Month: April 2019

Many times over recent years, Mark and I talked about death. He was convinced that we would live well into our nineties in sound physical and cognitive health. Since both of our fathers died at the age of 64 of cancer, I wasn’t so certain of the guarantee of years. He brought up the subject of our longevity often, and I would always redirect the conversation to the need for us to put our adult pants on and get a will and medical directive. Mark had biked for years with a group of guys every Saturday morning and it seemed to me that half of them were attorneys.

“Just ask one of them for an appointment,” I’d say to him. “We can do it first thing in the morning before we go to work and get this taken care of once and for all.” Mark finally agreed and talked to one of his lawyer friends who said he’d give us the “biker rate”, then he never did another thing about it. Besides considering the financial aspect in our regular death talks, we’d also ponder the possibility of finding someone else when either of us were no longer on this earth. That part tended not to gain much traction, not because we were opposed to it, but rather looking at a very alive spouse and saying, “Sure, I can see myself with somebody else when you’ve kicked the bucket,” didn’t seem right. To picture Mark happily remarried was like a knife in my back and I’m sure he felt likewise.

Then the unimaginable happened without warning and since September I’ve been swimming in a riptide of loss and loneliness, frantically paddling and not only going nowhere but terrified I’ll be swept out to sea if I give myself a second to rest. Every aspect of my life changed dramatically that day and everything I thought I had in the future with Mark was wiped clean. I told my therapist that whenever I try to visualize the years ahead it is a complete blank. She assures me that in time I will carve it out and make it my own but she has far more faith in the process than I do. I’ve spent every single day trying to keep my head above water, too drained to imagine anything but heartache.

On a still, dark, and cold Sunday morning I woke up at four o’clock, and as those early wake ups tend to go, I started thinking everything over for the thousandth time until I gave up, went downstairs, fed the cats, and started the coffee. An hour later I went back to bed and fell sound asleep.

I don’t know how long I was asleep when I could feel Mark standing next to the side of the bed. “Kath, wake up,” he said shaking me. “I have to talk to you.”

I opened my eyes and he immediately started telling me that somebody wanted to meet me. I looked at him like he was crazy and said I would absolutely not be meeting anybody. “You have to, Kath,” he said. “It’s a friend of Joe’s.”

Mark, I can’t meet new people right now. I’m too sad. It’s been so hard since you’ve been gone.

“You have to,” he said. “I already told Joe that you’d meet this guy.”

I started crying and said I couldn’t do that since I’m not exactly liked I used to be when he was here.

“Look,” he said, “it’s a drink. He just wants to meet you and take you out for a drink. It’s not that big of a deal.”

Oh my god, Mark, are you kidding me? That sounds like a date. What is wrong with you that you would ever agree to something like that?

“Kath, please,” he said looking at me with those intense green eyes of his. “You can’t be sad for the rest of your life.”

And I sat up in bed, looked around and he was gone but I knew every second of it was real.

As the kids in this house started moving out and their rooms got little use, I decided we should put the t.v. in one of the downstairs bedrooms. As a nod to my husband who gave up having much of a say in the decor around here, I painted it a caramel color, bought some leather furniture, and went a little nuts with the antler trend. This was a special touch seeing as how Mark never hunted anything in his life except fish, but a room with antlers was cool even if had no bearing on your life.

The room stayed like that for many years until I told Mark that it didn’t make sense that there wasn’t even room on the leather loveseat for both of us to sprawl out and watch t.v. together, and that maybe we should look into a sectional. I’d been looking at the same one for two years at West Elm, paying frequent visits and checking the price, and so one day last August we both went on a Saturday afternoon to look at it again. While I have to kick the tires on a big purchase forever, Mark shopped differently. He had taken over doing the weekly grocery shopping because I hated it, and explained to me that shopping needed to be planned like a reconnaissance mission. “You move in and out. Under the radar before you’re detected.” This sounded more like an episode of WWII on the History Channel than a trip to the neighborhood grocery store but that was his style.

