Month: March 2020

A few years ago, before my daughter and her husband were married, I asked them if they wanted to have Sunday dinner at the house with us. It wasn’t a ploy to get them to spend more time with me and Mark, but rather that they were both working full-time, Maggie hadn’t honed her cooking skills yet, and I felt sorry for Nate who didn’t seem to me to be getting enough to eat. At the time, Will was in college, Mallory was still home, and both of them would join in on our dinners as their schedules allowed.

It was never supposed to be a regular thing, but the next Sunday came along and I asked them again, and the one after that and the one after that. Because Mark and I were usually home most of the day, we started making better meals, he’d cook on the grill, I’d experiment with new side dishes, we’d get some beer and wine, and there was always something for dessert. We nearly always worked together on these meals, fighting (literally) side-by-side for counter space in our teeny kitchen.

I knew that Mark and I liked cooking together, we liked having the kids together one day a week, we liked getting caught up with them, and them with each other. We did not know that the kids looked forward to it as much we did until we had to cancel a couple weeks in a row because of other commitments. When we told them we could hear the disappointment in their voices, and from then on we made it a priority to be together for Sunday dinner.

It did not always go smoothly. Siblings know how to push each other’s buttons and at times arguments would erupt. Sometimes they’d get a more attractive offer and ditch us at the last minute. After a few tumultuous weeks that were more bad than good, I told Mark I was sending all of them an email. I told them that their dad and I were happy to continue making Sunday dinner but that they weren’t going to be arguing at the table any more, that if they couldn’t make it they should let me know before noon so I could plan accordingly, that phones were not allowed at the table until after we were done eating, and that they should pitch in to clean up the kitchen. When I read the email to Mark he said, “You’re going to piss them off and they won’t come any more.” I said that I was reminding them how to act around our dinner table because they’d forgotten. Things were much better after that, and like clockwork, we had dinner together every Sunday.

On the last Sunday we were all together, Mark and I needed to get out of the house and away from the emotions of that weekend, and so we made dinner and took it to our daughter’s house. My son-in-law was at one end of the table, Mark at the other. Our son told a hilarious story that had us all laughing, and I remember looking at Mark, seeing him smile and believing that he was going to be okay. I never thought that it would be the last time he would be with us for dinner.

When Mark’s funeral was over and we’d gotten back from a family wedding in Colorado, my daughter asked me about Sunday dinners. “It’s okay if you don’t want to do them any more, Mom,” she said, “we’d all understand.” “Dad loved them,” I said, “he loved having all of you here, he loved watching you together, and I love having you here. Our Sunday dinners will go on.” They started a few weeks later and they were painful for all of us in so many ways, but none more than Mark’s empty seat at the table.

In the early months of counseling, my therapist repeatedly told me that the grip of grief will loosen its hold on me. When and how she could not say, but she promised me it would happen, and there has never been a promise I have counted on more in my life than that one. I daily doubted her words, but lately it doesn’t feel like I’m wearing a straight jacket, it feels like I can breathe, that I am not daily flattened and exhausted by the what ifs.

Sunday dinners are on hiatus while we all are home bound, but will start again when life gets back to normal. On our best Sundays, our Mallie Bee will be with us from California, I will plan and grocery shop and try something new, and then pour myself a glass of wine before the kids and grandkids come through the door.

We’ll catch up on work and current events and tell each other funny stories. Mabel will be bribed into eating, Walter will throw most of his food on the floor, and the tender rhythm of life will go on as it always does.

On a Saturday afternoon last spring, my son came over to help me clean out the garage. It was something that desperately needed to be done and one of those chores where Mark and I were never on the same page. I always thought we should empty out the entire garage, sweep it, and organize it. Mark would hang a few things up, throw a few things away, then announce his signature line, “Good from far and far from good. Am I right, Kath, or what?” I’d get mad at him and say we hadn’t done anything, he said I was too anal retentive, and the garage remained a craptastic mess.

My son cleans and organizes like me, thorough and ruthless, so we were a good team for this project. It was so humid that day that sweat kept dripping off our foreheads and burning our eyes, but we kept at it, filled a garbage can, and then my car with things we could donate. When everything was cleaned out, and the floor swept of dead leaves and a whole lot of mouse droppings, Will said, “Here’s your problem, Mom, this is why you have mice,” and at the back of the garage where the floor and foundation met you could see a gap where daylight was coming in. Will went to the hardware store and got spray foam, filled in the crack, and we put what we were keeping back into the garage, gently hanging Mark’s bikes on the side walls.

