Month: January 2020

“One thing I’ll tell you about Kath. She’s like a teapot. She simmers for a long time but when she blows watch out.”
-my dad to Mark on the occasion of our wedding

During Mark’s last few months of grad school, he was finishing up experiments and writing his dissertation while I was newly pregnant. He’d write fiendishly, edit, write some more, edit some more, and overall freak out that he wasn’t going to pass. Mark always took his work and his future seriously, and the pressure of getting his dissertation perfect was all that was on his mind.

Since I was early into my pregnancy I had other things on my mind. I was the main wage earner and working at a bank processing mortgage loans. The loan officer I worked for was young, gung-ho and cranking out customers and loans in record time so he could could go to the head of the class. Every mortgage he approved caused a massive amount of paperwork for me to complete via the old-fashioned way of typing, but like clockwork every morning I’d get the dry heaves between 10-10:30. I’d go into the bathroom stall, close the door, sit on the floor with my head over the toilet and spend twenty minutes dry heaving with occasional full on barfing. Mr. Loan Officer lacked empathy for my situation and one time knocked on the door of the ladies room to ask me if I was almost done. When I got back to my desk he said that I should count my daily dry heaving time in the bathroom as my morning break. So I was spending my days with an average white guy in the 80s who answered to nobody for bad behavior, and my nights with my husband who suffered no debilitating side affects of a baby on the way.

As the time came closer for Mark to present his dissertation, he started staying at home to practice his talk. I’d like to think I was supportive, and maybe I was, but I was more jealous that I had to go into work every day and prop up the Ron Popeil of mortgage loans while Mark merely had to panic and freak out about our future with a baby on the way. During one of those days, I drove home for lunch, made a sandwich, and bitched incessantly about my job while Mark nodded and made notes in the margins of his talk with red pen. It was non-eventful as only one of us was having a conversation. When it was time for me to head back to work, I stood at the kitchen counter where a frozen pot roast was thawing and asked Mark, “About 3:00 can you put this in the oven at 350?” And Mark, pen in mouth and without looking up said, “No.” And that was the moment I flipped my shit about the men in my whole miserable, dry heaving life. I screamed, “NOOOO??? Are you kidding me? I’m pregnant and going back to work for that idiot again and you can’t even turn the oven on and stick this stupid roast in the oven?!!! Really? You really can’t even do that?” Mark was suddenly and violently startled out of the world of cytochrome p450 with no time to react as I flung that frozen pot roast in his direction and stormed out of the house.

I fumed all the way back to work, imagining myself as the victim of a love gone horribly wrong, not by another woman, but a pot roast. I fantasized that it would make a best-selling novel, the cover a portrait of me and my pregnant belly with a single tear sliding down my cheek. But by the time I reached the employee parking lot at the bank, I began to reimagine what my actions might have done. What if I hit him in the head and killed him? What if I hit him in the head and he ended up semi-comatose the rest of his life? I’d probably get arrested for attempted murder. Worse yet, what if I didn’t get arrested and had to keep working at the bank? I started to get a little worried, then I got real worried so I decided to call the house. When I reached my desk I picked up the phone and dialed our home number. When Mark answered, I thought *whewwwww did I ever dodge a bullet there.* Since he could walk because he got up and answered the phone, and he could talk because he said “hello”, he clearly suffered no brain trauma so I launched into another epic bitch session about the pot roast and slammed the phone down. That afternoon at break I told my bank friends the grievous crime Mark had committed, and since they shared in my work and male bitterness they tsk tsked him. “Oh, he had that coming,” they all said and I basked in the glow of my righteousness.

That night when I got home from work there was the smell of pot roast cooking, mashed potatoes being made, the table set with candles, and my husband apologizing for saying “no” when he realized he should have enthusiastically sayed “YES”. He was forgiven because I knew he didn’t mean it, and he seemed slightly terrified which made me sorry for flinging that frozen hunk of meat at his head.

A few weeks later, we were arguing about something else while standing in the kitchen, and Mark picked up a thawing pound of ground beef and slammed it to the floor saying, “I’m just trying to pass grad school so I can get a job and you’re bitching at me about everything.” Simultaneously we both looked at the package of ground beef on the floor and came to the same conclusion. We were so broke we couldn’t even afford to throw a box of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, let alone meat every time we were mad at each other.

