Month: April 2020

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
-John Muir

Four years before Mark died he had stopped drinking. Over the years he had been drinking too much and it slowly started having an effect on all of us, and what an eye-opener to think you know the signs of alcohol abuse versus the reality of it in your home. Mark was never a daily drinker, he did not get drunk at parties or work events, he did not hide liquor, nor did he become abusive or a jerk when he drank too much. On the weekends, what started as relaxing with a beer became another and then another, followed by a couple of glasses of wine with dinner, and it took a long time for either of us to realize that he was a binge drinker.

Why Mark stopped drinking has always been his story to tell, but once he did everyone wanted an explanation from me. They wanted to know if he was okay, why he stopped drinking, was he an alcoholic, was he in treatment. It was such an odd thing to me that if this same guy had said he was getting up before dawn every day to go to the gym he would have been applauded, but stopping drinking in our alcohol obsessed society? People felt entitled to know about that decision. I got asked over and over and after awhile, I started saying, “He’s right there, you should probably ask him yourself,” because it felt disloyal for me to answer questions about something that was personal to him.

But it was a scary time for us. We didn’t know how any of this new lifestyle was going to go, Mark was afraid and I was afraid for him. He started seeing a counselor and went to a few AA meetings that he found terrifying and he never drank again. The most painful question to me after his death was, “So did he start drinking again? Is that why he killed himself?” He did not, and of all the things he accomplished in his life, not drinking had the most profound effect on everything. The work he had done for decades was taking off and he was in the best physical shape of his life. Once he stopped medicating himself with alcohol, the twinkle came back in his eye, and nothing he did made me prouder because I saw what hard work it is to choose not to drink.

Right after he decided to stop drinking we went to Montana for a meeting he had been scheduled to attend for an infectious disease conference. We packed the car and headed out west, full of uncertainty about the future. No glass of wine with dinner, no happy hour beer with colleagues, a remaking of habits into uncharted waters.

Many times over that trip Mark seemed fragile and I was so worried about him. He seemed jumpy, nervous, and lacking confidence which are words that I would have never used to describe him before. For three days on the road we talked about everything, and every day I told him that since we were in Montana I wanted to go to Glacier National Park. For a guy who loved nature, he wasn’t very agreeable to the idea. I think he wanted to go to this meeting, get it over with, and try to change his life within the four walls of our home. But I was in love with Montana and wanted to see more of it so I convinced him that after his conference was over that driving four hours north was a good idea.

We first drove to Missoula where we ate breakfast at a hipster restaurant based on the advice of a passerby. We wandered the town, bought some books at the local bookstore, and decided that maybe we should move to Missoula one day. From there we drove north through the Bitterroot Valley, stopped at Flatfish Lake where Mark announced that on the next trip back we’d stay there, bought ten pounds of Rainier cherries for a steal from a farmer on the side of the road, and found a very overpriced motel room for the night.

The next day we ate breakfast in Whitefish and then drove to Glacier. From the moment we entered, it was like the pressure of our current situation immediately deflated. We both were relaxed and excited and couldn’t believe our eyes. We stopped so many times to jump out of the car and wander off the road to a creek, a lake bed, a stunning view. One time we were so wowed by what was in front of us that when we were walking back to the car Mark told me to look up and behind us was even more spectacular. We compared photos on our phone and I said that when we got back home I wanted to plant ferns in my garden because the forest floor was carpeted in them. We made our way up Logan Pass to the Going To The Sun Road, which for a girl who is terrified of heights was no easy thing. There was snow on one side of the road and the daintiest flowers on the other and I couldn’t believe anything could grow that high up. We stood on the gravel alongside the road and stared for the longest time, and it was in that moment that I knew Mark was going to be okay. What had started as a tourist stop for us was, by far, the most healing thing we could have done.

We talked often about that trip, how shaky it started and how it put a bandaid on so much that was hurting in both of us, how one day we’d go back and stay for a week. Sometimes I wish that the weekend before Mark died, we would have gotten in the car and drove until we found a spot to land, a spot that would put a bigger bandaid on everything that hurt in him.

A friend asked me recently how I am faring in this quarantine life and the answer is not good. I started off with projects around the house and have accomplished many of them but am losing my mojo. I want my husband back, I want my old life back, I want the guy who could make me laugh until I cried back, I want the guy who introduced me to the woods, the creeks, and the rivers back, the guy who could make me stuff down my fear of heights for a view I will never forget. I want to have had this time with Mark to sleep in, to make dinner together, to walk to the grocery store, to watch movies, to pick his brain about this virus, to flirt all morning, have sex in the middle of the day, and a lazy nap afterwards because a monotonous stay-at-home order calls for all of that.