We got to the destination of our reconn mission and I pointed out the sectional I’d been courting the last two years. He sat down and said “I like it. Let’s get it,” and my anxious heart started skipping like a rabbit in the eye of a Jack Russell terrier. “Like today? Oh god, no. We can’t just buy it today. We came to look at it and think it over and then maybe look at Craigslist for awhile longer until we find something similar.” Mark hated Craigslist. Over the years I had involved him in enough hauling of furniture and having to rent U-Hauls to get it home that just the idea of Craigslist sent him over the edge. “I’m not going into another stranger’s house to look at another piece of used furniture that we can’t fit in our car. We’re here, we should buy this, and we should get it delivered.” I wasn’t prepared for it to be that easy. “That’s it? We just buy it now?” He nodded while relaxing on his new sofa, and because I can’t make anything simple I had to agonize over the fabric choice for an hour.

After we finished ordering the sectional, I told him I wanted to stop in Banana Republic to look for a dress for a wedding we were going to the following month. Taking Mark out shopping was often like taking an alien who had just landed from Mars. Everything was a wonder to him. He followed me around while I looked until I said, “The whole other side is the guy section. Why don’t you see if there’s anything you need?” Amazed by this piece of information he said, “They sell men’s and women’s clothes here? In the same place?” It was Friends & Family Weekend and everything was discounted so he came back with a sport coat, a few shirts, and a belt. I struck out on finding a dress but got a skirt and two tshirts. When they told us how much we saved with the discount plus opening a credit card we high-fived each other at the checkout. Never mind that we didn’t really need anything we got, we saved a significant amount of money or so we told ourselves. All that spending made us hungry and we finished our shopping spree with lunch at McCormick and Shmick’s. On the drive home I started adding up how much we spent in a couple of hours and when I told him the total he said, “Good. It was worth every cent.”

At the time of Mark’s death he had worn the sport coat just once, the shirts and belt hung in his closet unused. He also wouldn’t live long enough to see the sectional delivered. Since then the room has been repainted, the antlers are gone, and it looks more feminine than it would have been if Mark were still here. On that August day we thought we’d have so many more years ahead of us. We didn’t know that there would only be a few weeks, and that the jacket he bought that looked so great on him would be one of the few things of his that I could give away. When I offered it to Brian, who lost his mother and close friend in a matter of days, he said, “Are you sure you want me to have this?” I told him I was positive and after he tried it on he said it fit like it was custom made for him. “Mark would like that,” I said.

The sectional is a different story. Unlike his clothes, I can’t avoid looking at it every day. It’s what I thought I wanted and it works better in the room, but like most of the things I thought were important, I am apathetic about it. Because I remember everything about that day I want to believe that there are threads of Mark exuberant life stitched into the cushions, waiting to be unveiled to me at some point. Until then I only can see it through the lens of sorrow, that exuberant life of his drifting farther from my reach day after day.

On the day of Mark’s death, that awful day in September when I was sitting in a sterile, white room at the police station, two detectives quietly and calmly told me that my husband was dead, that he rode his bike onto the tracks of an oncoming train, and that it appeared to be intentional. It was unbelievable and the most crushing thing I’d ever heard in my life. His bike? Onto train tracks? Are you serious? The guy who would cup moths and beetles in his hand to let go outside, who taught his three kids to do the same, that as toddlers would learn that smashing a bug with their chubby feet wasn’t something you did in our family. That guy rode his bike onto the train tracks on purpose? It not only made absolutely no sense to me, it was so horrific that considering it for even a few seconds made me physically sick.

The immediate aftermath of that conversation that afternoon was calling the kids home and telling them, their faces mirroring mine in shock and anguish, driving to the airport at midnight with my son to pick up our youngest daughter who came off the plane shaking uncontrollably, calling family and friends, and then the planning of Mark’s funeral. All of that kept me from diving too deep into the details of that day, but when family had gone home, friends went back to work, and the house became eerily quiet, that day was all I thought about. Besides going over and over it, I longed to have anything of his that he carried that day. Was all that gone too? No work bag, no keys, no wallet, nothing? Gone like him? Just disappeared from the face of the earth? The friend Mark was supposed to see that afternoon has been instrumental in helping me in thousands of ways. In one of our conversations I talked to him about Mark’s personal belongings, that I desperately needed something of his from that day and he offered to check on it for me.

