Nearly every day since Mark died, I have lived with a sense of outrage. How is it possible that he is not here? How did this happen? How is it that the world keeps turning without him? Add to that a global pandemic and it’s like a match to tinder. When friends say that TJ Maxx reopened and the shelves and racks were emptied by the time they got there, that Clorox Wipes are only available on the black market, that half the people at Target weren’t wearing a mask, I raise my hand and say, “Oh, I know. It’s all ridiculous and can you believe that Mark Fisher is still dead? If you want to talk about outrage have a seat and let’s light it up.”
Last week Outrage knocked on the door and said, “Listen, sis, we don’t think your world has been upended enough so buckle up.” On Tuesday, I got a text from my boss about a Zoom meeting with him at 9:00 where he delivered the news that after five years at the university my position was being eliminated due to budget cuts. “I know you don’t like bullshit,” he said, “so I’m going to give it to you straight.” I have been expecting this for months and was not surprised, and yet I was shocked. After this emotional (on both sides of the screen) meeting ended, I wanted to reschedule another one so I could say, “Just for the record, that’s true about me liking to be told the straight up truth but this time I could have used a couple of shakes from the unicorn rainbow sprinkle jar. Meeting adjourned. All in favor close your laptop and drop kick it out the window.”
The next day was the thesis defense of Mark’s graduate student which I was invited to watch online, and oh my, she took that Anthrax Pore Transformation, lobbed it in the air, and knocked it out of the park. She was poised and confidant and in command of her work, and Mark would have been so proud. Throughout his career most of his students left with a masters degree and she was only the second to graduate with a PhD. It would not be an exaggeration to say that he would have been like a kid on Christmas Eve, unable to sleep the night before out of pure excitement for the next day. It was an honor to witness and one of the hardest days of my life. She paid tribute to Mark at the end, saying he was a feminist, an ally, and a professor who always kept the best interest of his students at the forefront of his days. It was genuine, professional, and a heartbreak.
On Friday I had to go to the med center to meet with the landscaping team for options on a memorial bench in Mark’s honor. The new garden, pond, and outdoor meeting area will be outside his building and I stood there looking at the window of what used to be his office and wondered how it was possible that it would remain unoccupied by him for close to two years, and I was the one there picking out a bench with his name on it.
Saturday I traded our car in. By Sunday, which not only was Father’s Day but Mark’s birthday, I was done by noon. It had been a solid week of emotional avalanches and I had no energy left to pretend I was okay. I was not.
A few close friends knew the kind of week I’d had and kept checking in with me. Those regular check-ins keep me tethered to here when I often yearn to be in a place less painful. A long-time, dear friend texted me Monday morning and said she was thinking of me and praying for me. I texted back that if I could have a warm body next to me at night so I that I could at least sleep (or whatever), maybe I could handle things better. She suggested that I buy a blow up doll. I said with my luck it would come deflated. She said only when I was done with it.
Thank God above that I have the most outrageous friends.
After Mark died, people looked at me all the time and said, “You are so strong,” or “I don’t know how you find the strength.” I always flinched whenever it was said. I think it was meant as a compliment but it didn’t feel like a compliment. It felt like an observation of what the outside of me looked like which bore no resemblance to the inside. The inside had to talk herself out of bed every morning, she crashed into everything, she cared about nothing, and she daily wished she was dead. But the outside had to suddenly manage health care choices, fill out paperwork for life insurance, make decisions about investments, and had to accomplish these things under crushing grief.
A few months after Mark died, I went to the bank to notify them of Mark’s death. As was the norm then, I always carried his death certificate with me. I sat with a bank rep who was so gentle and kind when I told him, he noted it on our account, told me I could keep using the checks I had for as long as I wanted, and when they ran out I could replace them with just my name. I was stunned. I was supposed to order new checks without Mark T. Fisher at the top? His name gets erased from the decades of our hard work and savings?
