Month: October 2020

Many years ago I started going to estate sales. At first I thought it was kind of creepy to be scavenging a dead person’s stuff, but I acquired many things I loved and changed my mind to thinking that I’d rather have somebody enjoy my good taste after I’m gone than to see useful things end up in a landfill. Every sale always had a handful of aggressive buyers that would plow you over to get something, and so I started going to the basement and garage first. Those were where the random, cheaper things were, where the furniture that wasn’t perfect was parked, the stuff that wasn’t collectible or very valuable. If Mark and I were out on the weekend and passed an estate sale I’d make him stop. He didn’t share my love for this but he indulged me, and once tried to convince me that we should pass on the dining room table and buy the house.

On the way home from work one day I saw a sign for an estate sale and stopped. It was the home of someone who owned a local theater and was well traveled. It had some amazing stuff but what caught my eye was a raw pine dresser in the garage. It had a lot of issues but that finish gave me all the heart eyes and I wanted it bad, but it was priced at $120 which was highly inflated for all of its flaws. I sweetly looked it over and said, “When you’re half price in two days you will be mine.” I needed Mark to go with me to help me get it in the car and told him that after his Saturday morning bike ride and breakfast we needed to “Chop chop get going as soon as you get home.” Mark wasn’t much of a chop-chop-hurry-up kind of guy, especially for an estate sale he didn’t want to go to, so he took his sweet time getting ready to go and all the way there I kept hoping that dresser was still in the garage. As we were walking up the driveway I saw it and was so excited, but as we got closer I noticed the SOLD sign on it and the air went out of my secondhand balloon. Mark said it was too bad it already sold and tried to make things better by offering to go inside the house to see if there was something else I might want but I declined.

As we were driving back to the house I asked Mark to stop at the bakery because I needed to eat my feelings. When we pulled up he said he’d wait in the car because he’d already eaten his wheat germ whatever when he was out with the boys and wasn’t hungry. I found that especially irritating and it must have showed because as I reached the door to go in he was right behind me. We spent $50 and filled a box with scones, ham and cheese croissants, and cinnamon rolls. We scarfed half of it down over a fresh pot of coffee and Mark said it was better than that crappy dresser we missed out on which wasn’t true but I loved him and those scones for trying.

In the spring when Covid hit and everything was locked down, when I was working from home and stuffing my feelings with whatever I could find in the fridge, I got an email from Match that I could join their very successful dating site for free. Between that and some encouragement from a friend I made a login, password, and created a profile. While you can create all that for free, in order to communicate with anyone, or they with you, you have to join Match and make a monthly payment.

Nevertheless, and maybe as an enticement to go full on match, I would get a notification of my mutual picks which conveyed dateable tidbits like…..

No arguers. I’m worn slick from arguing.
In my free time I like to smoke pot and go for a walk.
Don’t message me if you’re a liar.
Let me complete you.
I prefer a woman who likes to cook.
Conservative by day, liberal by night.
I’m a gym rat. Are you? Let’s hook up.

Day after pandemic day these awful matches show up in my email. I’ve seen the same faces over and over and every once in awhile a woman shows up so things have gotten Covid sloppy and unorganized at the Mutual Pick Committee Meeting. Every other day I get an email for a special deal to join to get the full benefits and meet my forever match. It is always my last chance or the best deal ever offered and what started at $36 a month has been whittled to the never-before-offered price of $18.99 if I act now.

Last week someone new showed up in my email. His name was Ben, he was attractive, he was an architect. He liked to build things and I don’t know how this guy slipped through the border wall of duds and was practically begging me to let him build my new kitchen, but Ben the Architect had some potential. That’s when I figured out that all this time that I was getting the free benefits because I was too cheap afraid to join and pay the monthly cost, I was attracting the guys in the basement and garage. If I wanted quality benjamins, I needed to fork over the benjamins to see the better stuff inside the house. But as those things tend to go for me, I forgot my login and my password. I even forgot the fake name I used so I was back in unmatched limbo.

That didn’t last long as a few days later I met someone who did a Tarot card reading on me and I love me some of that hoodoo voodoo witchcraft. She pulled the magician card which means that when it comes to romance I am the one who is going to make the magic happen. That seemed like such a foreign and impossible concept to me that I took notes on what she was saying. Her advice was to make a list of the qualities I would like in someone which took a second since the only thing on the list was Absolutely none of the above in mutual picks.

