Month: August 2020

Dear Mark,

In a few days it will be two years since I’ve looked deep into your gorgeous eyes or seen that smile that always did me in. I don’t know what happened to you that day and I’ve never been the kind of girl that likes mysteries. I don’t know if you slept that night, I don’t know when you left the house, I don’t know how it could all break inside of you and I could not know.

Since that day there is nothing in my life that is the same. How or if I eat is different, the groceries I buy, the water, electric, and cell phone bill, the bank balance, the amount of laundry I do, the car I drive, the job I have, my social life, what side of the bed to sleep on which I have yet to figure out. I even took the dog back to the shelter. In the first week we had him I said I didn’t think he would work out but you said that we should keep him because somebody had abused him, that you two had that in common. After you died, I reached my limit of looking into the eyes of something else I could not save.

My whole life I have wondered how a person can survive the tragic, sudden death of someone they loved. I mostly worried about the kids, but every day when you left for work on your bike I worried about you until you rounded the corner at day’s end. You ending your life in the way you did was something I never saw coming and the cruelty of it will haunt me for the rest of mine. I used to love to lay in bed at night and listen to the sound of the trains as their horn blasts cut through the cold winter air. Then you ran in front of one and that sound unnerved me to the point that I thought I would go mad.

To lose you that way means that I replay that day over and over. How panicky I felt that you weren’t calling me back, how everything felt off kilter, the police station, the calling the kids to come home, the shock on their faces when I told them you were dead, the call to Mallory who answered so cheerfully and then I had to deliver the most devastating news of her young life, your sister who kept saying, “No, no, no, that’s not true,” your mentor from graduate school who called and said, “When I heard the news I said I wouldn’t believe one word of it unless Kathy told me herself.” Joe calling from work. Joe, who you talked about every day like he was your brother, and the two of us crying and barely able to choke out a single word.

So many people showed up at our door, each one repeating the same thing, “I don’t know what to say.” Over and over I told the story of that morning. I learned later that this is common. You have to keep repeating it so you can believe it yourself. Even now I am still shocked daily that you aren’t here, and every night when I go to bed I try to figure out how to save you. I know it’s impossible to save a dead man, and yet I keep thinking of that one magical thing I should have said that would have stopped you from leaving us.

You are deeply missed by more people than you can imagine, but it is the kids who have risen and faltered on every step of this journey alongside me. You should know that they are not mad at you, none of us ever have been. For a split second that weekend I saw a glimpse of the broken boy inside of you that never healed. How could I be angry at the sharp edges of wounds you tried to keep bandaged until you couldn’t? How hard you worked to keep them from overtaking you and still they grabbed hold and took you under? Since your death the kids and I have talked about how you might have fared if the situation had been reversed, if I was the one who went first. You had enough pain in your life and I’m okay with taking this for the team to have spared you. I wish, though, that the kids could have been spared. They have had to learn too soon about so many conflicting and difficult thoughts and emotions and were far from done needing you in their life. It would be impossible to imagine any of them being more empathetic than they already were, but they allow me and each other grace that stops me in my tracks. You would be so proud of them. We taught them well, and despite all you accomplished in your professional life, it was each of them that were our best experiment.

Remember when I would show you the numbers on my blog when I had a good response to something I’d written? I write now about what this road has been like and I have those kinds of numbers all the time. My story of grief has become public and there are good and bad things to that. I write hard stuff, mainly as a source of understanding and release for myself, so people often make assumptions about me that aren’t true. It’s odd and yet I don’t care because expending energy on that sort of thing seems pointless when the work before me is to not become a raging shell of who I used to be. That would be the second tragedy of this and I couldn’t face you again if I were to allow that to happen. For so long I knew what it was like to be loved, to be heard, to be respected and admired. I wanted so much more of you and that life, and then the story ended with a harshness that I never could have imagined.

While my story is public I have kept most of yours private. There have been so many times when I have been asked why you ended your life and it’s so layered and complex and something I still struggle to understand. That has come with a heavy, emotional price and I regularly talk about it with my therapist. She once asked who besides me you would confide in and I said, “Nobody.” “Then I think,” she said, “that’s your answer to who is entitled to know your husband’s breaking point.”