I can’t have any of those things and so every day I think about wandering off into the woods where I could scream and the canopy of trees would say, “You keep screaming. Look how tall and sturdy we are, we can withstand your pain.” I think about finding a creek and watching the tadpoles dart around while the hawks overhead circle in hopes of finding their next meal. I think about my boots getting caked with mud and sweat trickling down my back. I think about wandering a path that spills into a clearing where the pain and the trauma and the loss gets disbursed by the wind. I think about nature cleansing me like it did before so that I am brave enough to move forward in my life.

Anything less would diminish all that came before it, and I already know that would be a loss I could not carry.

Usually when I write something, I plan it out in my head for days or weeks or however long it takes me to figure out what I want to say. There are times when I am surprised by how a thought takes on a life of its own once I start writing and goes in a completely different direction than I had planned. But for this one, the story of Mark and his sister and their relationship, there has not been a single clear path to writing it no matter how many times I roll it around in my head.

I thought about writing of their connection to each other through ice skating, Mark as a hockey player, Vicki as a figure skater. How Mark started in figure skating (which was always a hilarious visual to me), and how he could do jumps and turns because his sister taught him. How he played hockey in high school and then at Purdue University where he was Rookie of the Year in his freshman year. How when we were dating we would go ice skating and he’d bolt around the rink a dozen times, and once he got that out of his system he’d come behind me wobbling on his skates, grabbing me by the waist and pretending that we were both going down. How he was as at home on hockey skates as he was on a bike. How Vicki made a career of figure skating, in private lessons and as the first person in the country to bring synchronized skating to the collegiate level at Miami of Ohio University. How the team won fifteen national titles, qualified for international competition eight times, and how she was twice named Synchronized Skating Coach of the Year. How both her and Mark in different ways changed the lives of thousands of college students in the course of their careers. How the year we went to Ohio for Thanksgiving, Vicki and her husband opened the rink so we could all skate and she gave Will lessons by having him push a paint bucket around on the ice.

I thought of writing about them being in the foxhole of childhood together with their stories of laughter, ice rinks, summers in Michigan, and much that did not see the light of day. How my presence in Mark’s life steadied those waters but the ones needed to steady Vicki were not good choices. That up until Mark’s end he flourished while his sister spent the last few years floundering.

How Vicki came to see us two summers ago, and when I picked her up from the airport I almost didn’t recognize her. How she seemed so frail that I called Mark at work and told him ahead of time to prepare him to see his very athletic sister in declining health. How when we went to bed that night I said, “We might need to think about the possibility of Vicki coming to live with us at some point.” How when he said, “I was thinking the same thing,” you could feel the weight of his sadness in the dark. That the following morning, Mark sat at the dining room table and dove into work because that was his fall back when he couldn’t face hard things, and that night I said to him, “Please don’t do this, Vicki needs you,” so the next morning he took her on a tour of his lab and out to breakfast and told me when they came back that they had a good talk.

That her coming to live with us never happened because a few months later I had to call her and tell her that Mark had died and she kept saying, “no, no, no,” and I had to repeat it three times because she could not grasp what she was hearing. How for the entirety of Mark’s funeral and reception afterwards she never stopped shaking. That she never recovered from his death.

How Mark was so gentle with her, how even though he was only two years older than her he always called her “kiddo”, how he felt it was his duty to protect her even when he was hundreds of miles away. That his inability to do so would eat away at him more than he ever let anyone know, including me. How Vicki’s self esteem was so damaged that she built a wall that only allowed Mark and a few others in.

Ten days ago, Vicki died quietly in her apartment from a heart that gave out. It felt like I was reliving Mark’s death all over again, and talking to my niece, my mother-in-law, and my kids felt like we had been collectively dropped into another bad dream. Once again it was too much, too sad, too confusing. Vicki’s difficult life ended in a whisper, without sirens, interference, or another trip to the hospital, and while there is some peace in that it does not diminish the loss.

Years ago I put an old, small photo on the bathroom shelf of Mark and Vicki when their family had taken one of their annual summer trips to Michigan. Over and over I’d see the photo face down and I’d stand it back up. Sometimes the frame would get cracks in it and I would glue it back together. I couldn’t understand how it kept getting knocked over until I had a conversation with Mark one day. That afternoon I replaced the photo with one of just him and Vicki and when he came out of the bathroom he said, “I know why you did that. Thank you.”

