Month: November 2020

Many years ago Mark and I went to Spain for a conference he was attending. We had three young kids at the time and it wasn’t cheap for me to fly there with him, but he came home one day and said he’d booked the flight despite me repeatedly saying we couldn’t afford it. His mom came into town to take care of the kids and when we got to Atlanta and checked in for our flight to Barcelona, we found out we’d been upgraded to first class. Everything from that point on was perfect and there is something about exploring a new city with someone you love that elevates all the senses. We would go on other great trips but there was never another quite like that. Maybe it was because it was our first international trip together, or maybe it was two young, exhausted parents who found their way back to each other in a beautiful place. Whatever the magic was, whenever we made travel plans it always circled back to that trip. “Spain,” we would both say sighing. “Nothing will ever beat Spain.”

But whenever I talked about it to anyone else and was asked what part of Spain we’d been to, I could never remember. Over and over I’d have to ask Mark. He was like an encyclopedia. He had an ability to remember a multitude of specific facts on many topics with ease. A year before he died we saw Dunkirk, and all the way home he spoke in detail about WWI – things that were completely unknown to me. When I asked him how he could remember so much with such accuracy, he said that whenever he found out something interesting he’d sink into it. While there is plenty I find interesting, too, I never seemed to be able to retain anything with the ease he did.

Mark wasn’t so great at remembering other things like parent-teacher conferences, signing up for health insurance during open enrollment until the very last day, dinner plans, or significant dates. For that he relied on me. The day after he died when a close friend came to the house, he told us that he and Mark had made plans to meet for lunch. Mark never showed up. They rescheduled. Mark never showed up. Finally, on the third try Mark remembered to meet him. His mom would often say that he lacked common sense but that wasn’t the case at all. His mind was in constant motion with plans and experiments and papers and grants. He was the juggler of many professional demands, I kept track of the rest.

One time we got invited to a dinner party at the home of Mark’s boss. There was a big meeting in town and Mark said there were some heavy hitters in the science world that would be there. We assumed that other people in the department would also be attending but when we got there it was only us and a table full of people we didn’t know. Mark could handle that kind of stuff with ease. Me? Not so much. I was mostly a stay-at-home mom at the time which was the kiss of death to any conversation with a bunch of scientists, but over the years I learned to hold my own even if it was pretty shaky. After dinner, the conversation of the table turned to wine and our dinner companions knew their years, their barrels, their oakiness, their grapes. I was amazed at all the information these passionate wine drinkers had, and said, “So how do you know all this? Do you google it?”

There is a faux pas and then there is a FAUX PAS. Everybody stopped talking and looked at me. Turns out it’s rather insulting to ask a table full of people who do research for a living if their vast knowledge comes from Google. Mark leaned over and whispered, “Thanks for ruining my career.” I recovered quickly and said, “I mean, of course, you couldn’t possibly learn all this from a basic internet search. I was kidding. Ha. Ha. Ha.” Then I asked some dopey questions about grapes in an effort to pull my husband’s career out of the flaming dumpster that I set ablaze. All the way home, Mark imitated me. “Do you goooooooogle it?,” he kept saying and we laughed until we cried that two box-o-wine hacks like us got an invite to such a classy party. “The good thing about wine coming out of a cardboard box,” I said to him, “is that you never have to worry about it being too oaky.”

I recently read that when you lose a spouse it’s like burning a library down. That is true and it often feels debilitating to not have Mark here to rely on for so many things. I am winging life, and it feels as awkward as my attempt at dinner party conversation with a bunch of people out of my league. I forget things, I overthink things, I sleep too much or not at all, I buy too many clothes to fill the gaping hole where my husband used to be, I cry, I rage, I’m hopeful, I’m depressed, I walk around this house like it’s some kind of labyrinth in hopes that the last time I circle, Mark will be there to tell me again that he married up, that I’ll always be his girl. My grief job requires me to untangle myself from a lifetime of us so that I can move forward, and most days I have a bad attitude about it.

As for Spain, I asked Mark so many times where we went that I put it in my notes on my phone. We went to Costa Brava, and like the day he ended his life, I remember everything about it. Ever since then my memories are in a constant battle to be acknowledged, so much so that I am always confused as to whether I am dancing with the angels or dancing with the devil. The only thing that is certain is that it’s impossible to learn the steps.

There is a popular book that has been around for several years called The Body Keeps The Score. It is about the complexity of traumatic experiences and how the body physically reacts to the stress. I had heard about it long before Mark died and thought it sounded interesting until I had to live with it.