I had to get out of there but I had a check for $1400 made out to both of us that I needed to deposit. “Well that’s going to be a problem,” the bank rep said, “because we can’t do that without his signature.” I stared at him for the longest time and finally said, “I’m not trying to cash it, I’m not asking you to give me $1400, I’m asking you to put all of this in our account. I’m asking you to take care of this when you can see there is more than enough money to cover this.” After an awkward pause he got on the phone with the higher ups and when he hung up he said,” I’m sorry. You’ll have to send this back and ask them to issue it in your name only. It shouldn’t be a problem but they’ll need his death certificate in order to reissue it.”
I tried to plead my case and when I opened my mouth the only thing that came out was, “I can’t,” and I could not move. I couldn’t stand up, I couldn’t argue with him, I couldn’t get out of the chair. I think I could have kept sitting there after they turned the lights off, locked the doors, and all left for the night. After a very long time he picked the check up from the desk and said, “Let me see what I can do.” A few minutes later he came back with my deposit slip and handed it to me.
Mark used to cycle in a lot of charity rides. He was years ahead of the cycling trend and one of the earliest ones he did was the Tour De BBQ, where the ride went all over town to the local barbecue restaurants. At each stop you could rest, have some water, and sample the bbq before moving on to the next one. Each of these rides required a fee and came with a jersey. When the Tour De BBQ got more popular, and every weekend jock started participating, Mark quit signing up for it. He hated that it had become bumper-to-bumper with amateurs but he saved the jerseys and rotated them with the other ones he wore for his daily ride to work. Because they are as familiar to me as he was, I like to open the drawer and look at them. Often I think, “They’re all still shoved in your dresser drawers, Mark. Come back and put one on and shake me awake from this bad dream.”
Our son had one of his dad’s jerseys at his apartment and decided to bring it back home. It was from the Tour De BBQ and it sat on the couch for several days. I kept looking at it and there was something off about it that I couldn’t figure out. Finally I saw it – on the side where it was supposed to say “Unity Is Strength, it instead said, “Unity Is Stregth,” which I found hilariously funny. I wished Mark were here so I could have pointed it out to him and said, “Can you believe nobody proofread the dang jersey before you guys put it on and rode all over town?”
That is how the inside of strength goes, the unceasing awareness that somebody needs to call the manager and explain that the “n” is missing. That somebody in charge should know that the absence of a single letter makes everything feel precarious, wrong, and on the verge of collapse. But then you realize that even though it’s as plain as day nobody else can see it but you, and over and over it keeps making you stuck and unable to move until you figure out that the only way through is to rest, hydrate, and push on to the next stop.
Some things to note regarding this story: 1) I embrace all things female, and am, therefore, a gatherer in life and not a hunter. Mark once told me that as a pioneer I’d make it a day in the wild before the wagon train threw me over the side and never looked back. 2) Cats are absolutely worthless in a crisis. 3) All previous things I have ever written about wanting to be in nature are bullshit.
In the early days of spring, before a single thing had even bloomed, stink bugs started showing up on the windows in the living room. This had never happened prior to last year. I blame global warming even though I have no proof or even looked it up to see if this was true. All I know is that Mark and I bought this house 28 years ago and beetles hanging out on the windows for months never used to be a problem and now they are. At first there would be a few here and there. They are the “C” Team of bugs, slow and dumb and easy to kill which you are not supposed to do because once squished, they stink (hence the name). In the beginning, I would scoop them up and let them outside where they would fly away, only to land on the outside of the window and try to get back in. On nice days when I had the windows open, they’d whistle for the relatives and there would be a reunion in my living room. I’d get distracted trying to work from home or talking on the phone and have to stop what I was doing to take care of them. After weeks of hanging out in the living room they got bored and decided to move upstairs to the bedroom. Since they have hard backs, I’d hear them land on the blinds, or even worse, get under the lamp shade and bounce back and forth inside it. Twice one of them landed on my arm while I was reading, and after that happened whenever I saw one I’d grab a Kleenex and wrap it around the lumbering doofuses and drop them in the toilet. One of them had the audacity to fly right back out and when I found it I smashed it with a poetry book so the end was quick but probably peacefulish.