Three weeks after Mark’s death I was back at the police station after calling to make an appointment with the property department to pick up his things. They told me on the phone that they had his work bag, his wallet, his keys, a bike helmet, and a bike. A bike helmet? A bike? The bike was in the warehouse but they would bring it to the station for me to pick up if I wanted it. Was that some kind of cruel joke? Hey lady, here’s your dead husband’s smashed bike. It’s not worth a damn but we don’t know what to do with it so you can figure it out. I told them I wanted it and decided that if it was in as bad a condition as I imagined it to be, I would find a dumpster on the way home to ditch it because there was no way in hell I was going to let the kids see that.

Three different people offered to go with me to the police department to pick up his things but I declined each one. Each one of them said they insisted, that I absolutely shouldn’t go there by myself, and I said they were probably right. I looked at the calendar on my phone which was empty of everything and told them Wednesday seemed like it would work. Then I picked up the phone, called the police department, and made an appointment for Tuesday morning.

I arrived at the station, checked in, and sat in the same chair in the same waiting area that I’d been in weeks earlier. My eyes never drifted from the door the detective came out of that Tuesday afternoon. I expected at any minute to be called back into that sterile, white room where the tone would be much different this time around and I would be peppered with questions about everything that led up to that day. That I would crack like a suspect on an episode of Law and Order and say the same thing over and over, that they would look at each other knowing they got their accomplice.

I didn’t wake up.
I didn’t wake up.
I didn’t wake up.
It’s my fault.
I didn’t wake up.

Instead, a very cheerful, female police officer came from an elevator behind me and I turned my head towards the sound of Mark’s bike. His favorite bike, the carbon fiber bike that he loved. When he brought it home he called me out to the driveway and said, “Look at this, Kath. You can lift it with two fingers. You know what that means? I’ll tell you what it means. It means the lighter the bike the faster you can go on it.” I marveled at the genius of this and he said I had to pick it up to really appreciate it so I put my hand under the cross bar and he said, “No, no, no. Two fingers. Pick it up that way.” I did and he smiled and said, “See what I mean? Can you even believe that?”

I had to sign some paperwork and the properties police officer disappeared with it for a few minutes. I grabbed my phone and took a picture of his stuff. I don’t know why. I wondered if that made me look guilty or crazy, and that on second thought maybe this wife did need to be interrogated by those detectives. I will never know what made me do that. I think it was because I didn’t actually believe his bike was intact. That it was leaning against a railing with not a scratch on it. The police officer reappeared and offered to help me out with his stuff. She started rolling his bike and I picked up the bag with his things. A white sticker on the front of the brown paper bag said “evidence” and I thought my legs were going to go out from under me.

I opened the tailgate and she wondered if we’d be able to get the bike in there and I said don’t worry I’ve done this a hundred times. It will fit. Mark and I had that down to a science. I put the brown paper bag inside and she lifted the bike and said, “This is the lightest bike I’ve ever seen. Look at this. I can lift it with one hand.” I tell her, “Two fingers. You can lift it with two fingers.” She tried and said oh my gosh you’re right, I think I love this bike.

He did too, I say to her. He’d never have let anything happen to that bike and isn’t that funny? In the last moments of his life I can picture him gently laying that bike down along the grassy side of the train tracks like he did with every harmless bug found inside the house. But I cannot picture that without also picturing that he thought his life should end with the cruel violence of cold steel.

When I got home I sat in the driveway for a long time, just me and the stuff of his ordinary work week in the back of the car. Eventually I decided that sitting there in shock and tears wasn’t making anything better so I opened the garage door and wheeled his bike next to the three others he had. The late summer morning was so quiet except for the ticking of the chain – as if all the birds and the cicadas in the neighborhood stopped for a moment of silence. His riderless bike rolled into the garage, his last words tucked in an envelope inside a brown paper bag.

All evidence that his life was over.

I have and will always deeply love you. You were the light to my darkness…..