Month: July 2020

For as long as my curly-headed brain can remember, I have loved to vacuum. Back in the day I remember cleaning half the bedroom I shared with my sister, moving the bed and dresser and sucking up the cobwebs and dust and feeling instant gratification. Her side was messy, mine was pristine, and while most girls that age had a crush on the Monkees, I had one with them and the vacuum cleaner.

That relationship got even more meaningful when Mark and I had kids. Smashed Cheerios and pretzels on the floor? No problem. Let me vacuum it up and calm my frazzled nerves with the sound of a motor sucking up another mess. Kids fighting every single day of summer break over who gets to sit in the front seat on the way to the pool? Let me run the vacuum and drown out their daily argument. When one of my Hoovers needed new bags I went to a locally owned small appliance store and saw a Miele – a German engineered Mercedes Benz of vacuum cleaners. I asked for the details on it and when the salesman said, “You can’t find a better vacuum cleaner on the market,” I pulled out the Visa card and bought it on the spot. That Visa card already had a rolling balance every month and there was a big difference between the cost of six bags versus a new expensive vacuum cleaner, but the minute I got it home, plugged it in, and ran it over the hardwood floors I knew I’d made the right decision. A few years ago Mark kept telling me it smelled bad and asked me if I’d vacuumed up barf with it. “Vacuum barf? Who would do something like that,” I asked him. “I think you might,” he said. I hadn’t (that I was aware of) and I think he was jealous of my Miele because I always gazed at it like a beloved old boyfriend.

My ongoing preoccupation to vacuum made Mark nuts from the beginning. On my first married birthday, Mark got me some tiny diamond earrings. A few months later he came home to find me sifting through the vacuum cleaner bag to try to find one of them that I had accidentally sucked up. I never did find it and he never let me forget that those diamond earrings were $90 which in our broke and destitute days was more like $1000. On Sunday afternoons when I wanted to “tidy up a bit” and the vacuum was on then off then on then off, he said, “I know you’re anal retentive but I just want to watch the game. That’s all. Let me watch the Bears game in peace and then you can run that thing all you want.” He had a point and so I’d vacuum on Saturdays so the house was nice and quiet on Sundays when he would scream profanities at the t.v.

Over the years I think Mark came to appreciate (or resigned himself to) walking into a house that wasn’t constantly upended by the mess of life, a place where you could breathe and dump your worries and problems and relax from the stress on the other side of the door. But even when it was back to just the two of us and the house didn’t get very dirty, I’d still regularly roll out my Miele. From the kitchen Mark would yell over the sound of the vacuum, “WHY DON’T YOU JUST GO WIPE YOUR ASS AND YOU’LL FEEL BETTER,” and I’d yell back, “MY NEXT HUSBAND IS GOING TO RESPECT ME,” and he’d say, “GOOD LUCK WITH THAT.”

Two days after Mark died the kids and I went to the Cremation Society to make arrangements. It was surreal. Somebody that sounded like me was answering questions and keeping remarkably calm but I don’t know who she was. I never met her before. We were ushered into an office where the business part of Mark’s body had to be discussed and then we were invited to look at urns. Like a herd of deer in headlights, the kids and I walked around trying to find one that would be Mark’s final resting place.

I hated them all. I thought they were ugly, I thought they were expensive, and I mostly thought what are we even doing in this place. Finally I said to the kids, “I’m not being cheap. I’m really not but I cannot spend money on something I hate and that Dad would hate even more. I can’t put him in one of these.” I think there was a collective sigh of relief between us all. Mark wasn’t an urn kind of guy and I wasn’t about to make him one at death.

When the cremation guy came out to find out what we chose, I said we’d stick to the plain box and figure out something else. He wondered if maybe we’d like small individual urns and I thought that would be a good idea so we all grudgingly picked out a small urn. Then he asked me if I wanted them sealed. I said no because how was Mark supposed to come back to us if his ashes were sealed in an urn?

