Month: December 2020

When I was a little Catholic school girl in my plaid uniform, I learned in religion class that dead babies did not go to heaven or hell, but rather to limbo. The babies landed in limbo because they had the misfortune and bad timing to die prior to being baptized. Since an unbaptized soul couldn’t jump the line and get to heaven, the babies went to a different place as you wouldn’t want them with the drunks, the tax cheats, and the philanderers in purgatory. My mom would tell us all the time to “Pray for those poor souls in purgatory and the babies in limbo,” so it seemed perfectly legit that there was a cloud of floating babies that were on pause for eternity. I prayed extra hard for them as it seemed to me that those sketchy souls waiting to plead their case in purgatory had a better shot at making it to heaven than non-annointed infants, and mostly because I was afraid a limbo baby would drop from the sky and land on me when I was riding my bike.

Since Mark died, it feels as if I’ve been living in limbo, like I’m on a cloud looking at my life but not in it, as it doesn’t resemble anything I’ve ever known. Every morning when I wake up, I open my eyes, look around the room and the light filtering in through the blinds, and think, “Oh you’re alive.” It’s not a good thing or a bad thing, but an acknowledgement that I’m still here which is stunning progress. In the immediate aftermath of Mark’s death, I was certain I was dead and nobody had the heart to tell me that I needed to move along because I was taking up space meant for someone fresher, happier, and easier to be around.

On Christmas morning I woke up in an empty house which was a first for me and not something that will make the year-end highlight list. The kids came over later in the day, we opened gifts, had dinner, and zoomed with Mallory and her boyfriend. It was the quintessential pandemic holiday, and unlike the previous two years, I wasn’t engulfed in loss and on the verge of a sobbing meltdown. Besides the reminder from my mom to not forget about the babies in limbo, I learned from her that on the extra hard days you get dressed up like you care, put some lipstick on, and get on with it because nobody likes being around someone who wears their sadness like a heavy, black cloak. But at the end of the day I couldn’t wait for everyone to leave so I could have a good cry. I’d held it in for days and went to bed like I woke up, alone and a little scared of the future, and missing a husband and a life I loved.

The next day I woke up with the light filtering in through the blinds and told myself I was alive like I do every morning. Thankfully, these last days of this harsh year are nearly over as December gets torn from the calendar to make way for pages unmarked by celebration or tragedy. I happen to know a bit about years that are harsh and how they can make you spiral to the darkest of places. I also know about a new day blinking me awake with the light of a sunrise and asking me to try again.

I’m going to be okay. So are you.

Happy new year.

My dad died at the same age as Mark in the same month, and my mom was the same age as me when death and grief came barreling into her. For many years prior to my dad’s death, it was a tradition for Mark and me to go to Chicago for Christmas. When it was just the two of us it was a pretty easy thing to do, but it got much more complicated to pull off when we added three kids into the equation.

After my dad’s death I couldn’t bear the thought of my mom waking up alone on Christmas Day, and so it became more important to me that we keep up this tradition despite how insane it was to pack up all the gifts, suitcases and tote bags, and drive all day, sometimes through harrowing winter weather, to be with her and the rest of my family. This went on for years until I waved the white flag and said “no more.” Mark and the kids were mad at me because this is what we always did, so I suggested we try for Thanksgiving instead and see how that went.

My mom’s house was small and always too warm, so Mark, Maggie, and Will started staying at my sister’s house a few miles away while Mallory and I stayed with my mom. My mom loved the company, and as we settled in for the night, she’d flip through the channels and every year come across The Sound of Music. She would pour us some of her homemade Irish cream and we’d sit on the couch sipping a nightcap and watch a movie we’d seen dozens of times. Towards the end of the movie, when the VonTrapp family is hiding from the Nazis in the abbey, I once said to my mom, “I’m always so scared for them at this part. No matter how many times I’ve watched this I feel like I can’t breathe until they escape.” “Oh, I know,” my mom said, “I can’t imagine keeping seven kids quiet for that long,” and as a mother of six she had some street cred behind that statement.