On the day Vicki died, I took the photo off the shelf and looked at it closely. After all those years of it being there, it was the first time I noticed how tightly their little hands were holding onto each other. I knew what it was like for Mark’s hand to grab yours. He reached for mine thousands of times in the years we were together, and most nights before we fell asleep. It made me feel confident of my place in his life and the world, it made me believe I deserved nothing less, and it is the reason that I know I will be okay.

Maybe the only thing that needs to be written is that when I heard the news of Vicki’s death, I prayed that Mark’s hand was there to grab hers and protect her on her final journey out of this world. That the comfort they always found in each other was ever present, and that she was showered in love when her brother introduced her to the other side.

For many years, my Grandma Dora lived with my parents for half the year. She’d spend spring and summer months with us and head back to Arizona where she lived with my aunt during the winter. My room was next to where my grandma slept, and every night she would sit in her chair saying the rosary before she went to bed. After she was done praying, she would pour herself a glass of whiskey. “It helps me sleep,” she would say without explanation or apology. If you passed by during Whiskey Time she would offer you a glass and tell you to stay and visit a few minutes. “Tell me about your day,” she would say, taking my hand in hers and patting it gently the whole time I talked. I’d tell her about my job and my cute boyfriend, where in the city I went for lunch, how the trains were packed coming home. Like most grandmas, there was no part of it she found uninteresting. She’d never stop holding my hand while I was talking, her soft, old hands with knuckles that seemed larger than they should be for such a small person, and the thinnest layer of skin covering them. Hands that had seen a lot of hard work and hard loss over the years.

My grandma died when she was 97. Up until the end she read the paper every day, had her rosary beads and whiskey beside her every night, and despite a spine that had been crumbling for years from wear and bad bones, rarely complained. While she was at my mom and dad’s house she got a chest cold that turned into pneumonia. I was married then and living two hours away, and when I got the call that she was in the hospital I did not believe that she would die. She had spent a lifetime outrunning so much, but then her clock ran out and we stood around the funeral home and told each other we were grateful for her long life. We were but when we went back to our regular lives we couldn’t figure out how it was possible for the world to keep rotating without her in it.

My mom is now 92. She broke her pelvis a couple of years ago when she fell taking care of a neighbor’s dog, and since then her life has been a challenge that seems unfair for someone, who like her mother, had already seen her share of heartache. She was fatherless at the age of four when her dad dropped dead of a heart attack, she was raised with boarders in the house because it was the only thing my grandma knew to do to keep food on the table for her girls, she buried three children, two of whom were full-term and stillborn, and became a widow when my dad died of a rare cancer when she was 62. For her to lose her fiercely fought independence to move into assisted living months after that fall was a blow that none of her kids wanted, but it was no longer safe for her to live on her own.

My siblings have carried the weight of my mom’s care. I am too far away for daily input and my own hands are full with the weight of Mark’s death. At one point, I asked to be taken off our family group text because I couldn’t handle hearing about her not having a good week, her confusion about what day it was, her frustration of searching for a word that she could not find. You could have easily substituted her name with mine and it would describe me in the months after Mark died.

Last winter and this one, my mom went to Florida for a few months to spend time with two of my siblings who both have second homes there. I went down there for a few days last year, five months after Mark died. I felt broken and pressured to act like I was functioning well in regular life. I smiled, tried to follow conversations, picked up seashells along the beach, sat by the pool, had a martini. I know this because there are photos and yet I don’t know any of it.

My mom has never been one to talk about her losses, to tell you how it felt to have so many hard things happen to her. When I was pregnant the first time, I asked her about her stillborn deliveries. I wanted to know if she felt something or had any warning beforehand. In the one and only time she ever spoke of it to me, she said, “Nobody knew why those babies went full-term and came out dead. Nobody. They wanted to do an autopsy but I worked at the hospital. I’d seen autopsies and I wouldn’t let anybody touch those beautiful baby girls. To me they were perfect and that’s how I wanted them to stay.” I was overcome with sadness for her and the things her generation of women had to stuff down, the unbearable losses that they were never allowed to talk about.

This year was better when I went to Florida. I had many moments of wanting to hide in a closet and cry, but had warily grown accustomed to my role as the leading character in a foreign film that happened to be my real life. One afternoon my mom came into my room and watched me sort clothes to do some laundry before flying home the next day. We talked about nothing important and then she asked, “How are you doing?” It wasn’t a regular how are you doing but how are you doing with your life, the one I can see you struggling with because I am your mother and have known you since before you were born.