“Hmmm,” he said. “That might be a bit of a problem then.” He grabbed the urn and showed us how the top easily came off. Off then on he lifted the top and I was so confused about what the problem was. “As you can see,” he said, “the top of the urn doesn’t seal so what could happen is that if it were to get knocked over the ashes might spill onto the floor and there have been occasions where people have vacuumed up their beloved’s ashes.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or be horrified. I did know that me and my Miele could totally do something like that and then I’d have to put the vacuum cleaner bag under plexiglass with a sign that says Here Lies Mark Fisher. May He Rest In Peace With The Dead Spiders And Cat Hair And May Perpetual Light Shine Upon All Of Them. I ordered the urns and had them sealed, and on the way out the door the cremation guy tried to upsell us some necklaces with Mark’s ashes so we could wear him around our neck. I declined and when we collapsed into the car to drive home Will said, “Well, that was fucked up,” which was the most apt description of everything.

Later on I got each of our small urns and tenderly handed the kids their individual container of heartache. I kept mine on the nightstand until a few months ago when I decided that it didn’t represent Mark’s life at all and I didn’t want to look at it every night. Maggie broached the subject one day with me and said, “I think I’m not going to keep my urn. I think I’d like to open it and spread the ashes around the oak tree Dad and I grew from an acorn.” I said that was fine with me and she didn’t need to feel guilty about it.

Last summer we spread most of Mark’s ashes in Yosemite. This summer I’m going to pry open that stupid little urn and walk the same creek Mark did two days before he died. The creek close by the house that made him smile when he came home and talked about it. That as he picked stickerballs off his pants I looked at him and thought there you are. You’re still there and I’m still here and we will be okay. You will be okay. And then he died and I wondered if that adventure was his farewell to what he loved most about being outside.

I don’t know. I just know that Mark never lived a contained life so I’m going to let those ashes join the mud and the water and the minnows and see what springs to life when set free.

Maybe it will be me.

Many years ago there was a book called The Secret. There was a lot of hype about it and whenever the author would appear on talk shows she would dance around the premise of the book and never reveal the secret. If you wanted to know the secret you had to buy the book, and if someone you knew read the book it was apparently a secret to keep it a secret. When the buzz died down and the secret wasn’t so heavily guarded, I learned that it was about the law of attraction and how you can use that to change your money, relationships, health, and happiness. That really didn’t seem like such a big secret and I felt as let down as Ralphie in A Christmas Story after decoding his Little Orphan Annie ring.

Death has a magical tendency to immediately elevate someone to sainthood and that has certainly been the case with Mark. He was far from it and he’d be the first one to admit it. His suicide and what led up to it is so layered and complicated that I could spend the rest of my life trying to figure out that fateful choice and still not completely understand what was going through his mind at that point. While I know he thought he was doing me and the kids a favor by removing himself from our lives, it was anything but and the circumstances of his death will reverberate with each of us forever. On the many nights I don’t sleep, I often imagine him walking in the door where I would either fall to my knees in gratitude or scream at him that after forty years he owed me a goodbye. I have read enough about the mindset of someone wanting to end their life to know that in order for them to go through with it there is an emotional detachment that occurs. Because Mark was such a passionate person whose love I never doubted, it is beyond my ability to understand how that happened.

Likewise, our marriage was most assuredly not a union of saints. We argued often about big things and dumb things. One time we argued all the way home from a party, and a few blocks from our house I got so pissed at Mark that at a red light I opened the door and told him I would walk the rest of the way home. He said that was fine by him and when he didn’t come back for me I was even more pissed. The next morning neither one of us could figure out what that epic fight was even about. When we were visiting New York and had walked miles and miles, I told Mark I needed to stop someplace and eat. He said I couldn’t be hungry because we’d just eaten three hours ago. I sarcastically asked him how he could possibly know how hungry I was. We went back and forth on the sidewalk, and if it were anywhere but New York, people might have been curious to know why this couple was airing their dirty laundry out in public. I walked across the street and found a place to eat and ordered lunch. Mark came in a few minutes later and asked if I was okay. I said I wasn’t and all that walking was making my foot throb from a broken bone I had a few months earlier. He said I should have said something, I said he should have known, he sarcastically asked me how he was supposed to know my foot hurt. You could say we frequently had a failure to communicate.