While they were making a home on the inside, the cats were dropping dead mice on the back porch like they it was their only job in life. Every day there’d be one or two on the porch, and one morning when there was five of them, I called somebody to rescreen the porch. He used a heavier duty screen that the cats couldn’t tear and it cost plenty, but between the warmer temps taking care of the stink bugs and a refurbished screened-in porch, I finally felt like I was free from beetle and rodent removal.
And then the universe said, “Hold my beer.”
Before dawn on a Monday morning I woke up to the sound of something scratching the carpet in the bedroom. I turned the light on and saw nothing. Five minutes later I heard it again, and that time when I turned the light on there was a POSSUM IN THE BEDROOM standing by the door. I screamed. The possum turned to look directly at me like “Whoa, it’s cool,” and crawled underneath the dresser. On shaaaaaaky legs I stood on the bed, reached over, slowly opened the door, and then made a beeline for the office beside the bedroom, slamming the door behind me. I bent over, hands on knees, my heart pounding right out of my chest and told myself to thinkthinkthink.
And the only thing that my brain could think to tell me was, “Kath, you’ve got a MFing possum in your MFing house,” which, duh, I already knew so I laid on the floor in a fetal position and waited for stress to finish me off. And I waited and waited and waited while my heart thumped thumped thumped and nothing happened so I got dressed for a Possum Hunt.
I’m kidding. I wasn’t going to hunt for a possum. I was going to go to the Shell station down the street to fill the gas can to the brim, come home, splash it all over the house, and then throw a match over my shoulder as I walked away for good. First, though, I had to get out of there so I slowly opened the office door, tip-toed out of Dodge and bolted down the stairs. All morning things (especially possums and arson) should start with coffee and while that was brewing I wondered who I could text to rescue me. I could text nobody because my phone was upstairs with You-Know-Who. So I posted a plea on Facebook for any early risers, an SOS call from my Hindenburg and googled how to get rid of a possum.
It is highly unusual for a possum to ever enter a home. And yet…..
At 6:30 my neighbor walked down the street, the first of the Possum Posse to arrive. She sat on the porch with me while we both drank coffee and then volunteered to look for the possum. A few minutes later she came down with my phone in hand, said she saw no sign of the possum but that she didn’t look real hard, and called her husband to bring a trap. In the meantime, my daughter came over with their terrier who had been hunting possums under their deck for weeks. Between the dog and the two worthless cats who were in for the day, we had three animals against one, and none of them showed much interest in finding the squatter.
While my neighbor’s husband went to get the trap, we all started talking and I was gently asked if maybe I dreamed there was a possum in the house because really, who has a possum come into their bedroom? I said, “I don’t think so,” but immediately thought maybe I did, maybe I’d caused all of this commotion over a dream, maybe I am taking a swan dive off the deep end, that people who knew me would run into each other in the grocery store next to the beets and say, “She seemed like she was doing better after her husband died and then I heard that she started seeing possums. Yes, I know, possums, and now they say she just lays in her bed all day long staring at the door.”
My neighbor’s husband arrived with a small trap, and between them and my daughter they all went possum hunting upstairs. Maggie, my oldest child, the one you have to scrape off the ceiling when there is a spider, went looking in the closets and under the bed for the possum, and it’s a little late in the game to find out she must belong to somebody else. There was no sign of Mr. P. and the captains of the Possum Posse decided the situation called for more traps and left to go to Lowe’s. Before leaving my neighbor said, “Everything is fine. Wherever he is now he’s asleep and won’t bother you.” They seemed to have mistaken me for a big girl who could hang out in my house with a possum like IT WAS NO BIG DEAL. If it weren’t for the smidgen of pride I barely had left I would have clung to their pant legs and begged them to stay.