And now what?

Considering I have enough baggage to jam an airport conveyer belt, and the kind of exploding creative chaos that would make weak men cry, I’ve decided to tuck that magician card into my bag of Crazy Shit I Never Thought I Would Need and abracadabra this wobbly little life of mine.

On a Saturday night two months after Mark died, as I sat in our once lively house that was now deathly quiet and lonely, I thought that if I spent one more minute in it I might be tempted to set it on fire. It wasn’t the craziest thought I had except for the fact that I imagined setting it on fire with me in it, so I grabbed my keys and drove to Target. It wasn’t much of a solution to all that was wrong but it was a distraction. On the way home I got pulled over by the police. I had no idea why until the officer came to the window and asked me if I knew that I was driving without my lights on. I did not, nor did I care, but he did and so he took my license to run it to see if there were any warrants out for my arrest. I sat in the car with my forehead resting on the steering wheel and thought that I should be arrested for my husband’s suicide. “It was on my watch,” I’d tell him, “of course I’m guilty.” I got a warning that night and thanked him because that’s what you are supposed to do when you’re pulled over instead of screaming, “Where were you two months ago when I could have used a warning? Why didn’t you or anybody else tell me that the lights in my husband’s eyes were going out and he was in trouble?”

So much of the first year after Mark’s death is missing from me but there are pieces of it that I am starting to remember. I called off work three times. The first time I said I had a sore throat and my boss told me to feel better, the second time I said that I was either getting the flu or food poisoning and my boss told me to feel better, the third time I said I was too sad to get out of bed and my boss told me to take care of myself. I’ll be okay tomorrow, I texted back, because isn’t our productivity the scale on which we judge ourselves? Be useful, be busy, show up, produce something even if it’s shuffling papers from one side of your desk to the other, but I was too broken to be any of those things.

Every day was a monumental effort to get to work and do my job, to take care of all the paperwork that accompanies death, to figure out my health insurance, a car alarm that kept randomly going off, a dishwasher that wasn’t working, a dog that was neurotic. Some days I’d come home and realize hours later that I had not taken my coat off. I always felt cold, empty, and lost, and a thousand times I told myself the same thing.

You are pathetic.
You need to get your shit together.
You are damaged goods.
Who could possibly love you when you can’t even get yourself out of bed?

In the last month I have completely redone the upstairs. I painted, moved out of the bedroom Mark and I had since we bought the house, bought a new bed and bedding, new nightstands, lamps, and switched over closets. I could not walk into the room we shared for so long without being completely engulfed in sadness. I spent two years in it alone and never slept. In the process I went through every thing in Mark’s dresser. I saved some of his favorite bike jerseys and every one made me cry. I went through his socks, underwear, and tshirts. I made stacks of save, donate, ask the kids if they want. I told myself that what is left of a life isn’t reduced to what fills a black, plastic garbage bag, that it’s okay to sift through it all and keep what is meaningful, that letting go of most of it isn’t letting go of his essence, that a life without Mark is still a life and making everything a shrine is an unhealthy tribute to something that no longer exists.

When I think of me two years ago it makes my heart ache. I want to cup that face that sobbed over and over and tell her that she was shattered, traumatized, and in shock. That the life she had and loved had collapsed due to the person she trusted most in the world, that he didn’t mean to do that to her and she wasn’t responsible for it. I want to tell her that every day she kept herself alive she was productive enough, that nobody will ever understand her loss but her, that healing will take the rest of her life and most of that arduous and unrelenting work will go unnoticed by everyone, that one day she will be able to open the drawer that held his socks and see her tshirts and it won’t make her feel like throwing up.

I want to tell her that loss is brutal and misunderstood, that timelines for grief are meters of bullshit, that what should be set on fire are the words closure and new normal, that she will find her way back to herself and it will be unpredictable and take a very long time, that everyone is damaged and has wounds that are bandaged, and if staying in bed all day will stop the bleeding then that’s what needs to be done.

