Month: July 2019

Mark and I were married on July 30th, 1983. The following month Mark would be back at the University of Illinois for his second year of graduate school, this time with a wife. I was leaving a full-time job in Chicago processing employee medical claims for a large utility company. I was about to be unemployed, uninsured, moving two hours away to a small college town, and marrying a student who received a monthly stipend of $600 for teaching undergraduate classes.

This marriage started on a wing and most likely the desperate prayers by my parents who in private conversations must have been beside themselves with worry about how this daughter and new husband were ever going to make it. To add another layer, this daughter’s soon-to-be husband was not a Catholic, which in their eyes was the equivalent to marrying a pagan who worshiped stars and made brews of tree bark in the forest while howling at the moon. The final straw was the wish of their gypsy, middle offspring for a smaller wedding than her siblings had with no band, no event space, no frills. A simple ceremony in church followed by a party in the backyard under a big tent. My dad said, “Well that’s a fine idea but you can’t count on the weather to cooperate,” and I said, “That’s okay, Dad, I’m not worried.” I didn’t need to worry. He had that part under control, and if anyone said to me that the whole idea of me marrying my broke boyfriend with a party in the backyard at the end of July would lead to his early death a few years later I wouldn’t argue with them. Everything I was about to do was the opposite of how he lived his life.

I also wanted a simple, tea-length dress but my mom was not on board with that idea and I knew I was pushing my luck. Maybe she felt it wasn’t pure enough for church, and it didn’t seem appropriate to tell her while shopping for white wedding gowns that that was no longer in question. We settled on something that covered everything but my face and hands and I looked like a virgin Shiite Catholic. While I was getting fancied up in the dress I didn’t like nearly as much as my mom did, I would later learn that my dad would spend the entire day looking at the sky, looking at the outdoor thermometer, looking at the barometric pressure, and looking at my mom and saying, “For God’s sake, I knew this was a bad idea.” She in her wisdom (or maybe in resignation over this entire wedding mutiny) said, “Well, whatever you do don’t say anything to Kathy.”

I wouldn’t have cared if he had. I was too excited to marry my student husband and start our new, poor life together. I stood at the back of the non air-conditioned church with sweat trickling down my dress and slipped my hand around Dad’s arm. “Are you ready?” he asked me. I nodded and he said, “Then let’s do this with class, Kath,” and I walked up the aisle with my favorite man in the world until Mark Fisher showed up at my door five years earlier and replaced him.

I remember my dad’s smile during the reception afterwards, how relaxed he was, how he and my mom and everyone else seemed to be enjoying this day. It would set the tone for the decades to follow. To know that the people who have cheered you on since you were born were now cheering for your love.

The wedding was the start of Mark and I doing things our way. Sometimes they worked, sometimes they blew up in our face. We rarely planned anything. In the early years of our marriage this would frustrate me with Mark, but he loathed planning and scheduling on his free time as his work life was ruled by class schedules and deadlines. He much preferred when he was with me and the kids to let life surprise and unfold before him.

Last year we went out to dinner and toasted to #35, and there was no reason to think that we wouldn’t be celebrating many more anniversaries together. Things were going well, we were back in rhythm as a couple who could finally spend more time together, we loved to travel and had our wish list of places we wanted to see. Knowing Mark as long as I did, I believe his death was not planned or thought about until the early morning hours of September 4th, when lack of sleep and new and old things began swirling that would take him quickly to a very dark place. In thinking about those moments he had alone with his demons, I wonder why he didn’t come to me for help, pour his worries on me, ask me to sit beside him until the sun came up. I have to constantly remind myself that when someone reaches the point of ending their life, stopping the pain is the only option.

I would have wished for Mark’s death to be surrounded by me and our kids, the people who knew him best, who loved him passionately. To have walked him to the passageway between here and there and whispered thank you for every minute of it, even the hard stuff. I didn’t have that chance and so I live in gratitude for the beautiful life we created and mourn what was left undone, unsaid, and unplanned.

