Month: June 2019

It is rather fitting that Mark was born on June 21st, the summer solstice and longest day of the year. For as long as I knew him he never wasted a minute of daylight. I’m sure that started when he was a little boy, maybe even earlier. When our kids were babies and nothing would calm them down, I’d take them outside and tell them to listen to the birds talking to them, the leaves in the trees blowing, the drum of the cicadas. Since they are 50% their dad, it would do the trick and they would be ever so attentive to the outdoor sounds. It works now, too, for the newest grandbaby who will stop crying in seconds if you take him outside.

These days I have found that being outside is about the only thing that gives me some peace. I am on a constant tilt-a-whirl of thoughts of Mark’s life and death, which does nothing but cause me to spin my wheels and go nowhere. When I walk out the door the spinning ceases, as if I am the crying baby that needs the sound of birds and leaves to calm my head and heart. Even so, I still turn my head whenever I hear the sound of a cyclist riding by (a constant occurrence in this neighborhood), hoping that one of them will round the corner at 7:00 like the old days and my handsome husband would say, “Sorry I’m late. I was ready to leave and forgot I needed to send an email, then I ran into somebody on the way out, then I cycled home with this guy I met a few times and he’s kind of a slow rider.”

Once when my sister was here and I had hung up the phone with Mark she asked me when he was going to be home so we would know when to start dinner. “He says he’ll be home in an hour,” I told her, ” but if you double that and add twenty minutes you’ll be close to when he’ll actually be home.” She didn’t believe me but my estimations were usually spot on. The guy was easily sidetracked.

I always worried about Mark riding home on his bike. Sometimes he would go to a dinner meeting or stay late into the night because a paper or grant was due. I never liked when he did that but he told me it was safer then because there were fewer cars on the road at that hour. He had a light on the front and back of his bike, a light reflecting jacket, and a light on his helmet. He never took chances with motorists as he had a few close calls.

After Mark died a retired colleague and friend of his was riding past our house and stopped by to talk to me. “When I heard the news,” he said, “I knew it wasn’t an accident. Mark was far too careful a rider for something like that to happen.” Oddly, that gave me a great deal of comfort. To know that the thousands of days he rode back and forth to work and early on Saturday mornings with his biking friends, that he was careful. That he knew I worried about him, that he knew he was supposed to return home to me.

That’s not what happened on the last day Mark set off on his bike and it casts a long shadow over all the other days. I pray the searing burn of this wound will lessen, but in this first summer without him he feels so far away and the hours of sunlight too long.

One of the many heartbreaks of losing Mark in the way I did is that through therapy I feel like I know him better now than I did all those years we were together. Most of what I knew about him in the before was how he was not how he thought. On the weekend before he died, I suggested to him that he might be depressed because I had heard that men tend to manifest depression more as anger than sadness. He wanted to know where I heard that. The truth was it was on an Oprah show years ago, but I figured Mark would likely discount that as not legitimate so I said that I read it somewhere and couldn’t remember the source. He bent over, hands on his knees and said, “Oh my god, Kath, that’s it. Sometimes when I’m riding to work I’m so pissed off and I can’t even figure out why because the day hasn’t even started.” I don’t remember what transpired when we got home, but I would bet he immediately looked it up on the internet because if anything was revealing to Mark he quickly went down the rabbit hole of research.

I would find out months after his death that another sign of depression is the tendency to be a workaholic. Mark was a hustler, and in the highly competitive field of scientific research he never allowed himself to coast or rest on his latest achievements. He thrived on the chase for discoveries and results, and was so intellectually curious that the field suited him perfectly. He never knew how to rest, though, and it was the source of many arguments between us. His computer went with us on vacations, on trips to Chicago for Thanksgiving, on Sunday afternoons on the dining room table. A previous boss told me that he was one of the few faculty in the department that regularly came into work on the weekend. It would rarely be for the entire day and sometimes I’d guilt him into staying home, but overall the guy didn’t know how to not work. At times even his daily bike ride back and forth to the med center, regardless of the wind, pouring rain, or snow, seemed less like exercise and more like a punishing commitment he made to himself written in stone.

I told my therapist that I had seen Mark knocked on his ass more times than I could count. Grants not funded, the lab running on the fumes of dwindling funds, students who opted to work in other labs, a rotating student who broke a piece of equipment that was a $5000 repair, publications submitted that got turned down, a $15,000 pay cut when we were a few short years away from sending our oldest to college, employees that weren’t working out and had to be let go. The list of setbacks were many but he’d give himself a few days to be in the dumps and then he’d get right back up. “How come,” I asked, “could he do that over and over and not this time?”

“Because those times he could use his intellect to figure things out. This time,” she said, “it was emotional and he had nothing in his toolbox to deal with it.”

Since Mark’s death I have had to shore up my own toolbox to deal with something I was ill-prepared for. Besides going to therapy I also take something for anxiety. All day every day it felt like my chest was in the grips of a vice. I couldn’t decide if I should go to the emergency room or just wait for a heart attack to strike me dead. When I finally went to the doctor she asked me if I worried about things out of my control. “My whole life,” I said, surprised that that was even a thing. I thought everybody worried about everything. She gave me a low dose antidepressant with instructions to come back in a month. On my return visit I was asked by a med student how I was doing and I said fine while tears ran down my cheeks. “It’s just a bad week. I’m really much better,” I said unconvincingly. He asked me how I was eating. I wasn’t. He asked me how I was sleeping. I wasn’t. He asked me if I thought about suicide. “No, but it would be okay with me if I didn’t wake up in the morning,” I said. He left the room and I could hear him in the hallway giving my doctor the rundown of our conversation. She came in and said the dose needed to be upped. I knew I was too fragile to argue.

Mark would have found all of this fascinating. The connection to his work habits and emotional health, my worry and what would turn out to be anxiety, the mind-body connection. Five years ago he quit drinking, he read a lot about sleep and the affects on cognitive health, he was active and very fit. The thing he didn’t take care of was his mental health and that would have tragic results. Unlocking the boxes of hurt and shame he left me along with my own is the hardest work I have ever done. When I come home from therapy I often lay on the couch for hours.

But I go every week because I think I owe it to him, to me, and to our kids. To unburden all of us from fear and remorse, to learn to let go of the trauma that whispers to me that I didn’t do enough, that whispered to him that he was unworthy of the life he had been given.

To set that wounded soul of his free, so from the other side the only thing he knows for sure is that he was loved.