There were bigger cracks between us, too, things that I sometimes thought couldn’t be repaired. Times when both of us wanted to throw up our hands and say, “This isn’t what I signed up for.” A friend said she admired that we could have such intense disagreements and somehow always be able to figure it out. I was surprised by that statement and she said, “You do know that some couples never argue, right? They simmer and resent and swallow all the hurt down until they retreat into apathy or explode in divorce,” and that seemed far unhealthier to me than arguing. Even in the midst of our most trying times, even when he made me crazy, Mark Fisher was my favorite person on earth. He was the first person I wanted to tell the good news and the bad news to, the one who shared my outlook, empathy, and humor on life, the one who challenged my thinking and pushed the limits of my experiences, the one who always believed me to be a writer first and everything else second. The repeated difficulty of his death is trying to make sense of being abandoned by the person I least thought would leave me. In the firestorm of those complex feelings, why does it seem as though death suddenly anointed Mark to the status of being a saint?

It didn’t.

I never bought into The Secret because it seemed too self-serving, but there are some things that are only revealed when events out of your control take a machete to what you hold dear. Since Mark died there isn’t a day that passes that I don’t know how achingly fragile we all are. In the blink of an eye I had to learn how to dance with life and loss, and in trying to learn those complicated steps I remind myself to tend to the love lest my garden flowers in bitterness.

• 

In the history of the Fisher family, I tended to make self-improvement proclamations for the betterment of all like I was The King of the Forest. Because Mark was busy with his career and had bigger fish to fry, he gave me enough chain to cause me to believe I was being taken seriously but not enough to think I had any control over the ragamuffins under this roof.

I’d throw down gauntlets like:

• There will be a mandatory meeting at 6:00 p.m. to discuss the division of labor in this household.
• I will no longer be doing laundry for this family and by this family I mean you people.
• Remember when we got the dog and everybody said they’d take turns walking him? You have now forced me to schedule you for a shift.
• Our vacation is in danger of being cancelled for insubordination.
• If you keep leaving dirty dishes in your bedroom we will have a roach infestation and the county health department will shut this house down and we will have to live in the car.

Behind the scenes I think Mark gathered his frightened little fishes around and said, “If this is anything like your Mom’s affirmations to eat better and exercise more it should last three days tops and then we’re back to being as good as gold. Just toe the line for a few days and don’t worry about going on vacation. It may be without Mom but we’re going.”

I’d issue decrees in our marriage too. Helpful tips for Mark to be a better husband in which he’d nod and say, “Good idea,” and shove a spoonful of Wheaties in his mouth while working on his computer. I’d say, “You’re not even listening to me,” and then he’d repeat verbatim what I said so that always backfired. If Oprah had a particularly interesting show I’d wait until we were in bed and say, “So I was watching Oprah today and there was a marriage expert on and he said……..” After a few years of that Mark rolled over one night and said, “I can’t with the Oprah stuff. I just can’t any more.”

Many years ago one of his colleagues was separated and going through a painful divorce and we invited him for Thanksgiving. I was disappointed that we couldn’t spend the holiday with family, and, Mark, who decided he would be in charge of the turkey was doing it all wrong in my opinion. I was so mad at him that I left with the dog and walked for an hour but as soon as I got home we started arguing again. Finally he said, “What is wrong with you? Why are you being such a bitch?” I screamed, “I’M PREGNANT and everything makes me want to puke especially the smell of this turkey.” Admittedly, the delivery of my breaking news flash was not the best (or even close) and he stared at me and said, “You’re pregnant?? What? Really? You’re really pregnant? That’s crazy and good, really good,” and it was because it always took us a long time to get pregnant and this was a wonderful surprise. We hugged and cried it out, I asked him to quit opening the oven door so much because the smell was making me gag, he said he’d try but that he happened to be a masterbaster and who wants a dry turkey, and the dinner went off without a hitch except for Mark who would smile and lean over to me every few minutes and say, “You’re really pregnant?”

A year later when this colleague’s life had settled down he wanted to have a party to thank everyone who helped him out during his rough patch and Mark and I were invited. He had gotten a hot tub which were very new at the time, and the invite was explicit in including that we should come with towels. When Mark told me I said, “Oh we can’t do the hot tub. We’ll have to leave before that happens.” Mark wanted to know why and I said, “Because, Mark, people go in hot tubs naked and I am not going to do that in front of your work friends. I just had my third baby and besides that it’s just wrong to not be wearing clothes at a party.” We went to the party and before long the hot tub talk started which was my clue to get Mark to leave. He was disappointed as he wanted to experience this new trend while I thought I was doing him and his chances at tenure a massive favor.