Back they came with two more traps, baited with cat food and the fervent, sweaty prayers of me who suddenly needed confirmation that there really was a possum on the premises. They decided to leave for a bit and my daughter and I started talking. I told her that one morning I was drinking coffee and could hear something crunching cat food. The cats were still outside and three times I got up to look and there was nothing there. Then twice there was the most disgusting poop in the upstairs bathroom and I thought the cat was sick, and DEAR GOD that had been four days earlier. “There’s been a possum in my house for four days, Maggie!! Roaming around, going upstairs, having a good time like he was a paying roommate. Sweet jeezus, tell me how somebody has a possum in their house for four days and not have any idea???” And Maggie said, “There there, Mom, you’ve been under some stress. How were you supposed to know you were living with a possum? It could happen to anyone.”
No it couldn’t. I’m certain most people would know there was a possum in their house before four days had gone by. They would know before it came into their bedroom to wake them up. They would know when the cat food was always gone. They would know when it had diarrhea on their bathroom floor twice. All of them would know except me.
As we were talking, I wondered if it was in the downstairs closet because there is a small opening in it that backed up to the stove. Maggie offered to look and I clapped and said “Yeah, girl, you go do that,” and she marched off to get her Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom badge and Patrol Leader of the Week. Reporting back from base camp, she whispered, “Welp, he’s in there but he’s sleeping right now,” like we had some newborn who’d been up all night with colic and wore his little self out. “Wake him up,” I said, “and tell him the jig is up and he has to leave. Now.” She went back in, slowly opened the closet door, positioned the trap right outside of it, and closed the bedroom door behind her on the way out. She came out eager and energized because now we were getting somewhere in this hunt, and I looked over at her and said, “You know what I want? I want a boring life, a regular boring life like everybody else has. Is that too much to ask?” “Oh geez, Mom,” she said, “you weren’t meant for a boring life. Not ever. Besides this is exciting.”
And five minutes later we heard Possum Pete go in the trap. Maggie called our neighbors back and they came and got him and offered to set him loose in a kingdom far far away. Everything was fine and ol’ Pete diarrheaed all the way out the door as a heartfelt and pungent farewell.
Some more neighbors came and secured the perimeter and it was determined that the possum likely came in through the screen door. I had a friend over a few nights earlier and we had a glass of wine on the porch and then I walked her out before I closed everything up. By then the possum must have come through the kitchen door without me knowing.
At 10:30 that night when every light in the entire house was still on because of my PTSD, a different neighbor texted me. She had a pack of cigarettes stowed away for especially high stress days if I was interested. I poured two glasses of whiskey and met her outside. We went over to the creek and sat alongside it, drinking and smoking until midnight, talking about how life upends you and knocks you flat. How just when you think it can’t get crazier a possum shows up in your bedroom, and how decades earlier when you were delivered into the world, the only instructions left for your parents was to make sure that one never lived a boring life.
Postscript: I have the most incredible neighbors and they have my unending gratitude for possum hunting, ciggies, and a million other things.
Throughout our marriage, there was nothing more painful for Mark and I to do than to buy a car. We’d shell out thousands of dollars year after year for repairs on cars that needed to be replaced because the alternative was TOO MUCH. We’d think about it, talk about it, complain, ignore, and when the time came would breathe slowly into brown paper sacks and finally take the leap. Most of our cars were Fords as Mark’s dad worked for them for decades which allowed us a Friends & Family discount. You would think that would have made the whole process easier but for us it never really did.
When the kids were younger we had a mini van that started racking up the miles and would cost $800 in repairs every time we took it in. Finally, the doomsday clock on this junker rang too loudly for us to avoid and we knew we had to replace it. At the time hybrids were rather new, and after doing some research we knew we wanted a Ford Escape. Even that took months to decide, but when the van started making another weird noise we resentfully took the day off work and went car shopping. That day happened to be Election Day in 2006, a day full of hope and change as we cast our vote and then drove to the dreaded dealership to sell our bleeding liberal hearts in exchange for a new car.
