, and a toddler and a baby that brought the sparkle just by walking in the room.

But New Year’s……

I dreaded New Year’s Eve more than anything else in December. Well wishes said with the best of intentions made me physically flinch. Is an entire year really supposed to be happy? Who ever has that happen to them? This new year represents twelve, long months without Mark and that seems too harsh to reflect on for more than a fleeting moment.

The last day of the year was spent on the phone trying to straighten out my health insurance. This is so routine now that it rarely leaves my checklist of post-death crappy problems. Just when my insurance got straightened out in 2018, the dawn of a new year brought a host of new problems, new phone calls, new departments to be transferred to for help and no definitive answers.

The business side of death threatens to do me in at every turn. Bearing the oppressive weight of loss, the mundane feels unbearable as I brace myself to tell another stranger “my husband died in September” when most days I don’t believe it myself.

In late spring Mark was writing a grant. Those grant writing times consumed him. Chances of getting a federal research grant seem slightly better than winning the Powerball but not by much. Nevertheless, he poured all his energy into it like every other one he wrote. Because of the timing of the due date on that one, he never planted his vegetable garden. Sometimes I look back at that and wonder if that’s when things started to go south. Was not being able to garden and watch lettuce and tomatoes grow a precursor for giving up? Then I think that if he were here and I told him that he would say I was crazy and that would be true these days. I often feel like I’m tipping over to crazy.

When I was done trying to get my insurance problems solved, I checked my email. Mark’s department head who was new to the job in July, and like everyone he worked with has had to deal with her own grief over his death, wanted me to know that the last grant Mark ever wrote was approved.

The work in his lab goes on and I whispered “you did it, buddy, you did it” and rang in the new year with heaving sobs.