On Monday, Mark came home from work and said, “I have to tell you about the rest of the party and who turned out to be the biggest idiot.” Oh this is going to be good, I thought, and said, “Wait while I pour myself a glass of wine,” because I needed to savor this naked gossip and get comfy while hearing the deets. “So,” Mark said, “I go into work and everyone who went to the party wants to know why we left early because it was so much fun and I tell them that you were uncomfortable about the hot tub. They said it was great because the water was hot and it was really cold outside and it was the perfect night for it. I tell them that you didn’t want to be naked with everyone and they say NAKED?? We weren’t naked. We were wearing bathing suits so I say BATHING SUITS??? Kath told me you do hot tubs in the buff and they said well you can but you wouldn’t do that in front of a bunch of people. You’d wear a bathing suit. So you want to know who was the biggest idiot that night? You. It was you.”

I looked at him in disbelief. “You wear a bathing suit? I never heard of that. I read a People magazine article about Hugh Hefner and it sure looked like there was nakedness in that hot tub.” “HUGH HEFNER???!!!” Mark yelled. “Hugh Hefner from Playboy? We live in fucking Kansas. Didn’t you think it might be a bit different here from the Playboy mansion?” I obviously did not and then started laughing hysterically and said, “Oh my god, Mark, we should have stayed and when everyone was in the hot tub with their bathing suits on we could have paraded out naked and acted like it was all cool. Wouldn’t that have been so funny? Like we didn’t get the memo?” Mark looked at me and said, “Sure, Kath, real funny, funny like a clown.”

A few days before Mark died we were sitting at the dining room table eating dinner. The back of our house faces our neighbor’s screened in porch and I noticed them sitting out there. These neighbors are gay and have since moved, and we were crazy about them. They talked to Mark over the fence all the time, and when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of legalizing gay marriage we were so happy for them we left a bottle of wine and a note for them on their porch. As we were eating dinner I said to Mark, “They always look like they’re having a serious conversation, don’t they? Sometimes I wonder if they might be breaking up.” “I don’t think so,” Mark said, “I think they’re just talking.” He kept eating and I said, “We should have more serious conversations and talk about our feelings.” Mark shoved a forkful of salad in his mouth and asked, “Haven’t we been doing that all weekend?” “Well, yeah,” I said, “but really serious and digging deep. You know, like lesbians do.” He looked at me and said, “If we’re not lesbians how are we supposed to communicate like them?” I let out a sigh and said, “We could try,” and by we I meant him.

A few days later the unimaginable happened and these dear friends came to the house, distraught like everyone else. The kids were here and we all cried when they walked in the door because they have always felt like family when our own family has always been so far away and were scrambling to get to us. They wanted to know what happened, they told me Mark seemed very off on that Sunday when they’d seen him outside, they were so very sorry for me and the kids. In the course of talking about that weekend I told them about the conversation between me and Mark and how I thought they always seemed to have such deep and meaningful conversations that we should emulate as a couple. They looked so puzzled when I said that and finally K. asked, “Am I bent forward with my head down?” “Yes,” I said, “exactly like that, like you’re intently listening.” She laughed and said, “Whenever we sit out on the back porch we play cards.”

A few months before Mark died, I got a bone density test. I’d had one before and the results weren’t stellar since thin, crumbling bones is the card that was dealt to the women in my family. I had been avoiding another scan for too long until my doctor insisted on it and the results were borderline osteoporosis. This raised all the flags and I was written a prescription for a bone building med. Because I dabble in drama, I immediately spiraled into despair as I pictured myself as the female version of Quasimodo who was going to spend her golden years looking at filthy floors because she was unable to lift her head.

Mark did more than dabble in facts and immediately got on the case. Part of his job was to facilitate med student discussion groups where a topic was assigned and the students were supposed to find research on it and advise a protocol. He assigned his group osteoporosis and told them his wife was pretty close to having it so he needed some good published papers to reference. After that he came home and told me that based on the research of the med students and a discussion with his friend, Joe, I should take the prescription. I presented my own research that showed that the drugs could cause necrosis of the jaw and how did he think I’d look without a jaw. Mark asked, “How long did it take you to find the one case where someone’s jaw died,” and with the confidence of an acclaimed Google Researcher I said, “Long enough to make me not want to roll that dice.”