Mostly I want to tell her that she was never pathetic, she wasn’t supposed to have her shit together, that she would have to relearn how to love herself and it wasn’t going to be fast or easy. She was going to have to sit in the thick of her sorrow and it would terrify her most days, but if she didn’t do the work it would hide in all the cracks and the rest of her life would become stagnant and without meaning.

And if she were to allow that to happen, if she never gave herself permission to move forward from the anguish and the loss, how would life ever be able to unfold and surprise her as it always had?

When news of Mark’s death traveled beyond our house, the kids and I were immediately blanketed in such tender love and help, from phone calls and visits to express tearful condolences, a steady stream of plant and flower deliveries, and all the food we could ever need for weeks. Three days after Mark’s death the coffeemaker stopped working. I said something to my daughter about needing to get a new one and the next morning there were two on my front porch. A neighbor who was worried about all the food in the house going bad bought clear containers and spent hours cleaning out my fridge to make room for everything. When one of my brothers called to check up on me, I told him how so many people had swooped in and were taking care of everything we could possibly need and I started to cry. “It’s so overwhelming,” I said. “That’s because everybody likes you guys, Kath. I guarantee you that won’t happen when I die,” which isn’t true at all but it made me laugh which was the earliest and faintest pilot light of hope in that dark time.

Though the caretaking has trailed off since those early months, I often still have dinner delivered to my porch, packages left at my door, an invitation extended for a glass of wine, coffee, or to walk in the park, a text to see how things are going. A few weeks after Mark died, his Saturday morning biking friends showed up at the house to rake my yard and clean my gutters. They came a few more times that fall and have returned often to help me with things around the house. I miss the stories Mark always told me about them so when they arrive to help me I’m thankful that the friendships he forged didn’t die with him. When they are done and go home to take care of their own yards, I walk around and admire their work and usually end up crying because I don’t know how to repay any of this.

My life in general and especially since I met Mark, has always been one of gratitude. I was grateful a friend saw something in him that she thought would match something in me, I was grateful I said yes to that blind date when I wanted to say no. I was grateful that his career allowed me to live in several different places and meet fascinating people. I was grateful to have been given healthy kids who were challenging, fun, kind and curious, and remain that way. I was grateful for our house and finding ourselves in a neighborhood that believes community means being present for the celebrations and the losses. I continue to be grateful for the relationships we both built over the years that have sustained me since Mark has been gone.

The early days of grief overpower every sense like a tsunami, while at the same time you are expected to make immediate decisions. Every waking minute feels like fight or flight so when someone comes along to take care of something you didn’t even know you needed, it feels like you are allowed to take a breath when even that seems to have been forgotten. In those moments, the gratitude gets knotted and intertwined with the sadness like two tangled necklaces, and it seems impossible to figure out where one begins and the other ends.

When we were dating I worked in Chicago, and for a few months Mark got an internship in a lab at a hospital on the same train route as me so we’d go to work together. Much of that route felt gritty and dark with garbage strewn along the tracks accompanied by the sound of screeching brakes on the rails. The train would then go underground and make its scheduled stop at the station. We’d climb the steps out of the darkness and arrive to early morning daylight in the Loop – Lake Michigan to the right and the city to the left. Mark would head south to begin his day, I’d go north. I have thought a lot about those commutes on the train that we took together so many years ago. I’ve thought about the garbage and the dark, and how despite that when you got your first glimpse of the lake, whether it was blue and calm in the summer or gray and biting with winter’s cold, it felt like you had been anointed for the challenges of the day ahead.

Ever since Mark’s death I have been curious and terrified to know of the place where he died. When I got the death certificate that showed the location, I looked it up on my computer at work and had barely focused in on it before I needed to log off and escape to the back stairwell. I’ve imagined it in so many ways and every time it is strewn with garbage, and the thought of his last moments being amongst that saddened and sickened me. Last month as the anniversary date of his death was breathing down my neck, on a day when I felt battered and raging and so over everything, I decided to drive to the place where he gave up on himself.

Tall grass grew along the side of the tracks that swayed in the hot summer wind. There was no garbage littering the sides, no gas station styrofoam cups, no empty beer bottles, no plastic bags wrapped around weeds. There was the most unexpected sense of quiet and peace beside the hard metal of those tracks, and for the first time I wondered if the final passageway through the tunnel of Mark’s darkness was calm.