Carla and I have had many long talks about dating which is absurd to think that either one of us would even be in this position and at the same time. She asked me one day what kind of guy I thought we’d end up with and I said, “He’d have to be somebody who was divorced, who couldn’t stand his ex-wife because who wants to keep hearing about the perfect first spouse? Making lasagna and him saying that Barb used the kind of noodles you don’t cook first and thinking she didn’t know what she was doing but you can’t say that because Barb hangs over the place like an inflatable from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. No thank you. Besides one house isn’t big enough for two altars to dead spouses.” Then we both laughed until we literally cried because, Jesus, how did this happen that we were even talking about something so ludicrous as both of you guys being dead and us dating? When I mention meeting someone to anyone outside of the Widow’s Club, I get two reactions. “You absolutely deserve to be happy,” or “I don’t think you’re ready for that.” You would be surprised at the amount of people who feel it necessary to weigh in on my life, and every time I hear your voice saying, “Fuck ’em, Kath,” which always makes me smile. One of your friends told me that the world would be a richer place if I were to fall in love again and the generosity of that statement still takes my breath away.

When you died and people said to me, “May he rest in peace,” I thought it was absurd. I was going through the motions and didn’t believe for one minute, even at your funeral, that you were actually dead. Anybody that knew you knew that you were constant motion. For you to rest, either here or there, has always seemed unlikely but the emotional torment about your death often feels like a hand around my ankle coming from the other side. I can’t tell if it’s you or if I am the one that is preventing myself from moving past that September morning. Neither one of us could give up a good fight, but I do know that if I stay in this place of reliving that day over and over it will kill me. For 40 years we were a beautiful, passionate couple and there isn’t a single waking minute in the day that I don’t miss that. I miss being happy. I miss being your girl. I miss stability. I miss bad jokes, recycled jokes, and inside jokes. I miss dinners, movies, road trips, and wandering around the garden center with a cup of coffee and a million ideas. I miss being at a party and you finding me and saying we should go home and do something more fun.

This has been the most painful two years of my life and my daily prayer is that your tender soul rests knowing that you were the joy and love of my life, that the way you lived made a difference in this world, that we all try to be better versions of ourselves because of you, and that despite the constant ache for you to be with us, the kids and I still try to live our days with passion. Daily being shocked at your death has been an unwelcome gift, for we know better than most that the expiration date can come at any moment. Knowing that changes everything so we live accordingly and trust that wherever you are you are wildly cheering for us. That keeps us going in a world that has lost much of its brilliance.

Tu me manques, Mark Fisher, tu me manques.

You are missing from me. You are missing from us. You are missing.

Love,
Kath

I started working at the age of sixteen at the local Dairy Queen and except for a few years raising kids have not stopped. Mark’s long-term plan was to keep working until he was a crotchety old geezer, eventually giving up the professor life to work the bench for free for an up and coming younger scientist. I have always liked to work but was certain I’d kick back much sooner than him. We both came home every night and told our work stories/frustration/gossip and then did it the next day and the next. Mark worked at a university medical center, I worked across town at an urban campus.

My work history has always looked like someone who really didn’t know what they wanted to do with their life and that would be 100% accurate. Mark never understood why I couldn’t stick with one thing, but I’d get bored and want to try something new. When I got the university job it was the 11th interview I’d been on that summer. Some jobs I interviewed for seemed so bad that I never considered working there. Others I really wanted but didn’t get, and so I was shocked when the HR department called to offer me the job. My interview had been in a tiny conference room where eight people sat around a table and round-robin grilled me. It seemed like overkill for a part-time, accounting position and I should have been intimidated, but I could not stop sneezing before I left the house and took a Benadryl that kicked in as soon as I arrived in the parking garage. My only goal during that interview was to not do a face plant on the table.

I started a few weeks later and the learning curve was so steep I daily thought I wouldn’t make it. The training was awful with a convoluted reference guide the size of War & Peace. My coworker would pass contracts off to me for processing and payment and say, “You know how to do this, right?” I had no idea but I’d give a thumbs up and scramble to figure it out. Somehow I pulled if off and one year turned into two and eventually five.