This year my mom moved from independent care to the memory care unit of a retirement village as dementia causes her to slowly fade from herself and all of us. Due to Covid it has been impossible for my siblings to see her except through her bedroom window, and for my brother and I who aren’t close by, hard to schedule some kind of phone visit. A few weeks ago, I got an aide’s cell phone number and texted her to get a FaceTime call. She told my mom that she had a big surprise for her and showed her the phone. “Oh it’s my daughter,” my mom said, “that’s my daughter.” The rest of that very short call didn’t go well as she was having trouble getting words out. I talked mostly to the aide and said that my mom was ready to go, that she’d seen and done enough in her life to warrant some rest. The aide started crying and said, “Everybody loves her. All her kids and grandkids, you all love her. I wish you called yesterday. She was so chatty and held my hand and we talked and talked.” I can’t remember the last time my mom felt chatty. I wish I could, but like other times of impending loss, there’s no warning bell to signal that this time you’d better pay close attention because what you took for granted will no longer be.

The last time I saw my mom, sat and talked to her, felt her pat my back when she could see that I was so tired of being sad, was in February. Things shut down a month later, and our Mallory, who sat beside us during our annual watching of The Sound of Music, now lives in Los Angeles. Her plans to come home for Thanksgiving with her boyfriend were scrapped, and the last time any of us shared her presence with a glass of wine over dinner was in March. This Christmas seems like a gathering of beloved traditions and heaving them into a dumpster as a final stripping down to everything but the basics. But it’s also the story of a young, frightened couple that followed a star to Bethlehem to have their baby, and the VonTrapps escaping from their beloved homeland of Austria. In the breadth of this time that has seen so much death and darkness, I don’t think that the weary world rejoices, but maybe it stops for a longer pause to pay attention to who is here, who is there, and who always watches over us.

Merry Christmas.

In January it will be two years that I have had a standing appointment on Monday afternoons with a therapist for grief counseling. I initially thought I’d go one or two times so that I could say to everyone who suggested I needed help, “See, I went and now I’m fine so you can quit nagging me.” I found this woman through a friend who works in the psychology department at the med center. Her boss knew Mark and gave me a couple of names. The first person I called said he wasn’t taking any new patients but that his partner was and she was very good. I called her and we set up an appointment. Her office was located in the shopping and entertainment district and I came directly from work an hour early. As I wandered around wasting time, I passed someone on the sidewalk. He said he loved my shirt, I said thank you, and as he walked by he turned around and said, “All of it, the shirt, the hair, even the sunglasses. You’re looking good today.” I sometimes think he was sent on a mission from beyond because more than anything I wanted to get in my car, drive home, and forget this whole therapy idea. But that very brief encounter gave me the shot of confidence I needed to walk into a therapist’s office, tell my story between sobs, and look into the eyes of this woman I just met to see them tearing up at the heartache of it all. In the midst of this sad retelling of that September day, and because my life is an ongoing comical shit show, on the sidewalk below were a group of Hare Krishnas chanting and banging on drums. I wanted to open the window of her office and scream at them to shut the fuck up but was afraid she’d think I had raging anger issues which I did but was hoping to keep on the down low. The following appointment had a lot to do with my mother who was not the problem so I left thinking that this therapy thing was worthless and not going to fix anything. I was smart enough, though, to know that if I quit with her that I would never seek out anyone else and I’d be in trouble.

I kept showing up, making my copayments, pouring my heart out on her loveseat every Monday afternoon. When everything was so dark, when I prayed every night to not wake up in the morning, she looked at me and promised me things would get better. When I cried over the loss of so many connections that we had as a couple that just vanished, she told me there would be new connections. When I said there was nothing in my future but utter and terrifying blankness, she told me I would carve out my own future. These weekly appointments and the work of grief have been hard, incredibly hard. There are times that it feels like a weight lifted, but more often I cannot speak to anyone for hours afterwards.

At the end of a recent session, I told her how Mark saved everything. It made me crazy. He had stacks of paper everywhere. He’d print articles to read and make notes in the margins, he kept every business card he ever got, he saved spirals from college with every page filled with notes, he saved scientific journals from thirty years ago. If he got a free notebook at a conference it was filled with equations and scribbling. His office was even worse. Besides saving all of those same things, he saved everything from every class he ever taught, every book he ever used. When cleaning it out with help from his boss and a friend, we found attendance sheets and notes on lectures, who participated and what they had to offer, a drawer of thank you notes from students. There was a CV from a colleague when he was applying for a position. Noted in the corner Mark wrote “my favorite.” Joe got hired and did end up being Mark’s favorite, so much so that I asked him to speak at the funeral.