In the last few months I have been thinking of replacing our bed and nightstands. I can’t keep walking into our room and see the place where we both ended our days without a stab to my heart, and one night last week before I went to bed I’d been looking again. I came up with a few options, put my computer away, fell asleep, and started dreaming. In the dream the new bed and nightstands had arrived, and I was vacuuming, cleaning the room, and putting the new bedding on. When it came time to put the lamps on the nightstands and finish everything up, I couldn’t find them. I looked in the other bedrooms and ran down to the basement but the lamps were nowhere to be found. I yelled to Mark asking him if he knew where the lamps were. “Maybe they’re in the closet, ” he yelled back, and I dug through every closet in every room and still couldn’t find them. “Mark,” I said, “it’s so dark in here. This isn’t going to work, there isn’t any light.” He didn’t answer and I was irritated and felt like I’d wasted a bunch of money.

But then Mark called me from the front door to come outside for a minute. Usually that meant there was a bird he wanted me to see, but instead he waved at me from the driveway to follow him, then lifted the garage door and walked towards the back. He crouched down and told me to do the same, and when I did he put his arm around my shoulder. In the space that Will had filled with foam was the tiniest crack of light coming through and Mark said, “Don’t you get it, Kath? It’s the foundation. You have to look at the foundation in order to see the light.” I gasped and smiled, and when I turned my head to look at him he was gone.

My dad died thirty years ago from a rare form of melanoma that started behind his retina. He had treatment at a hospital in Milwaukee where they removed his eye, planted radioactive isotopes to kill the cancer, put his eye back in, and then waited. The treatment reduced the size of the tumor but did not eliminate it, and eventually he had to have his eye removed and replaced with a glass one. After awhile him having a glass eye became less of a thing, and he’d have to remind you if you were talking to him to sit on his good side so he could see you.

Three years after that surgery, a tiny black dot appeared on his cheek which seemed like No Big Deal. He had it removed and I was with my sisters and our significant others sitting in the bleachers in Wrigley Field on the day he was supposed to find out how the biopsy went. “That spot is too small to mean anything,” we all said, confident that when we got home from the game that good news would be waiting for us. That small spot was big enough to indicate his cancer had returned and he would end up at the University of Chicago for more experimental treatment until the summer of 1990 when he said, “Enough.”

He would die in September, and my mom, who nursed him through all the chemo and all the scans, who changed the gauze on his face where there was a hole where an eye used to be, stood strong and unflinching through it all. But even after all these years if you were to ask her about those days when my dad was so sick, her face would change and she would quietly and remorsefully say, “I should have insisted he go to a better eye doctor from the very beginning. We wasted so much time with that guy who didn’t know anything.”

That is what death does, it takes sadness and turns it into regret, second guessing, and Monday morning quarterbacking. It makes you doubt every single thing you did, as if you were capable of outmaneuvering the Grim Reaper if you weren’t such a bloody idiot. Suicide takes that ball of regret, pumps it full of steroids, hands a boulder back to you and says, “Not so fast, sister, you’ll need to carry this now.” Carry it I have, and it is a rare day when I haven’t gone over that last, long weekend with Mark, the same thoughts swirling in my head like a grief tornado. Why didn’t I stay up all night with him? Why didn’t I wake up before my alarm? Why did I go to work when I was worried about where he was? Why didn’t I call the friend he was going to see that afternoon to say he needs you now?

My therapist reminds me often that this is about control, that I think I could have changed the outcome when it was Mark’s intent that day for me not to hear him leave, for me not to find him. Anyone who knew him, even casually, cannot fathom him ending his life. A zest and curiosity for life exploded out of him, and it ending the way it did stuns me every day. So much so that I still question if all of this really happened or that I am unable to awaken from a horrific dream.

Even when I have taken the blunt force of Mark’s actions, my therapist points out that I only speak of him with love and compassion. And that is true, I do speak of him that way to every one, every time. Mark saved me from a life of mediocrity, he made me question everything, he taught me that the status quo was bullshit, that accumulating wealth was greed and not a legacy, that we had enough all along, that travel was the best education in the world, that life is God and you can see it everywhere if only you paid attention.