I kept on doing my own fact finding and all of it said that exercise and supplements was the best way to build bone. On my breaks at work I’d do a couple of loops around the campus, I only took the stairs in my building, up and down three flights several times a day, and then I’d walk after dinner every night to get my 10,000 steps. Though he never said it, I think Mark looked at walking as being kind of lame for a manly man like him who started and ended every day in a spandex outfit, and so he’d say, “Have a good walk,” and keep watching cable news and screaming at the t.v about Trump. But one day he came home and told me about some research he’d read that showed walking to be great exercise for cognitive health and he started joining me after dinner. I loved those walks as we talked about everything under the sun for a quick 30-40 minutes around the park and through the neighborhood. It made it go by so fast and it didn’t seem like exercise but our own little staff meeting every night.

On the weekend before Mark died the one thing we kept doing throughout was walking. Our walks were longer and a bit slower than usual, there were some heartbreaking revelations that made us both stop and look at each other, there was understanding mixed with utter confusion about things I did not know, there was quiet and unspoken love. One night I checked my Fitbit to see how close I was and if we needed to walk further or head for home and Mark said to me, “Don’t you love it when you hit it and the fireworks go off?” Mark never lost his boyish wonder at those kinds of simple things and I miss that so much.

After Mark died, I took my Fitbit off and put it in a drawer. I’d walk to clear my head and look for my husband who must have lost his way on his bike and needed to find me so I could show him the way back home. Achieving 10,000 steps in a day and the density of my shitty bones were the least of my problems.

A few weeks ago I opened the drawer, took my Fitbit out and charged it. I strapped it on my wrist, put my gym shoes on, and headed out the door. Since then I’ve worn it daily and have only reached my goal once which isn’t so important to me at least for now. I look back at Mark’s last summer here and and wonder if meeting my goal every day was something I was doing for myself or to give Mark a reason to be proud of me. It’s one of those dumb insecurities I have now that circle round and round when I know we were always proud of each other and said so often.

I walk now in search of a new life I never wanted and try to find some pride in the way I am doing it. Some days I can see it and some days not, but in every single one of those steps is the prayer that I will have fireworks again in my life.

I am always hesitant to talk about any unusual things that have happened since Mark’s death as he was highly skeptical of that kind of stuff. I’d read my horoscope every day and over coffee tell him whether I was going to have a good day or not before it even started. Did I believe it? No, but Mark did outrage better than anyone, and so I’d read it out loud to him to get under his skin and he’d take the bait, mansplain the utter bullshitness of horoscopes, and then say, “Okay, Nancy Reagan, you better to call the Astrology Police and tell them they need to rearrange the stars to your liking.” Then he’d take a 45 minute shower to figure out his day and cleanse himself of my Pisces angst.

But odd things happen that defy explanation, most recently when I went to the dealership to trade my car in and pick up my new one. The entire car buying process was handled by my son-in-law who searched and negotiated and did everything but write the check. I had decided that I wanted a Honda CRV which was similar to what I had in size, but on a walk in the neighborhood I saw a Honda Fit, came home and read everything I could about it, changed my mind, and placed a new order with Nate. My only request was that it have a leather interior. He found one, met me at the house where they brought it over for me to test drive, and in that cute black leather interior that matches most of my wardrobe I said, “Is it bad to want to marry the first boy I date?” It wasn’t as I have no bandwidth to agonize over decisions. Nate worked out a deal for me and I went with my daughter on a Saturday morning to pick it up. I woke up that day, looked at the Escape in the driveway, cried, and left the house with the keys and title in my hand and all the enthusiasm of someone getting a root canal by a student in his first semester of dental school. But my daughter, who is like her dad in so many ways, bounced into my car like Tigger and was bound and determined to make this an adventure.