There weren’t many hybrids available yet but the first place we went to had a silver one that we drove around town while the salesman pointed out the features. Mark loved being able to watch the screen to see when it was using the battery versus the engine – a techy option that he was enamored with while I fell hard for those heated leather seats. When we got back to the dealership, Mark, who believed all shopping was a reconn mission where you get in and out quickly before the enemy even knows you’re there, was ready to close the deal. All of it was happening too fast for me. Were we really going to pay $30K for a car? I pulled Mark aside and said I was teetering on a ledge of panic and we needed to go to lunch and talk this over. That sort of thing with me always drove Mark nuts. If we both agreed that we needed to buy a car, we agreed to a date to buy a car, and they had the car we wanted, what was the hold up? The hold up was always my head that thought the emergency brake was to be used for e.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.n.g.
Over lunch Mark calmed me down, told me we couldn’t keep sinking money into the van, that this car would save us on gas, and that it was past time to get something more reliable. I knew he was right and we went back to the dealer where they encouraged us to take it home for a few hours. We picked up the kids from school, took it on the highway, thought it over some more, and then took it back to the dealership where our salesman said, “I can already tell you’re in love, aren’t you,” which was some kind of over reach because we weren’t exactly car loving people. We all sat down at a table in the showroom where the negotiations started. The first great deal they thought we’d love had a payment that was more than our monthly mortgage and I laughed. The salesman said, “Oh, I thought you wanted a two year loan. You need longer? No problem. Let me run this by my manager,” and off he went. I said to Mark, “You know that’s how they hook you, right? They come out with a ridiculous payment so they keep extending the months until they’ve beaten you down and you agree.” Mark leaned over and whispered, “I think this is the part where we’ve become unwitting participants in a hostage situation,” and I nodded and kept my eye on the exit signs.
Junior Salesman bounced out of the manager’s office again with another deal and I shook my head. “No?” he asked incredulously, “you need something a little less?” Fun Fact: We’re at a Ford dealership trading in a twelve year old mini vanthat barely got us here. In case it wasn’t obvious we are the Leadership Team of The Less People. He went back again to talk to his manager to get us an even better deal. I looked at Mark and said,”What do you suppose they’re really talking about every time he goes into the manager’s office?” “I’m going to go out on a limb here,” he said, “and say they’re talking about hosing us.”
After a lot of back and forth and an in-person meeting with the concerned manager because we really want to put you in this car we came up with a deal. “Well congratulations, you guys!! This is great and you know what that means,” the salesman said excitedly. We thought it meant that you get the kind of debt that makes you want to puke but he said, “Every time somebody buys a car here they get to ring the Showroom Gong.” The Showroom Gong? Mark leaned over to me and said, “I hate these people and I am not getting up and ringing some fucking gong,” so I got up and rang the gong like a big dork. The salesman said, “Oh you can ring it harder than that,” and I smiled and declined because it turned out that I’d reached my limit with all of these people.
Hours after this marathon started we finally had a car but were we really done? No we weren’t. We needed to talk to someone about undercoating and so a very attractive, British woman had us come into her office. She explained how undercoating works, the benefits of this option, and the price. We were wary and so she said it looked like we were the kind of people who needed a demonstration. She reached into her desk drawer and brought out two rusty, metal pie tins, one with undercoating and one without and was sure we’d be able to tell the difference right away. She knocked on the bottom of one tin and then the other. “Undercoating, no undercoating.” Knock knock knock. “Can you hear the difference?” By then we were like two high-schoolers in the last hour of all-day detention and about to slide out of the chairs and onto the floor. “Actually, I can’t,” I said, “can you do it again?” So she knocked knocked knocked on one pie tin and knocked knocked knocked on the other. “Undercoating, no undercoating.” I listened harder this time and looked at Mark for input but he was lifeless from boredom. “Can you do it one more time?” So she knocked knocked knocked on one pie tin and then knocked knocked knocked on the other and I said, “I’m not hearing it,” and leaned in across her desk. With another knock knock knock on the pie tins, Mark threw his hands in the air and said, “Just give us the undercoating so we can go home.” She smiled and said, “Folks, you won’t regret this decision,” and I thought we probably would but we signed the papers anyways and waited in the showroom to talk to somebody else.