Three years ago last week, Mark and I were in Portugal. He had been invited to an international conference to give a talk, and because he’d been there before and was close friends with another scientist, he also gave a talk at the University of Lisbon. Mark had traveled extensively in his career, and Portugal was his second favorite place, only slightly behind Greece. Mark wanted me to go with him on all his work trips which were normally 2-3 days, but I had a job, and though part-time, I didn’t want to take advantage of my boss by asking off too much.

But Portugal? I’d shamelessly beg for time off to go there.

Mark was bursting with happiness the second we arrived in Lisbon, it was as if the city was a gift he couldn’t wait for me to unwrap. With its cobblestone streets and century old buildings, it was stunning in history and beauty. Mark quickly figured out the subway system and every day we jumped on a train to some new adventure. We’d walk for miles and return to our hotel late, wake up and eat a big breakfast in the morning, and then figure out what we felt like seeing and doing. Sometimes Mark could hang out with me all day, sometimes for a few hours, other days only for dinner, but I figured my way around the neighborhood where our hotel was, and would wander off by myself when he was busy.

Mark’s friend, Claudio, insisted on giving us a tour one night and he drove us to see castles, a monastery built in the 1500s, a custard tart shop that had been around since the 1800s, historical places of conflict, the burial grounds of poets. There is nothing better than seeing a city through the eyes of someone who is immensely proud of his homeland. When we were done touring, Claudio took us to a restaurant, where over tapas Mark would meet his graduate students and launch into professor mode for details on the work they were doing. Two days later we would leave that beautiful city to head back home, unpack from that trip, work a few days, then pack the car and drive to Illinois to celebrate Thanksgiving.

Mark loved Thanksgiving and being around my big family, but for the first time the Fishers would be minus one as our youngest daughter who lived in LA wasn’t able to get off work to join us. As a couple, Mark and I spent more holidays and special occasions without family than with, and though we managed to survive just fine, I wanted Mallory with us. During the eight hour car ride I texted her a few times to see how her plans were shaping up for the next day and if she needed any recipes. She’d cheerfully respond back each time, and though it wasn’t like having her with us, she seemed good with her plans and I stopped worrying. We arrived at my sister and brother-in-law’s’ house, had dinner and were sitting around talking with them and my mom when my other sister walked in the door with her girls.

We all got up to hug them and behind my sister and her daughter was not her other daughter but Mallory. It took a few seconds for all of us to register what was going on but when it did we screamed and cried and laughed, and Mark and I grabbed that kid and squeezed the daylights out of her. Unbeknownst to us, my sister had called Mallory weeks before and somehow she managed to swap some shifts to get a few days off. Ann and her husband arranged the flight and paid for it, and while I was texting Mal in the car in Iowa, she was hanging out with her cousins in Wrigleyville. I was so grateful to my sister and her husband, and would find out later that when my brother-in-law came the next day for dinner, Mark went up to him with tears in his eyes and thanked him many times over for bringing our daughter to us for the holiday.

Over these past two weeks, my body has diligently kept a scorecard on these memories. It remembers how good it used to be until trauma rewired it to the point that everything often feels like fight or flight. In the midst of this scorekeeping, though, are the tiniest fireflies of light blinking on and off, on and off. The beauty of a centuries old church in Europe, the taste of milk and coffee at the hotel breakfast buffet every morning, falling asleep on my husband’s shoulder in the airport because we went non-stop for five days straight, and the joy that Wednesday night when our Mallie Bee unexpectedly walked in the door.

Around the world this year loss has so much devastated company, while in the dark night sky souls quietly blink on and off and on and off. From the ground we hope our prayers reach high enough for them to know that despite the aching emptiness and pain, we are grateful that for the shortest of moments they belonged here with us.

Happy Thanksgiving.

When I was a little girl my best friend lived across the street. She would often invite me to spend the night and I’d pack a small bag with my pajamas and toothbrush and proudly walk over with my mom for my overnight adventure. At some point during the night, I’d get homesick and start to cry and Nancy’s dad would wrap me up in a blanket and carry me home to my mom who would be waiting for me by the back door. This happened over and over, and I don’t know why my mom or Nancy’s dad just didn’t give up, but we all kept trying and after many attempts I was finally able to sleep there all night.

Such was the early start of someone who preferred home to most other places. When Mark and I were first married we lived in a basement apartment in Champaign, Illinois, and we would find out within days that there was a massive roach problem. During that time Mark developed a deep and long-lasting hatred for the smell of RAID because I used it so much that he said he could smell it from the parking lot. It got so bad that we had to put baggies over our toothbrushes because the roaches would sit on top of them and eat the dried toothpaste. Six months of that and with both of us teetering on some kind of breakdown, we were able to get out of our lease and move to less creepy digs. I never considered that crappy apartment with its constant parade of cucaraches a home, but Mark? Mark was home.