As is the strategy of car dealers, we were there forever so they could break me and wear me down with a $3000 extended warranty. Little did they know that this chick is so worn down already that an extended warranty (especially on a Honda) was never going to happen. But they have to do their thing and before we got to the hard sell, I said to the finance guy, “What’s with the old guys in this place who won’t wear a mask? All of you have to wear one and their wives are wearing one but they aren’t. Is it like this every day or do they just come out on Saturdays?” He looked at me and said, “Well, I’m not sure you are aware of this but men know everything,” and then he did a show and tell of the half-ass ways said men would try to comply, the favorite being the mask dangling from one ear. It was the snarky kind of humor I love and so I said, “Maybe they can be the sacrificial lambs for the murder hornets.” This was the invitation he needed to launch into an explanation of a Youtube video he’d watched of a murder hornet getting into a beehive. The bees (who never forget that it’s their job to save the queen) surrounded it and flapped their wings so fast that it created enough heat to kill the murder hornet. I said, “What??? Really? You just type in murder hornets and you get to see that? Get. Out. Of Here.” “Yep,” he said, and from there he talked about hummingbirds and the way they can see ultraviolet light, that the scales on sharks create no resistance in the water which is why they swim so fast, that a drop of water can sit on a leaf and not disperse and one day cars will have that kind of technology so that a wax job will last for the life of the car, that his mom has had breast cancer three times and how one day medicines will target the cancer only and not kill everything in its path. There was no end to the passion and enthusiasm he had and I turned to look at Maggie and she said, “I know, Mom.” “Know what,” our new friend Josh asked, and Maggie explained how this car thing was an emotional powder keg for me but he resembled her dad so much it was like he was here. I asked if he had any interest in science and he said a little bit and that as a kid he could not watch enough nature documentaries and grew up with David Attenborough. “Now when I watch them,” he said, “I have to turn it off before something gets killed because it gets to me,” and we talked about the cruelty of big game hunters and how elephants mourn when someone in the herd is killed. We were in his office way too long which was okay, and when I sat in the driver’s seat of my new car in the dealership parking lot I cried and said, “I’m a little bit happy today, Maggie, and I’m not faking it like I usually am,” and she said, “That’s good Mom. You deserve it.” “I think so too,” I said but did I think Josh the finance guy was a sign? Not really but it felt like a stamp of approval from another world that I was doing the right thing and I desperately needed that.

A few days after that I was going to walk and went into Mark’s closet for one of his shirts. When I was pregnant with Mallory, a pair of leggings and one of Mark’s big white shirts was my daily attire and I went in there to find one. I have been in Mark’s closet dozens and dozens and dozens of times. Usually it begins with a pep talk that I can clean it out, I can donate his clothes, I can fold them, box them, and let go. I can move forward in life without all his stuff, but the pep talk fizzles out as soon as I open the door and look at his shirts, dress pants, sports jackets, the shoes he wore until they fell apart, the shelf of ball caps stacked one on top of the other. On that day I looked over the big white shirts and wasn’t feeling it when I noticed a gray polo turned inside out on the shelf next to the ball caps. That is how all of Mark’s shirts ended up and many times we’d be out and I’d say, “Your shirt is inside out,” and he’d say, “It’s been on like that all day and I never noticed,” because in every single way Mark was the absent minded professor. I grabbed the polo, turned it right side out, and wore it to walk.

The next morning it was on the bedroom floor when I picked it up to put it in the laundry basket. I held it up to my face, this shirt that is one of the remains of a life that vanished, and it smelled just like Mark. I kept turning it over and every single spot smelled like Mark. I sat on the floor with it pressed again my sobs and was so grateful because I miss that smell so much, and so confused because I swear on all that is holy that that shirt was not there before. And how could it still smell like him when nothing else in his closet does?

The next day was Sunday and the kids came over for dinner. We took a walk afterwards and when they left I finished cleaning a few things up, got the coffee ready for the morning and started turning lights off downstairs. As I was turning the dining room light off I saw two pieces of paper sitting on the table. I had earlier wiped the table off and there was nothing on it so I walked over and picked them up. There were two receipts – an itemized receipt and a credit card receipt. They were from the IHOP across from the med center, the IHOP Mark was so excited to have close by because he could walk over there and have pancakes for lunch which was his kind of thing.

The receipt was dated November 6, 2015. He had the breakfast sampler.