“Mom,” I said as I climbed onto the bed, “I’m so tired.”

“I know, Kath, I know,” she said, and the worn hands of her life and loss, the same ones my grandma had, patted my back, said nothing more and everything at once.

Mark’s fortune and burden in life was being married to a creative person. He usually liked the end product but the road to my getting through one of my benders was steep and scattered with the remains of paint, masking tape, dirt, fabric, stain, glue sticks, thread, and a lot of wacky ideas. I knew that the strain of my creativity often drove him bat shit crazy. I knew this because it drove me bat shit crazy.

I’ve changed the paint color of every room in this house so many times I’ve lost count. When I recently looked at an old photo of me and Mark and the background was a dark yellow I had two thoughts – what a great picture and that was not one of my best color choices. I painstakingly painted a white picket fence on the walls of my daughter’s bedroom. I measured, penciled it in, edged it out with a tiny paintbrush, painted each picket, and repeated the process around the entire room. Two years later I thought it looked amateur and painted over it. I once decided that our small kitchen was suddenly going to be an eat-in kitchen and dragged in a table. As five of us were crammed around it, Mark started eating off everyone’s plate. We all looked at him like he was crazy and I asked him what he was doing. “Oh my bad,” he said, “with this Dreamhouse Barbie table you’re forcing us to sit at I couldn’t tell which plate was mine.” I had him and Will dig wine bottles (“Not the big ones, you guys!!”) out of the glass recyling bin at the shopping center so I could turn them upside down and bury them halfway to create a border around a brick patio. I have dyed clothes that weren’t the right color (and then really weren’t the right color) and spray painted everything. Whenever I was down in the basement, spraying away without a mask or a window open, Mark would yell at me that I was killing a couple million brain cells.

I swapped out the pillows on the couch depending on the season or boredom and would get mad when Mark didn’t even notice. I rearranged the furniture all the time and then would say to him, “Don’t you think this works so much better?” He didn’t because HE DID NOT CARE. One time I rearranged the furniture while he was out of town. I heard him come in late at night, run into something, and say, “Son of a bitch.” I pretended I was sleeping when he came to bed and faked like I just woke up when he crawled in next to me. “I’m so glad you’re home,” I sleepily said. He said, “If you could leave a light on for me the next time you move the couch in a different place that would be really helpful,” and showed me the bruise on his leg the next day.

What drove Mark crazier than anything was me bringing home old shit from the side of the road, an estate sale, or Craigslist. It almost always involved him in some way as I may have a good eye but not the upper body strength to deliver the goods. I’d always start the conversation the same way. “So I found this really cool thing that I think would work great in here……..” Mark would ask what we needed it for which was his way of putting the brakes on my creative mojo. I was never deterred.

A few years ago I told Mark that the couch in the living room needed to go. It was too big and SO TUSCAN LOOKING. He didn’t even know what SO TUSCAN LOOKING meant so those sorts of conversations had to take place over the span of months. I had to introduce the idea, bring it up casually but not too much, I had to sigh a lot when I had to push the couch to vacuum underneath it (which I only did when he was around) and then complain that it was bad for my bum shoulder. I had to wear him down but not let him know I was wearing him down.

My plan was to slipcover whatever couch we got so it did not need to be new. The slipcovers were going to cost a bunch of money which was Phase B of the plan that I hadn’t introduced Mark to yet. I’d search every day on Craigslist and show him when I’d come across a possibility. He’d nod, go back to his computer, and then I’d say, “But I don’t know, it might be too whimpy looking.” Since he didn’t know what the point of any of this was, he’d say, “Whatever you think,” which was the equivalent of telling The Elves in Charge of My Overthinking to start pulling the fire alarm every ten minutes.

Finally I found something I liked that was the right size and I arranged to look at it on a Saturday morning. I told Mark the plan and he said he had a rewrite on a paper that had to be sent off on Monday morning so the weekend would not work. “Maybe next weekend,” he said. I said, “Do you not understand how Craigslist works? You don’t tell people next weekend because a hundred other people are wanting to buy the same thing. This isn’t a furniture purchase, Mark, this is a contest and we are going to win.” Then I swore that I only needed one hour of his time and so he agreed.