From there we lived in three different townhouses in three different states before we found our one and only house. I’ve always loved this house and told Mark that often. He loved other things more and wasn’t nearly as enthusiastic as me. Nevertheless, he would proudly show it and the yard off and say, “It’s all Kath. She’s the one who’s made everything look so great.” Now without him here, I don’t even know what to call it. It’s no longer “our house” and saying “my house” sticks in my throat and burns with loss. It doesn’t feel so much like a home but more like a bed and breakfast with phantom hosts.

Last week I had to go to the med center for a dermatology appointment. The fact that I could get in after calling two days earlier was some kind of miracle and I was feeling pretty good about taking care of something that I’d neglected for two years. That didn’t last long as the campus came into view and I started crying before I made it to the parking garage. On prior late afternoon appointments I’d have, I would call Mark when I was done to see if he could meet me for coffee. He always had some fire to put out and would say he wished he could but that he was too busy. I’d be disappointed and say, “Or we could grab an early dinner and you could get those chicken wings you love, but if you’re too busy that’s okay. Maybe another time.” He’d tell me to hold on, that maybe he could hurry and finish things up, that he’d meet me at the back of his building in twenty minutes. I’d park by the loading dock and wait for him and he’d come running out the back door, get in the car, kiss me, and tell me what a great idea I had. All the while I’d congratulate myself for using the ace-in-my-pocket-chicken-wings that he’d fall for every time.

At my appointment the nurse kept looking at me and said that I looked really familiar to him. I said he probably had me mixed up with someone else but I wondered if maybe he was on one of the buses that came from the med center for Mark’s funeral. “Maybe you saw me in a church two years ago,” I wanted to say. “When I stood in front of a couple hundred people and talked about the life of my husband and my voice had only the slightest crack at the end. How I told stories of how funny and passionate he was, how I begged everyone to remember how he lived rather than how he died, how I asked them to tell our kids stories about their dad because they were looking at me in the front row and all I really wanted to say to them was that I was so goddamn sorry that I wasn’t able to keep him here for them.” But instead of saying all that I shoved a fingernail into the palm of my hand to keep from crying as he kept looking at me and saying, “I swear I’ve met you.”

That afternoon I got three pre-cancerous spots frozen off the side of my face. A different nurse said I got the award for strongest patient of the day because I never flinched. “People always flinch,” he said. “You were perfectly still and a dozen shots of liquid nitrogen to the face just about makes everyone jump off the table.”

“I’ve been through worse,” I said. Then I walked to the parking garage, paid my parking fee, and drove away from Mark’s other home without him running out of his building towards me, without him getting in the car and tilting my head to take a long look at what they did, without him saying, “I’m glad you took care of that so you’ll be around to keep bribing me with chicken wings.”

Ever since Mark died, I rarely go to the grocery store that is five minutes from my house. In the beginning there were too many people I would run into who were worried about me and I didn’t want to start crying about my life over 10# bags of potatoes. In contrast, there were also people I’d run into that knew me well, who worked extra hard at avoiding me, and could never say a simple, “I’m sorry about your husband.” Sometimes it was uncomfortable and hurtful, other times it angered me, but ultimately it was something that was fixable if I chose to shop further away and that is what I’ve done ever since.

Recently some friends were telling me about someone we knew whose husband died. He’d been ill for awhile and because our only connection were kids that were the same age, I had no idea because I hadn’t seen her in years. Whenever I hear that someone has lost their partner it pains me greatly. I know how hard it is, and whether expected or not, the death of a spouse upends every part of one’s life.

Last week I ran into this woman at a clothing store. She didn’t recall who I was and I told her that my oldest and her son were in the same grade together in elementary school. She had a blank look on her face so I told her my name and my daughter’s name and she said, “Oh yes, now I remember.” I understood as I know that utter confusion about basic stuff after your husband dies, sometimes I still have it. As a precursor to acknowledging the changes in her life, I said that I saw that her house had sold because I drive past it in the way to work. She looked at me and said, “No, actually we’re in the same house we’ve always been in.” I apologized and said I thought she lived on such-and-such a street and she told me where she lived and I wondered how I didn’t know that because I thought she lived in the same house for years.