After our wedding reception was over and everyone had left, the hot, humid skies that had been threatening all day opened up and poured down, as if the first day of our married life was baptized with fire and rain. We would spend 35 years together, years that went by in a blink, and the only regrets were for the times we failed each other in the grace and forgiveness that is required both here and there.

Sometimes when I go to therapy it can be very uneventful. I’ve been rehashing the same story since January when I started going and am often bored by the repetitiveness of it. I just want this thing fixed so I can get some semblance of happy and normal back in my life. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.

Someone recently told me that I didn’t deserve what happened to me and I didn’t know what to do with that statement. Nobody deserves to have bad things happen to them and I have never believed I was immune from tragedy. What I deserve or don’t in life isn’t a place I ever visit, either before Mark’s death or after, but it got me thinking and I talked about it in my therapy session. “Well, no,” my therapist said, “you didn’t deserve this.”

We talked a lot about that and it feels to me that in order to believe that I have to get mad at Mark. That feels dangerous. To shake my fists and rail against the person I miss the most, the nerdy science guy who fell for the girl with the wild hair, who misses him so desperately she hasn’t figured out how to function without him. And if I do get really pissed and rage for all that his death has caused me to go through since September, will I stay in a place of anger for the rest of my life? That feels even more dangerous.

What I feel safe getting angry about is Mark not sticking with therapy, for not opening up the can of shame and regret that eventually caused him to end his life. For not digging down so deep that he goes back to the little boy who didn’t understand what was going on around him or could even put a name to it. I heard many of those stories the weekend before he died, things I never heard before. Difficult, emotional stories that seared his memory and obviously made a lasting impact. I could only listen. He was the one who had to do the hard work with a therapist of putting the pieces together to figure out how it affected him his whole adult life, and like many things we all deal with going back decades, he locked it up until the sides bulged and exploded.

Like the anguish he must have been in that morning when he wheeled his bike out of the garage, mine burns with the intensity of two people who thought everything would be okay until it wasn’t. In the letter he left behind he said he was sorry FOR ALL THE PAIN and God knows I am, too. Sorry he felt like this was the only solution, sorry I never heard him get up in the morning, sorry for a life that was so vibrant and full and then over, sorry I failed to see what triggered him until months after he died, sorry I didn’t nag him about therapy, sorry for all I did not see until it was too late.

This last week has been merciless in regret and sadness. Facebook says Mercury is in retrograde which is disruptive and can cause a host of problems. Is that what is causing this inability to find any peace? I’m not sure. I know that I carry Mark’s hurt and tend my own and that is often crushing regardless of where Mercury happens to be. The pain that Mark’s death inflicted on me was never intentional, he wasn’t that kind of person, but it has stayed front and center and it isn’t going anywhere until I deal with it.

How I do that will continue to be a long and uphill road, and the what ifs seem like they will haunt me forever. In less than two months it will be a year since Mark has been gone. At once it seems like yesterday and a lifetime ago when I would be telling him a story and he would push the curls from my face. “God, I love your hair,” he would say to me and we would both smile because we knew we had it made.

It was Mark’s daily habit to check on the many birdfeeders he had around the yard. Some had regular bird seed, some had finch feed, there were sunflower seeds, and nectar for the hummingbird feeders. I’m not sure when this started but it was important to him to make sure the birds feeders were always full, especially in the winter. “They have a hard life out in the cold,” he’d say to me as he headed off to the store to get more seed.

Besides loving to provide food for the birds, he also loved observing them. He could name every bird that came to the yard and whether or not they were male or female. If it was unfamiliar to him he’d sit on the screened porch and comb through his bird book until he was sure of the species and then come in and show me what new bird had come by for a visit. His constant nemesis in this hobby, though, were the squirrels. Over the years he bought many squirrel-proof feeders which lasted about a week before they figured out how their entire family could snack on the food he bought for the birds. “They’re nothing but rats with tails,” he’d say to me, and what started as an annoyance became a full-blown war. We’d be eating dinner and he’d keep an eye on the backyard. If he spotted a squirrel at the feeder he’d jump out of his chair, sometimes knocking it over to run out and scream and flail his arms at them to get away from his birdseed. The velocity of him launching himself out of his chair would give me a near heart attack every time. “I don’t know about the squirrels,” I’d say, “but you scared the hell out of me.”

