Sainthood & The Secret

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.

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