All the while we were talking I kept telling myself, “Just say you’re sorry about her husband. You can’t keep talking about this dumb stuff and not acknowledge that her husband died.” But for the life of me I could not get the words out of my mouth and I thought about those times in the grocery store when people I knew avoided me so they wouldn’t have to say anything. I often labeled them as cowards and to my disappointment I was behaving the exact same way. We talked about the cost of housing in our area, and as she was talking I noticed she was wearing her wedding ring like I had for nearly a year after Mark died. I achingly remembered how hard that was to take off.

She then started talking about her and her husband walking in their neighborhood. Walking in your neighborhood? I know I was off my rocker for a long time after Mark died but I never thought about walking my dead husband around the neighborhood. And while she was talking I was trying to visualize getting the urn off the mantel and saying, “Time for our daily walk, honey!!!”, then tucking it under my arm and chatting up the fall colors to a jar of ashes.

Meanwhile, the Cap’n of the Neuron Firing Squad started pulling alarms and was screaming, “ABORT!!! ABORT!!!” and I was telling him to STOP YELLING AT ME because I needed to concentrate on the timing of my expression of condolences and he was saying, “NO!!! NO!!! NO!!! YOU. NEED. TO. SHUT. YOUR. MOUTH.” While these two conversations were happening simultaneously (which happens all day every day), I took a long look at this woman again and realized she wasn’t at all who I thought she was. Not only that, we had never been friendly towards each other and that was confirmed when she commented on a shirt and said she would never wear something like that and I had just bought it.

While the unsaid often hangs awkwardly in the air like an unmoving cloud, what hangs even more awkwardly is when you’re about to offer to have coffee with the wrong person to talk about dead husbands when hers is very much alive. Thanks to Covid, I was wearing a mask that hid the shock on my face as I narrowly escaped barreling headfirst into a hot mess of my own making.

And that shirt I bought? Of course she wouldn’t have gotten it. It had cougar widow vibe written all over it.

In the aftermath of Mark’s death, every single day felt like I was lugging around a trunk of sadness like a first class passenger on the Titanic. Instead of being able to pass it off to a steward like a wealthy heiress, I had to carry it wherever I went. It was heavy, cumbersome, and impossible not to notice. It filled every room I entered and the size of it sucked the air out of everything.

Despite that there were many people who were able to walk around that trunk like it wasn’t even there. They would tell me that they knew things would get better, that I was so strong, that at least I had those grandchildren of mine, that thank goodness I had a job to go to, that I was young enough and vibrant enough to find another husband, that time would heal this because when their grandma died time healed them. A teller at my bank told me her husband died and that Jesus was her husband now and he could be mine, too, if I only asked him. I wondered how the sex part of the Jesus-is-my-husband worked and would have brought that up if only I didn’t feel like running out of there screaming.

In all of those instances I wanted to ask, “But can’t you see my sorrow? Can’t you see that big trunk with so much love and humor, the three beautiful kids, the adventures, the silliness and the profound, the talks over coffee and dinner, the celebrations of birthdays, anniversaries, the jumping for joy when the NIH approved a grant? Do you not see that all of that is weighted in sadness and I never get to put it down? That I’m so tired and it’s so heavy and it’s right there in front of you and you keep pretending it’s not. That if you could just pick up the handle on the side and help me carry it for just a minute it would be so much more helpful than trying to Dr. Phil me out of this grief.”

Six years ago when Mark and I went to Montana we stopped in Missoula on the way to Glacier National Park. We had just eaten breakfast and were walking to a bookstore when I noticed the wing of a butterfly on the sidewalk. I reacted like I’d won the lottery. That kind of stuff always confused the hell out of Mark, my excitement over such a dumb discovery. “Can you believe this,” I said to him. “That all these people have walked by this butterfly wing and not seen it? That it’s still intact?” I carefully picked it up, wrapped it in a Kleenex and put it in my purse. It felt like an omen to me and when I got home I put it in the tiniest frame. I loved looking at that thing, the colors, the perfectness of it, that it was on the sidewalk waiting to be acknowledged by the right person.

Two years later we would take a road trip to drive our youngest back to California and Mark wanted to stop at a meteor crater in Arizona. We spent quite awhile looking at it and then he and Mallory climbed some rickety steps to an observation deck. I didn’t trust those steps and went into the gift shop. I had never been much of a rock person until I set foot in there and suddenly wanted them all. I was balancing a few in my hand and trying to decide what I wanted when I dropped one. It broke in half and the sound made everyone stop and look at me. The person working there said it was fine and that I didn’t need to pay for it but I thought I did. It felt like the two halves of Mark and me that I could make whole with some glue, but I wondered if maybe that wasn’t an omen too, that brokenness might be my future. Seven months later Mark would be dead and broken has defined my life since then.