Mark kept notes on everything. When I cleaned out his office I found notebook after notebook after notebook. He wrote in the margins of papers, he wrote on business cards, he wrote on resumes, he wrote on scraps of papers, and so it wouldn’t be like him to end his life and not leave a note. It is that note that has broken me in so many ways. There is such defeat and resignation in those words, and I cannot imagine what it was like for him to write them. Many of his thoughts circle back to me, one paragraph ending, “My wife understood my pain.”

There was a moment when we were walking that weekend when I realized that the boy in him had never understood his life. It was so crystal clear to me I can tell you exactly where we were in the park when it happened, and the enormity of that moment still takes my breath away. When the weight of my sadness feels like it is pulling me into the darkest of holes, I always wonder what it must have been like for Mark. To have nobody tell that little boy that he wasn’t imagining anything, that all along what he knew in his gut was the truth, that only he could save himself by talking about all of it and letting light burn its power, that he was worthy of love and forgiveness, that being my husband and the father to Maggie, Will, and Mallory was a gift none of us ever wanted to lose.

Through time and practice I am learning to speak compassionately to myself about Mark’s last days, but the season of grace will take time to bloom. This life of mine turned out so differently than I thought, but in this place, this place where so many days feel pointless, sad, and unending, I am indebted to my husband for what he knew throughout our marriage and made sure I knew on the last day of his life.

That the gift of being human, compassionately and genuinely, is to see the pain of someone else and not run from it.

When our oldest daughter, Maggie, got married, she asked us if we could host a gathering at our house for anyone who needed a place to hang out between the wedding and the reception. Mark and I were happy to oblige. We stocked up on beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers, and then hired one of the Mallory’s friends to stay at the house and set everything up while we were at the church. Most of our family and friends, along with our new son-in-law’s parents and out-of-town family came, and it was a lovely and relaxed time for our two families to get to know each other.

When the time came for us to head to the reception, Mark and I stayed behind to put the food away and lock up the house. When we got into the car Mark looked at me and said, “I think this is the happiest day of my life.” I smiled and said, “Me too, Mark.” We loved this new son-in-law of ours and this long-awaited day when everyone got to be in the circle of their infectious joy.

There were many happy occasions over the years. The birth of our three beautiful kids, their graduations from high school and college, Easter brunches and packed Christmas parties in our small house, social events and promotions at the med center, quiet dinners with close friends.

I remember all of those things vividly and with crushing fondness, but it is the ordinary days with Mark that I miss the most. The morning routines we both had, him often walking alongside the car while I was backing down the driveway to tell me something he forgot or to kiss me goodbye, the slow weekend days when we drank coffee and figured out our plans, the cold Saturday nights when we stayed in – him watching videos on Youtube, me scrolling the internet. There were our family Sunday dinners when the kids would all be here and he and I would cook together. Mark going to the grocery store beforehand, me folding the laundry. Our regular negotiations over what restaurant to go to to have a bite to eat, usually landing at our standby pizza or Thai restaurant. The walks in the neighborhood after dinner or up to the hardware store. Mark mowing the lawn, me vacuuming. The trips to the garden center where he would load the cart with vegetables to plant and me with flowers. Me saying, “I think we’re spending too much money,” and him saying, “I thought the point was to spend a bunch of money.”

For several summers there was a heron family in our neighborhood. It was at the other end of the block and if you happened to be by there the neighbors would point them out high in the trees. I could barely make the nest out and wasn’t entirely sure what I was seeing, but one day when I was walking home from the park there was one of the infamous herons standing on a car like a giant hood ornament. It was a stunning sight and neither the heron or I dared to move for several minutes. Last summer when I hadn’t heard any news of their return, I asked my neighbor if they were still around. “They came back,” she said, “and then it was awful. A hawk had been circling and had its sights on the nest and eventually dove in for the babies. The heron was screeching, the sound of it was terrible. It went on for the longest time and then she was gone and never came back.”

Like that heron, my nest was left barren of the husband I was not prepared to lose. Before Mark died I tended to think of babies and the elderly as being fragile, but then my husband didn’t make it through a Tuesday and my thinking changed. Alone for the first time in my life, I move forward in fits and starts without a partner or a clue. I am terrified on a daily basis and there have been many times when I wished a hawk would set its sights on me. Instead a life of one is taking shape and I am confident of nothing these days but that I hate every part of it.

But with a glance in the rearview mirror are the decades of coffee, conversations, dinners at home and out, the joy, the worry, the laughter, the tears, and the litany of mundane chores, and oh how I wish I’d known that it was those ordinary days that were the holy communion of my life.