One day he came up with the idea to grease the pole the squirrels had to climb to get to the feeder. He grabbed some Crisco out of the cabinet, took it outside, and slathered it on the pole. “Hee, hee, hee,” he chuckled, “let’s see how they get into my feeder now.” This lasted a few days until the squirrels got Paw Pole Grabbers at the Squirrel Store and were right back in his feeder taunting him. “Those son of a bitches,” Mark would mutter.

Finally he got a squirrel trap and started baiting them. He’d cackle at them when they landed in squirrel jail and would load the trap into the car and let them go in the park a few blocks away. “You know,” I’d tell him, “they’re back in the yard before you even pull into the driveway. I can tell by their markings. You know how you can tell birds apart that way? That’s how I identify squirrels.” There was absolutely no truth in this. I just wanted to mess with him. He told me I was full of crap but after that conversation he started dropping them off at a park five miles away.

When the gardening bug hit Mark, the squirrel population doubled. They loved his tomatoes, so tasty. His trapping took on a new urgency so he bought another one and was jailing them and releasing them nearly daily. He started counting his trapped squirrels and would tell the neighbors. “Guess how many I’ve gotten so far? 47!!! 47 furry rats are no longer in this neighborhood and you are welcome.” I’d sigh and roll my eyes and wonder if he was tallying his catch on the garage walls. It was like living with the Rain Man.

Sometimes his trapping would be a problem for me. Squirrels in cages have high amounts of anxiety and would run back and forth in the cage frantically. If they got trapped in the morning they wouldn’t get released until he got home from work and probably died from adrenaline overload shortly after they got sprung. One time two little girls knocked on the door. They had seen a squirrel in the trap as they were walking by and were highly distressed. I told them that the squirrel was fine and he’d be going to a new home in, oh, about fourish hours. This didn’t satisfy them and they stared at me with their sad eyes until I went out and let it go. “You can’t trap your squirrels in the side yard,” I told Mark. “I can’t deal with distraught, little girls knocking on our door as they’re walking by.” He considered this for a bit and said, “Did you tell them that they are furry rats? That I’m actually doing a service for this entire neighborhood in getting rid of them?” “No,” I said, “they’re little girls. I didn’t want to ruin their happy, little world with your rat ramblings.”

One day I was at work and had to go into a staff meeting. I was expecting a call from a doctor’s office so I took my phone in with me and twenty minutes later it rang. I ducked out of the meeting and into the hallway. It wasn’t the doctor’s office on the phone but Mark.

M: Hey, Kath, yeah, so just wondering something. Is your car in the parking garage where you usually park?
K: Yes, why? What’s up?
M: Funny thing. Kind of crazy, actually. I took a shower and shaved and kept thinking there was something I was forgetting to do. I rode to work and I kept thinking and thinking the whole way. So I get to my office and then it hits me. I trapped a squirrel and put it in the back of your car and forgot to let it go before you left for work.
K: Are you…
M:
K: Are you….
M:
K: Are you telling me that I drove to work this morning with a fucking squirrel in the back of the car? Are you really telling me that?
M: Yes. Yes, I am.
K: Why? Why would you do that?
M: Maybe you didn’t hear me. I said I forgot.
K: Who forgets a live animal in the back of a car?
M: Me.
K:
M: It’s kind of funny don’t you think?
K:
M:
K:
M: Are you there?
K: Yes.
M: You’re not saying much. What’s wrong?
K: Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I was driving around this morning with a fucking squirrel in the car. Maybe it’s got me a little wigged out.
M: I’m surprised you didn’t hear it.
K: I heard a rattle but I thought something was wrong with the car.
M: Nooooooooo. That was the squirrel. Probably had a nice nap and then woke up and was like hey I’ve gotten kidnapped and now she’s taking me across the state line.
K:
M: Then he probably sent signals to the posse that he’s a victim in a squirrel felony.
K:
M: You’re not saying anything again. You aren’t mad are you?
K: Nooooooooo. Why would I be mad?
M: Good, good. Okay, I’m going to ride over on my bike and let it go.
K: I swear to god, Mark, if the car smells like squirrel pee I’m going to be so pissed at you.
M: Calm down, Curly. #1. You and I both know you don’t have any idea what squirrel pee smells like. #2. I’m about to fix this whole situation. #3. You’re acting squirrely.
K:
M: I made a squirrel joke.
K: I heard.
M: You’re supposed to laugh.
K: Just do me a favor. Don’t let the thing go by the dorms, okay? Just be as inconspicuous as you can be.
M: Roger that. I’ll be as inconspicuous as a guy in spandex can be carrying a squirrel jail.