We drove out to the house and the couch was practically new so I said, “Done deal, now let’s get this in the back of our car and take it home.” Mr. Craig looked out the window, Mark looked out the window, even Mrs. Craig looked out the window. They all agreed that the couch wouldn’t fit in our compact SUV and there I stood, stranded on the Island of No Bueno. Mark asked if the legs came off. The conclusion was that they likely didn’t and he said we should pass on the couch because of that. I said, “Nope, I’ve been looking for a couch for months. This one fits, I’ve measured, and we need to buy it.” Then I came up with the idea to go to Home Depot (“Mark, it’s not even out of our way!!”), rent one of their trucks for ONE HOUR, and then he could go to work. This was not at all what Mark wanted to hear but he said he’d give up another hour and so we drove there. “I’ll handle it,” I said and went to the desk to rent the truck where they asked me for my insurance information. I tore my purse apart looking for it, ran out to the car looking for it, and tried to find my policy number online with no luck. By this point Mark really needed to get going so I called Mr. & Mrs. Craig to say that we would pick up the couch the next day.

That Sunday morning we went to Home Depot to get the truck and pick up the couch. On the way home, Mark said, “I hope we can figure out how to get the legs off this couch,” and I thought oh dear god here he goes again with the damn legs on this couch but kept my mouth shut because I had been teetering on the edge with the mister all weekend. We got the couch off the truck, me going backwards through the front door and then the oddest thing happened.

It did not fit.

That’s when Mark’s rage meter hit Defcon 5 which caused me to babble like a moron. “I swear I measured, Mark. Wait, let me show you the measurements. I wrote them down. They’re in my purse. It’s in the car. Why don’t you get my purse out of the car and there’s a little piece of paper in there folded in the part where I keep my lipstick. Not the front zipper part where I keep my floss and ibuprofen but the back zipper part. You’ll see, it’s right there,” and I was nodding and smiling and sweating and he just kept looking at me. Finally he said, “This is why I asked about the legs coming off. Because if the legs came off we could unscrew them and this wouldn’t have been any problem. And I looked at him and said, “Oh, I get it now. You should have said that from the beginning. I probably would have understood it better.”

He did not look at me. He told me to MOVE. He told me he was going to shove it and make it through the doorway. I said let me help you shove it and he said that if I said one more word that Craigslist couch was going to be shoved so far up my … and I scooted out of the way and Mark pushed and shoved and got it through. I jumped up and down and said I loved him and I was sorry and I’d never put him through that again and neither one of us believed it. Before he left to go to work, I looked him in the eye said, “I want you to know that I really appreciate you and everything you did this weekend to get this couch home and it’s going to look fantastic when it’s done. So whatever fantasy you have, whatever, I’m game. You think about that while you’re doing your little sciency work and get back to me tonight.”

That night he said to me that he actually had a fantasy that he’d been thinking of for a long time. I told him to be explicit so I could get a visual. “Okay,” he said, “close your eyes. It’s a Saturday, we’re both wearing jeans, you’re wearing that black leather jacket I like, we go out to lunch and we’re flirting the whole time because something great is about to happen. We even get dessert. We share it and everyone around us can feel the sexual tension, the server, even people at other tables. We leave the restaurant, I rest my hand on the back of your neck and can feel the heat coming off of you, we walk down the street. I guide you to a store, and hold the door open for you to walk through. It smells good in there and you look at me and say, oh Mark, I’ve always liked this store. How did you know?”

My eyes popped open. “Oh my god, Mark, are we having sex in the store?” I ask him. “In the middle of the day? In a store? I don’t think it’s legal to do that.”

“Wait,” he said. “Close your eyes, I haven’t gotten to the best part.”

“We go in there, a salesperson asks if we need help. I say we do and we buy a couch. We buy a couch and pay a delivery fee. A few weeks later they come in our house carrying the couch. They put it where we tell them. They leave. We sit on the couch.”

“Oh geez, Mark,” I said, “that’s not a fantasy. That’s what normal people do.”

“Yes, yes it is,” Mark said. “That’s my fantasy, to go out and buy something like normal people do.”

A month before Mark died we did exactly that. Went out to lunch, shared dessert, walked down the street, and went into a store and bought a sectional. It came in dozens of color choices and I looked at every single one. Mark had biked in the summer heat that morning so between that and pretending to gave a fat rat’s ass about fabric choices (plus all that pulsing sexual tension), he fell asleep on the floor model.

I thought about asking him on the way home if he ever imagined his life with someone else, someone normal and not creative but I knew the answer.

He would have hated it.