It is a hard thing to explain that in the well of loss even gratitude can bleed and bleed and bleed.

Walking into the house after finding out that Mark had died, the first thing I noticed was his sandals under the buffet in the dining room. I found them in a hiking store in Maine and encouraged Mark to at least try them on even when he kept insisting he didn’t need them. He loved them the minute he slipped them onto his feet and wore them out of the store and for the entirety of two summers. He wore them so much he always kept them under the buffet so he didn’t have to dig through the closet for them.

That night when the kids had left and Mallory was home and in bed, I walked into every room like I’d never been in this house before. All of it suddenly felt foreign and lifeless. I went into the kitchen to get the coffee ready for the morning when I saw something on the counter. Every night when Mark went to bed he wore ear plugs and a black sock over his eyes. He was serious about sleep and at some point I got him an eye mask but he didn’t like the elastic and went back to his trusty black sock. He didn’t move much in his sleep and the sock would stay on his face throughout the night. To me this was an odd and amusing nightly ritual of his and when he laid that sock over his eyes it meant he was done talking until morning. There laying on the kitchen counter was his black sock with his ear plugs on top. That meant he had taken them downstairs when he tried to sleep and placed them on the counter before he left the house for good. For whatever reason I grabbed my phone and took a picture of it and his sandals. I don’t know why. Maybe to document that he was just here, maybe to document life and death in a span of hours.

There have been many moments like that. A bar of his half-used soap in the shower, his toothbrush in the drawer, a pair of his reading glasses that he would set on the gas meter while he was grilling and reading a paper at the same time, his garden shoes on the back porch, notebooks from his office with page after page of his handwriting, his business cards in my wallet. On my job if any student I dealt with had an interest in science I’d ask them what their future plans were. If they seemed uncertain or in need of advice I’d give them one of Mark’s cards and say, “Call him and tell him that you got his phone number from me and that I said he could give you some help.” The student would always be rather skeptical and I’d say, “Just call him. He’ll talk to you.”

Those traces of him always take me by surprise. How could he be here and then gone? Vanished from my life without a farewell, a bedside I love you as he lay dying, a parting with sweet sorrow. Instead I sat in an interrogation room in a police station with my legs shaking uncontrollably and heard that my husband was dead. It was traumatic to hear those words, it’s still traumatic to relive it. Yet in the two years since everything suddenly changed, there are still traces of Mark’s vibrant life tucked in drawers and closets, the garage, the backyard, the basement.

For my birthday the year Mark died, he and I went shopping for me to pick something out and then have lunch. Mark rarely shopped so he was always amazed at what was out there. I used to think that he should get out more so this retail stuff wasn’t such a wonder to him, but his idea of getting out involved a bike, the lab, a creek, or the woods and he was better off for it. We went into store after store and I wasn’t feeling any of it, but when we were wandering around J. Crew he found a bag for work. Mark used everything until it was literally falling apart and he had been having a hard time finding a replacement for the bag he had that was safety-pinned together. It had to sling over his shoulder and rest on his back for his bike ride in but he never wanted a backpack. He found the perfect bag that day and since he never bought himself much it was always sweet to see the excitement he got from finding something just right.

Three weeks after Mark died and his stuff was released from the police department, I went to pick it up and there was his blue work bag. I brought it home and opened it up to see pens and business cards from work trips he went on, notebooks, allergy meds, the usual kind of stuff. I set it on the chair where it stayed for the longest time. Every day I looked at it and thought the same thing. Remember when you got that bag, Mark? When we were out for my birthday? You loved that bag. How could you just leave it?

That bag sat on the chair for months and was bursting at the seams with our life – the happiness, the arguments, the joy and the frustration, the time I had something on my kidney that a doctor said was a suspicious mass. I fell asleep when we got home from the hospital and Mark went in the backyard and cried then came inside and laid down next to me. When I woke up he said, “This has to be okay. You cannot leave me, Kath, you just can’t.” It turned out to be no big deal and we breathed the biggest sigh of relief together and now here I am without my husband and every day I think the same thing.

You loved me. How could you ever believe that it was okay to leave me?