Mark would finish writing his dissertation and defend his work before his committee and pass with flying colors. It was a huge accomplishment and I was so proud of him. My broke college student husband was now a doctor. He was proud of himself, too, and in the months that ticked by he would keep working in the lab until Maggie was born and we started a new life in Maryland.

I was still processing mortgages, my bank friends had a shower for me, we put a crib together in our rented townhouse, and I anxiously waited for this new baby to make me a mother. Meanwhile, Mark started pontificating about everything. He told me in detail how the coffeemaker and microwave worked, how everything I made on the stove would cook faster if I’d just put a lid on the pot, that a drop of beer might turn our developing baby into the Hunchback of Notre Dame, that the tar he inhaled when he roofed would probably give him cancer one day, that professor jobs were hard to come by. I listened to most of it until one day the combination of heat and the growing baby in me that had run out of room made me reach my breaking point.

“Will you just stop,” I said. “You keep preaching to me about stuff I don’t even care about. You follow me everywhere like the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz who finally got a brain. I can’t take it anymore. Ever since you got this degree you’ve become a know-it-all asshole.”

Without missing a beat, Mark nodded and said, “I see your point but just so you know it’s Dr. Asshole,” and in the summer of 1983 let it be known that hands down he won Fight Club.

During the five years Mark and I lived in Maryland, we became more keenly aware and interested in the history of the Civil War. Brutal battles had been waged on the ground beneath our feet, and for a history buff like Mark, it was an opportunity to explore these places. Mark was especially interested in the Battle of Antietam – the single bloodiest day of the Civil War.

Antietam was less than an hour away, and so on a Sunday afternoon we loaded a very new baby into the car and drove there. Much of it I don’t recall except for standing in a field named Sunken Road. Two rows of wood rail fencing delineated the North from the South, an expanse no wider than the distance from my driveway to my next door neighbor’s, and it was shocking to imagine that a hail of bullets and cannonballs were fired in such close proximity. It was unfathomable that anyone could survive that, and while we like to think of wars being fought by men, boys as young as middle school were also sent from home to join the fight, often to lose their lives. On that hot, summer day, Mark and I would have the same reaction to what we were seeing. As the wind blew against the manicured blades of grass and dandelions sprang from that bloody earth, we both knew we were standing on hallowed ground. Our drive home was somber and quiet.

Before we left Maryland for a new job opportunity for Mark, we took a trip to Gettysburg, and that time we would load two kids into the car and drive to Pennsylvania. While also incredibly moving for its historical significance, it lacked the feel of Antietam. Tourist shops lined the town streets where you could get a dish towel with the Gettysburg address on it and a shot glass with Abraham Lincoln’s profile. Disappointed by what we’d seen, Mark would say on that drive home, “Why’d they have to go and bastardize the place?” It was hard to comprehend how two historical places where war was waged for the same thing could evoke such different reactions.

The struggle I have had ever since Mark’s death is for a meaningful life that I do not know how to remake. The person who gave me the confidence to do most anything is no longer here, and during my other times of doubt Mark would cock his head, smile, and say, “Oh Kath, I wish you could see in yourself what I see in you.”

Shakespeare wrote, “Everyone can master a grief but he who has it,” and those words certainly ring true with me. I am always bewildered that someone with an intact marriage and a very living spouse seems to know what I need to catapult me out of this grief. Advice to “just focus on the happy times” makes me flinch. There is a reel in my head of a 40 year relationship with a man that I deeply loved that has played non-stop since last September. There are thousands of happy times in that highlight reel but sadness touches every part of it now. The movie lacks half the participants to share in the highs and lows, and if there are any coming attractions somebody forgot to queue them up for me to watch.

Moreover, being told “don’t forget you have those great kids and grandkids,” makes me want to simultaneously burst into rage and laughter. Throughout my lifetime countless women have passed through my days, and I am positive I have never known a single one that has forgotten the children they carried, birthed, adopted, and raised, or those children’s children that made her a grandmother. How could I forget them when I fell in love before I even met them? And how is it possible for them to be responsible for my peace since their dad died when they are struggling with the same thing for themselves?

Everyone in my life desperately wants me to be happy and I am thankful that I am loved enough for that to be the case. They would like to look in my eyes and not see the pools of my sadness reflected back at them. If only they could see the times that I can still laugh at the dumbest stuff like Mark and I always did, that those kids and grandkids of mine and Mark’s do give me moments of joy, that the sound of my husband’s name makes my heart flutter with gratitude, that the point of this journey is to lead me to a destination of Whole not Happy, that they may think they know how fleeting and tenuous this life is but it is a very different thing to live that truth, that I reached it before them but they, too, will find themselves there one day.