I walked back into the meeting and my boss asked me if everything was okay. “Actually, no,” I said. “There’s a squirrel in my car.” This statement made a big thud in the room and everyone looked at me until my boss asked, “Why is there a squirrel in your car?”

“Because I am married to the Rain Man.”

A few weeks ago I was telling my therapist about something that was in the works that was causing me some distress. It has been my lifelong habit to worry and what if most problems, events, or decisions. Never did I what if my husband dying by suicide, and if you can’t predict that someone you’ve known for forty years was capable of that you should probably throw that worthless stash of what ifs off a cliff. Even so…..

“Is your worry because you feel like you’ll have to wear a mask too long?”, she asked me. That was absolutely it. The mask is my daily grief accessory, the one I wear to show the world that I am rising from the ashes of Mark’s death, the one that people see and tell me that I look great and seem to be doing just fine. Once inside the house, though, it gets flung off as quickly as a pair of too tight shoes.

After Mark’s death the outpouring of love and support was overwhelming. I was in shock and would stay in shock for months and months, but these days as that has slowly worn off I often feel at my lowest point. All around me life goes on as it always does, but I am stuck on that September day when my whole life went up in flames and I couldn’t see through the smoke to know who was actually living and who was dead. I was told that it was Mark who was dead, but how come it felt like I was too?

Since then I have checked all the boxes of recommended things to do when a traumatic death occurs, even doing meditation at night so I can sleep more than a few hours. But the morning light delivers the same sad as regularly as the alarm clock, and so I put the mask on when I walk out the door so that I don’t scare everyone with my dazed look of loss.

Before Mark’s death, my image of healing seemed much like the yellow brick road. Just follow it, do what you’re supposed to, and you’ll get to the Wizard who can grant your most fervent wish. But real healing shows up as a desperately needed tourniquet and I.V. that gets administered many times a day, and just as often gets yanked out unexpectedly by a song, a conversation, a sunset. It’s sailing through the morning believing that you’re doing okay, that just maybe you’re going to be happy again one day, and then you’re in your car and you turn the radio on and it’s Science Friday. You pull over because you’ve heard your husband talk about the very thing you are listening to and dig your phone out of your purse to text him and stare at the last thing you sent. Are you okay? Please call me. I’m so worried about you.

It’s the 4th of July and the floodgates of every happy memory of that day burst open from the backyard picnics at your parent’s house when you were dating, to vacations, to the neighborhood cookouts with your three kids. You never expected that this day would make you so sad, but the flags, and parades, and sparklers would intersect with the ten month mark of when your husband died and you are flattened by it. Friends are expecting you at their cookout but you are fighting against a riptide of grief, the power of which is scaring you until you remember that you have to swim perpendicular to the shore or it will carry you away. In over your head, you know that pulling yourself out of this will be entirely dependent on you, and arriving at a cookout with a salad and a smile will be one of many unnoticed acts of bravery in this new and complicated life.