As we were sitting there, Mark looked around and said, “How much do you think this place is worth?” Before I could answer he said, “Millions and millions and millions of dollars. There’s the building and the new cars in the showroom, a lot full of new cars, a lot full of used cars, equipment and tools in the service and body shop. This place is worth millions of dollars, so why do you think they’d spend all this money on this place and then pull out those ratty-ass, rusty pie plates and knock on them? Those things are what you throw away after your grandma dies and you’re cleaning out her house. Wouldn’t you think they could have used something better?” Then he started imitating the women knock knock knocking on one pie tin and knock knock knocking on the other and I started laughing and he started laughing and we could not stop. Our salesman came by to check on us and said, “I wish all of my customers were this happy buying a new car,” which made us laugh even harder. “Oh my god, Mark, we totally fell for the pie tin trick,” I said, “and as if that wasn’t bad enough we just financed it for five years so it probably will end up costing us ten grand,” which was so hilarious to us at that point that we were crying. In the midst of our party of two, we got summoned to the Finance & Insurance Manager’s office. I told Mark I had this one.
When Mark was in graduate school I worked at a bank. My first job there was to take finance deals over the phone from area dealerships. I knew that when a customer financed life insurance through the dealership it was almost always pure profit. It was also an easy sell, unnecessary for most people, and very lucrative for the finance manager so this F & I guy had met his match. He explained the financing details through Ford with a whopping $1000 rebate and then went on to the life insurance. “This is when it gets hard, folks,” he said, “because now we have to talk about if one of you dies and you still have a balance on your loan. What would you do? How would you be able to pay this off with only having one income.” “Oh, it’s not so hard for us,” I said. “We don’t want it.” He looked concerned and said, “Nobody thinks they want it and then the unexpected happens.” Mark shot me a glance. I shot one back saying I got this dude. “Here’s the thing,” I said, “we’ve got life insurance, we have savings, we have investments. We could pay this car off if we had to, and I bet your next trick is to tell us that this is only $1.99 a day and how could we not protect ourselves for the cost of a hot dog at QuikTrip. Am I right?” The F & I guy suddenly didn’t like me and looked to Mark for some mano-to-mano back up. Mark looked at him, shrugged his shoulders and said to me, “Atta girl, let’s get out of this place.”
We took many trips in that Escape and had thousands of conversations, deep ones about life and love and death, and mundane ones about when to stop for gas and where to eat. We saw cows and eagles, hawks, deer, and even a bear cub running in front of us when we were driving out of Glacier. We had a whole life in that car. After Mark died and I became the sole driver, the car took on so much more meaning to me. I could transport myself back to all those road trips and conversations, and many times I thought that at the very least I still had that car where we spent so many hours together.
Last month I took the car in for some routine stuff and was told that the underneath of it (the undercoated underneath) near the rear axles is rusting and to fix it would cost more than the car is worth. I wasn’t expecting that news and it flattened me for many days. Not the car, I thought, not that too.
Yes that, too, and life has knocked on my door to claim something else. If Mark were here he’d say, “It’s just a car, Kath, let it go,” but I’ve had to let a lot go and this one has tipped the Unfairness Scale. Since I got the news about the Escape I’ve looked at a few cars and am test driving one this week. Like every time before, I’d rather be spending my money on something else with someone else, namely a road trip with my husband. But he’s gone and won’t be in the showroom with me to make fun of some lady knock knock knocking on rusty pie tins or cheering me on when I shut down the finance manager.
I’ll find something that will work and for months it will have that new car smell, but it could never compare to the smell of Mark Fisher’s neck, where I loved to bury my face, take a deep breath, and pretend that all of him would last forever.