When Mark died I took off work for three weeks. I felt like I needed longer but when I wasn’t there my job got dumped on someone else and it was one more thing to feel guilty about. I called my boss, we arranged a date to return, and walking back into that office was excruciating. Nearly everyone seemed to be somewhere else so I sat down at my desk and tried to figure out what needed to be done first. Like my early days there, I immediately felt like I was in over my head and didn’t even know where to start. It wasn’t long before the building services worker on our floor showed up at my desk. “Baby girl,” she said, “you don’t have to say one thing to me but I had to come here and see you with my own eyes to make sure you were okay.” I hugged her and said, “I’m not,” and we both cried. I barely survived that day and every one after for months. When the alarm went off each morning I wanted to call and say that I was quitting, that my life was too much of a mess to be able to produce anything, that they’d be better off with someone else. I kept going back, though, because I didn’t know what else to do. It was the only stable thing in my life, it was the only place I didn’t cry (much), it’s where I knew what I was supposed to do. Gradually it got easier and I could push through the payment requests, talk to students about their organization’s budget, and get back into my work routine. For that I credit my boss immensely and all of my coworkers who propped me up every day, who kept me busy with things that weren’t sad, who didn’t run away when I was having a hard day.

But after awhile I still felt the familiar push to move on to something else, then Covid hit and we were given notice in March to start working from home until further notice. Fast forward three months and the university is in dire financial straits, everything is in flux, and my position was eliminated. My boss texted me to schedule a meeting and I knew what was coming. I told him that it was okay, that I would miss him and everyone else dearly, that he was doing me a favor because I needed to leave and didn’t have the guts to do it.

I spent the next two weeks finishing things up then logged off for good, promising myself that I would take the rest of the summer off and not panic about having so much time on my hands. I slept a lot, I opened Mark’s closet and took all his shirts off hangers and folded them. I started walking again and making myself better dinners than microwave popcorn, and when that new routine was established I started crying and could not stop. Sobbing meltdowns in my quiet house with the clock tick-tocking like thunder towards two years of living without Mark .

One day the phone rang and it was from a retail job I got hired for months before, a job that was supposed to keep me busy on the weekends but one that I actually never worked because it closed due to Covid. “Would you like to come to work for us,” they asked, “because we’d love to have you.”

It might not make much sense to agree to that in a pandemic but I have grown accustomed to my life not making sense. I grabbed the life preserver being flung in my direction, opened my closet, picked out something to wear, and started something new. I haven’t worked on my feet in a long time and am too tired when I get home to do anything, but at day’s end I make another imaginary tally mark under a heading I never could have conceived.

Number of days the tentacles of sorrow didn’t grab me and pull me under?

718

I feel like girls who drink whiskey have good stories. -Atticus

Recently I told my son that during this never ending pandemic, my choices for TV watching had hit new lows. “Mom,” Will said, “I don’t think this is the time to feel bad about how any of us are getting through this. We’re all making bad choices.” I heartily agreed and the floodgates of my choices suddenly had a signed permission slip from a responsible adult.

I am not much of a Netflix person or binge watcher as that requires commitment and attention, neither of which I currently have. Instead I scroll through regular cable and stop when I reach the bizarre. By accident I found Dr. Pimple Popper which is a misnomer because the people making the trek to see her have something far bigger than pimples. The show does a back story on each patient and how their physical conditions hinder their lives and then cuts to them walking in to see Dr. Pimple Popper. She perkily walks into the exam room and asks, “So what brings you in today?” I’m not sure how it’s possible that she can miss the basketball-sized growth on their forearm and even has to ask why they are there, but she always does. She examines them while they nervously bounce their feet and then the nurses come in with the big gun extracting blades. It is often gross and there is something wrong that this is even entertainment and that I get stopped in my tracks to take a look see. After watching several shows I can tell the difference between a lipoma and a sebaceous cyst, that scar tissue from piercings can do some crazy shit, that some things can be reduced but not eliminated, that crying at the end of the show is a given as these people are so happy once their disfiguring growths are gone.

Botched is a show about plastic surgery gone wrong . That one doesn’t make me cry due to the overwhelming vanity and stupidity of most of the patients. Brazilian butt lifts and Dominican Republic breast implants are an all-around bad idea, inflated lips the size of swollen inner tubes are still a thing, too much surgery on your nose will make your nostrils collapse, there really are women who have dozens of surgeries so they can resemble a Barbie doll. I’ve stumbled on My 600# Life which is incredibly sad to me, especially since the doctor treating these patients is an overweight, cranky loon with a bad toupe. Smothered is about mothers and daughters who are so unhealthily attached to each other that they dress alike and the husband/father is nothing more than a bystander to the bizarre.