These days the trunk of sorrow has been reduced to a large suitcase. It’s less heavy and not so cumbersome, but there are many, many times I still ram my leg into it and it hurts as much as those early days. The sadness stays tightly rolled inside and will always be there but it doesn’t coat as much as it used to. Now when someone notices my suitcase, when they say Mark’s name or tell me a story about him, when I can trust that they won’t tell me to look on the bright side or advise me how to live my life, I will zip open one of the side pockets, carefully unwrap my treasures and say, “But look at these broken things I saved. Aren’t they beautiful?”

In one of my therapy sessions my counselor told me that as the shock and devastation of Mark’s death subsided and time moved forward, that something different would takes its place. I longed for something different than the constant pain, and while I am receptive to everything about the subject, there are other times when my mind can only take in so much information before it waves the white flag and says, “If you could not tell me one more thing until I figure out how to get myself up off the floor that’d be great.” But things post death come fast and furious and with the constant reminder that you are in charge of nothing.

There was never a day in early grief that was not terrifying, but it kept Mark front and center right next to me all the time. I constantly tried to think like him, often asking myself, “What would Mark do if he was here?” I was the designated pinch hitter for him at events at the med center, showing up for everything I was invited to and then sobbing in the parking garage afterwards. I stayed in touch with his graduate students to encourage them to keep plowing towards the finish line of their PhD. I took them out to lunch at Christmas and gave them gift cards like he did every holiday season. I tried to figure out investments that wouldn’t be too risky because Mark was never risky with our money. I talked to his old and dear friends when they, too, struggled with his loss and we would be on the phone for hours. I listened to the kids when they were making career decisions and tried to balance my thoughts with what Mark would advise. I never stopped trying to fill his shoes, to prove that though an incredibly poor replacement for him, I could be a decent stand-in because I knew him better than anyone. All the while that he remained first and foremost, I drifted further and further from myself. Without even consciously deciding, my mission after Mark’s death was to make sure his life came before my own.

The girl he loved never lacked self-esteem, she liked what she liked and never cared what anybody thought, she was fun and upbeat and could tell a great story over a cup of coffee, dinner, or glass of wine, she enthusiastically loved all things girl and shared her finds with everyone, she was a creative gypsy that moved from one thing to the next with ease, the one who caught the eye of that roofer and never looked back because he told her every day she kept getting better with age, the one who left for work each morning like her pockets were stuffed with sunshine.

A few weeks ago I got an email about picking out a new spot for a memorial bench outside the building Mark worked at the med center. I had gone this summer and met with the landscapers who were putting in a new garden where the bench would be included. The bench is from donations from friends, family, and colleagues, and so the biochemistry department has deferred to me as to where it should go. I looked at the drawings and picked a spot beside the pond, had a long talk afterwards with Mark’s closest friend at work, and before I left looked back at Mark’s office window and felt my stoic walls caving in. Six weeks later the pond was axed, they needed me to pick out a new spot for the bench, and a date was agreed upon to meet with the landscapers again. Two hours before I was supposed to be there I emailed and said I couldn’t do it. I could not stand outside that building again, I could not even think about the absurdity of a memorial bench let alone decide where it was supposed to go and they could figure it out without my input.

That’s when I knew the early grief was subsiding, when I no longer considered what Mark’s thoughts might be before my own. I understood that the chasm had arrived, widening the space between then and now, between the life I cherished with him beside me and the life I now had. It is a different kind of pain, less terrifying but deep and in places that I thought had scabbed over. I understood how loss makes time abruptly stop for some people, how I’d never fault anyone for never being able to move forward, how choosing to stay in the the storybook tale (whether real or imagined) was so much easier than the alternative of filling the space of a blank future.

***

Once upon a time a handsome boy and a lovely girl fell head over heels for each other. They lived a charmed life for decades until another block got added to the Jenga tower that the handsome boy had been building in his mind since he was a boy. It was already precarious and leaning, but then it tilted the tiniest bit and all came crashing down, and he believed he should gather up the pieces and leave before the sun rose so the shattered remains wouldn’t hurt his wife and kids and so many others. She had no idea that he had been spending years building that tower, so when he suddenly left the only thing she was certain of was that her heart was broken. It would take her a very long time to realize that with every breathe she took after that her badly damaged heart was being mended, stapled, glued, taped, and put back together again. It would never be what it once was but it beat steadily which meant it still worked. In order for it to keep working there was one condition.

The lovely girl had to agree to stop being a stand-in for anyone’s life but her own.