For now grief is ever present in my life and I long for the day when it requires much less of my heart and head. In order to get to that place, I need to feel every part of what I had that tragically slipped through my fingers, and that is a painful place to be. Grief also demands not to be rushed and I have reluctantly come to terms with that.

But when the day does come that my eyes dance with renewed hope, and flowers grow where there used to be barren ground, I will still wish for the same thing that I wish for now. That what can be seen in my eyes is the entirety of Mark’s life and death, and that you know it is and will always be my hallowed ground.

“Sometimes we are just the collateral damage in someone elses’s war against themselves.”
-Lauren Eden

A few days after Mark’s death when I was with my sisters, daughters, and niece on a hunt to try to find guest books for the funeral, I got a call. I did not hear my phone ring initially which was a good thing. Since that Tuesday when I had gotten the call from the police department while at work, whenever the phone would ring my heart would stop and my stomach flip. This time it was a call from the county health department wanting me to know the services available for my mental health in case I felt suicidal. It would have been comical if the whole thing wasn’t such a heartbreak. One funeral wasn’t even planned and it seemed to me that they were heading me off at the pass to stop the need for a-buy-one-get-one deal from the church. They left a voicemail, I called back and left a message that I would contact them if need be but I was a bit overwhelmed at the moment.

On the day after Mark’s funeral, when I was on somewhat of a high (if one can even say that after the suicide of their husband) because his farewell was everything I had hoped it would be, the detective who told me what happened that Tuesday afternoon showed up unannounced at my door with a person from the mental health department. He was someone I wished to never lay eyes on again, and all 6’5″ of him filled my living room. He sat on my white couch and introduced a fresh-faced women who proceeded to hand me dozens of brochures on suicide. She was all of about 25, and I wanted to ask her if she really thought that if I was going to kill myself I would stop, say, “Wait a minute, where’s that brochure with the phone number I was supposed to call,” and then rifle through the pile she gave me until all was well again. They chatted awhile, and if there is one thing that you cannot do for a very long time after death lands in your house, it’s small talk. I told them I had to cut things short because I had to go to a physical therapy appointment for back issues that I’d had for months. This opened another conversation about the detective’s own back issues and he asked me if I had ever thought of getting an inversion table because, according to him, those things really work. I smiled, thanked him, and said I’d look into that. Silently I said take yourself and your gun out of my house and don’t come back.

I would later find out that making a welfare check like that is standard procedure after a suicide. Family members so distraught over the loss of a loved one often end their own life, and information about these services has to be passed on to prevent a chain reaction of death.

Many times since last September I have thought about that conversation. How I felt like throwing up when I saw him at the door, how I wanted to blame the messenger, how this was so very wrong on every level.

Mark thought his death was the only viable plan, that we would be so much better off with him out of the picture. I have read a great deal about the suicidal mind, but because he never even came close to that in our years together, it is so difficult for me to imagine him capable of thinking that way. In the dark of night he slipped into his own darkness, unbeknownst to me, and how was that even possible? How could I, who knew him best, be unaware of where his mind had led him? My therapist said Mark did it in the way he did so that I wouldn’t know, so I wouldn’t stop him, so I wouldn’t be the one who found him. In replaying the weekend before over and over, I always imagine myself to be the hero, the one who steps in at the last minute to stop him from doing the unimaginable. In going down that road I also imagine what the aftermath must have been like and I am grateful to have been spared that.

But my gratitude is someone else’s horror and it is something I think about often. The train operator who phoned the police after it happened and the police who responded to the scene, namely the detective I want to hate. Who ever thinks that the outcome of suicide will be part of the job description? And how often in a career does that happen?

On that Tuesday afternoon at the police station, when the story was unfolding before me and I could feel my entire body collapse at the news, I was asked if I had any questions. Did I have any questions? I didn’t even know where to start. I looked up and all that would come out of my mouth was, “Did he, did he, did he……”

Did he what?

I didn’t even know what I was asking. The detective looked at me and said, “He did not suffer, Mrs. Fisher.” How does someone remember to be so kind and gentle when they have become the collateral damage in the aftermath of a war they were called to witness?