By far the most fascinating bad TV hole for me to fall into is Hoarding: Buried Alive. This has been on for years and MADE MARK CRAZY. If he walked in the bedroom when it was on he’d shake his head in disgust and I was never sure if it was directed at me or the hoarders. The kids felt the same way and if I wanted to talk about an episode they’d go running from the room. Almost all of these hoarders have had some kind of trauma that makes them buy and save everything until they are climbing mountains of stuff to get to the fridge which has moldy and rancid food. They have very strained relationships with family members and are in danger of having their homes condemned by the city if they don’t clean things up. A psychologist and professional organizer are brought in to help them first uncover why they can’t get rid of anything and then to help them sort through their stuff to decide what stays and what goes. The psychology part is really interesting to me, the organizing part is a shit show. Once the hoarder agrees to help, a team of people come in and things move really fast, the point being to not have the hoarder agonize over every single thing. It goes well at first and then the hoarder gets overwhelmed and starts screaming, “MY STUFFED BEARS!! YOU CAN’T THROW AWAY ALL THE STUFFED BEARS!!” The psychologist and organizer have to do an intervention and the relatives shake their heads and say, “I told you she was going to be like that.” Then the hoarder screams a bunch of ef bombs at everyone and storms off to chain smoke. In the end, though, things usually get cleaned up, the kids come back to visit, and the hoarder vows to not bring any more crap home.

If you ever talk about a Hoarders show with people, they fall into two camps. The ones who can recite whole episodes, “Did you see the one where they found the dead dog behind the t.v. and they had to stop filming because the woman was so distraught? She totally thought Rusty had run away and turns out he was deader than a doorknob.” Or there are the Marks of the world who recoil in horror when you start talking about a show where people save garbage and look at you and say, “How can you watch something like that?” And I have no idea but he could watch the History Channel for hours until I’d whisper in his ear, “We defeated the Nazis. I thought you knew.”

I was recently talking to someone in the latter camp whose face gave away her thoughts on being buried alive by plastic bags of VHS tapes, but then she told me a story that catapulted Hoarders to a whole new level. She is a nurse that treats patients for wound care which is a special level of grossness. She and her coworker were called into a patient’s room who had irritation and itching under her breasts that would not go away. It also smelled bad so clearly something was getting infected that needed treatment. The patient was overweight and trying to get her to a position to where they could get her comfortable to even look at the problem took an enormous effort on both their part. When they finally did and one of them was holding her breasts up, the other said she thought she saw fur. “What??!!!,” I shrieked. “Wait,” Wound Care Nurse said, “I haven’t gotten to the best part.” So she looked at her teammate and was motioning ixnay on the furay in front of the patient and they kept working in tandem until finally they could get a good enough look to see what was causing this irritation.

A dead cat. There was a dead cat under this women’s ta-tas.

I had so many questions. How did she not know there was a dead cat under her breasts? How did the cat…….? Where did the cat….? How in the world? She had no answers as their job was to find and treat the infection, a social worker would deal with the obvious problem that animals dying under a laden bosom needed to be addressed.

Once I heard that story, ranked in the top five of best stories, I felt that if there is ever an end to this pandemic and we can start eating out with friends again, that we should raise a glass of whiskey and tell our outrageous tales from 2020. Any other year nobody would ever believe them, but in the Year of the Covid it all seems plausible. In the meantime, barely-coping-pandemic people, watch your shitty shows, eat badly, order useless crap from the internet, apologize to no one for your awful choices, and by all means check under your breasts. There might be story gold under them there hills.

I grew up in a suburb of Chicago, twenty miles south of the Windy City. The town was settled in the 1800s by Dutch immigrants and at the time of my youth was still referred to as “The Onion Capital of the World.” I’m not sure if that little town qualified for the title but I do know that every summer the smell of green onions permeated the air.

Back in those days the town was still predominately Dutch and they owned the furniture store, the bakery, the grocery store, and nearly all the banks. Every few miles was a Dutch church where attendance was required twice on Sundays which seemed excessive to me and my siblings who couldn’t hold our attention for an hour at the Catholic church. My mom mostly didn’t care for the Dutch. She said they were cheap and could clutch a dollar bill tighter than anyone. On Sundays when we would swim at the neighbor’s pool, my mom would sip an afternoon beer looking two doors down at the bored Dutch family drinking lemonade and say, “You kids should be grateful you’re not Dutch. Those poor kids can’t even bounce a ball on Sundays.”

In those days everyone knew the nationality of everybody else and sweeping generalizations were made in regards to that. It was also everyone’s business to know what church you went to and where your kids went to school. The Catholic kids were raised to believe that the kids who went to public school were pagans and would probably burn in hell at death. The public school kids thought the Catholic kids were part of a cult who dressed the same way for eight years in order to identify each other. In the neighborhood we would play together but it didn’t go smoothly, what with them being pagan devil spawns and all.

Years into living in our neighborhood, a new family moved in down the street. They were not Dutch but Polish and Catholic so that was good. I didn’t know much about the Polish but Mom said they were good housekeepers as evidenced by the Gra***inskis who washed their windows inside and out every few months. Shirley Gra***inski was a large women who wasn’t afraid to stand her ground against anyone and had a voice that could be heard for miles when she called her kids home for dinner. You really didn’t want to mess with Shirley and she seemed to live in a near constant state of friction. If her husband had an opinion on Shirley’s state of mind he didn’t say much. Even he seemed afraid of her.

Shirley didn’t like her next door neighbors who happened to be Dutch and one day there was a confrontation that sent her over the edge. She paid my mom a visit to tell her that she was so mad at them that she filled a paper sack full of dog shit, lit it on fire, and left it on their front porch. Mom told us the story at dinner and Dad was appalled. Mom, on the other hand, was a little harder to read. I think deep down she admired this solution because she thought the Dutch had it coming for all sorts of reasons.

That incident was the first of many dog shit fires in the neighborhood. Mom would roll her eyes and say, “Everybody knows it was Shirley. That’s her calling card.” When I reached adulthood and had neighbors of my own I often thought about these conflicts. Did Shirley get mad and say, “Kids, here’s a brown sack. I need you to find me some fresh dog turds and don’t come home until you do.” Did they come home with less than fresh ones where she would open the bag, examine them and say, “These won’t work. Try down the street where the bulldogs live.” Did she ever sit with her anger and think maybe this whole fire thing is over the top? Did she ever approach the neighbor to try to work it out? Was she in the throws of a raging menopause?

I think my mom thought Shirley went too far when one day she left a flaming sack of shit on Ed’s porch because he called her a fat, dumb Polack. I don’t know why he called her that especially since his own wife was Polish, but back in those days name calling was as normal as the smell of onions all summer long. “Everyone knows Ed would give you the shirt off his back,” Mom said which to her was reason enough for him not to deal with flaming dog crap.

All these years later I know now what it feels like to be Shirley. When people have looked at me and in a down low voice asked if I had reached the “anger” stage of grief, I looked at them in disbelief. Anger? Me? Why would I be angry? And I wasn’t in the first year because I was in shock, and when year #2 rolled around I still wasn’t angry. I was in a rage, a burn-it-down-to-the-ground rage. Small talk made me want to hurl dishes against a brick wall, the question of “So what are you doing this weekend” made me want to sarcastically say, “Crying then sobbing then back to crying. How about you?” I simmered at Facebook posts about my wonderful husband even though in the before I had done the same thing. Couples walking in the park made me want to chuck my shoes at them. I raged at people who had treated Mark badly, people who never apologized for the hurt they inflicted on him.

I wanted to go Shirley on the world and light it all on fire because anger feels productive. Sadness is another day sitting in the mud of grief unable to move, it is going nowhere again and again and again. Along the way I have learned that people are okay with grief making you sad so long as you stay in the right lane where the traffic moves really slow. Wanting to cross lanes where things moves faster with love, companionship, vacations, and sweet dinners on lighted patios is for couples and you’re not one of them any more.

Then the world got a crash course in grief when a pandemic hit and missing your people put everyone in a collective state of longing and sadness. No dinners with family or meeting friends for happy hour, no grandkids popping by for a visit, no hug for the friend going through heartache, no trip to assisted living to visit your elderly parent. Masks, social distancing, and connecting via Zoom became the new normal. I can’t even count the times since Mark died that I have been told that I will need to find a new normal. How do you explain that the old normal was lovely and uniquely yours? How do you set fire to a phrase you hate?

You don’t.

You mourn all the normal that got snatched from your hands and that you miss so terribly you physically ache. You set it on fire with white hot rage and the heat of it singes your eyebrows with an intensity that terrifies you. When it clears you hope it provides the light for a sign pointing somewhere. It’s not what you wanted but the charred remains around you are no place to plant anything. You take a deep breath and a step and tell yourself that you will be okay even though you don’t believe a word of it.

Or you keep setting brown paper bags of dog shit on fire and make sure everyone around you knows you’re angry. It’s either forward or madness.