I told her how I saved Mark’s love letters to me the first year he was in graduate school. It was 1982 and there were no cell phones, no texting, it was how we communicated between the times when we would see each other when I drove to Champaign, Illinois to his studio apartment for the weekend. Those letters have been such a gift to me since he died. To read his words feels like he’s talking to me, to see how out of his league he felt early on and then to watch the arc of his career as it rose. Those early days of love and uncertainty seem ancient and like yesterday.

In all the stacks of paper I have gone through, I have found a couple of cards to him from me but not a single letter I wrote from that year we were apart. I know I wrote a lot because I had two hours on a train every day going back and forth to work. So where were they? Why was everything related to his career saved but not the letters I wrote where I told him how much I missed him? How I loved him and couldn’t wait to start our married life?

My therapist explained that those things he saved from his career were proof of his worth, what he did for his job that he felt like he earned. And he did earn them, he worked hard for all of that. So why didn’t he save the things that were from me? Did he think my love for him wasn’t deserved? The emotional weight of those letters may have been too much for Mark to hold on to, as if he would never be able to hold up his end and wasn’t worthy of any of it, and that possibility knocked me off my feet for days afterward.

The minute I sat at that table at Denny’s on our first date and looked into those eyes of his it was enough. When he laughed at my jokes it was enough. When he got up in the middle of the night and changed the diapers of all of our babies and brought them to me to nurse it was enough. When he sat next to me in the bleachers of a track meet or a darkened auditorium to watch a dance recital, loaded the car with sleeping bags and tents for a campout, or lugged boxes into dorm rooms it was enough. When he walked in the door from work, from biking, from mowing the lawn it was enough.

For him to leave this earth not knowing he deserved love or his life is a heartache I will always struggle to carry. The swiftness with which everything emotionally tanked for Mark still shocks and scares me, and those eyes I miss so much, that danced with humor and joy and passion, went blank and lifeless by demons that kept their claws dug in so deeply that they kicked a lifetime of love out of the way. So I keep going to therapy every Monday afternoon to make sure I stay one step ahead of the voices that tell me I’m guilty, that it was my job to save him and I failed, and at the end of every session I wonder the same thing.

For all that is holy, Mark, how could you ever believe that you weren’t enough for me?

***for Eileen***

This neighborhood of mine is full of cape cods that were built in the 1940s and surrounded by trees, lots of trees. It was the appeal of these old homes and well-established trees that drew Mark and I to this area and why we wanted to live here. Those trees, though, can cause a lot of problems. Many years ago we had an epic ice storm in October. The branches were heavy with leaves that hadn’t fallen yet and then got coated in ice. When I took the trash out in the late afternoon, all I heard from every direction was snapping limbs. It was terrifying, and Mark and I were awake all night listening to branches crashing to the ground as the sky lit up with blown transformers all around us. We would be without power for five days until an army of lineman cleared brush and climbed pole after pole to restore power.

While the fall isn’t usually that dramatic, it does bring an avalanche of leaves that seem to never let up. Every weekend, homeowners are out raking, blowing, and bagging leaves. Mark and I tackled it year after year, and when the kids got older we made them help us. At first it would be a fun kickoff to the fall season, but that got old quickly when after a marathon raking day the yard looked no different 24 hours later.

A few blocks away is a house that never has any leaves in their yard. I first noticed it because it was the only house on the street where you could see green grass, and then I got kind of obsessed with it. How did they go through the entire fall season without a single leaf on their lawn? How did they not have them clustered around the bushes and blown against the fence?

It was so odd to me that I needed to talk to Mark about it, and when I did he asked me why I cared. “I care,” I said, “because every yard in every neighborhood in this entire town is covered with leaves but that one. You don’t think that’s strange? Doesn’t it make you think of a Dateline show with Keith Morrison asking in his husky, doubting voice, “Where did the leaves go?” Besides Mark having no idea who Keith Morrison was, there was only so much of me he had space for in his head and The House With No Leaves was encroaching on more important stuff. One day I made him drive by to see for himself and still he did not care, so I was a lone wolf trying to figure out what was going down inside that perfect house. Weeks passed by until Mark came home from the hardware store one day and said, “I went past that house and you’re right. There’s never a leaf anywhere in the whole yard. It’s weird,” and I loved him so for finally noticing that something was very wrong in Mayberry. That opened the door for me to tell him that I think this couple must sit in their living room and watch for leaves to fall and Leaf Man screams, “MOTHER!!! We’ve got a trespasser,” then goes outside, shakes his fist, locks and loads his leafblower, and blows that thing to kingdom come. How this gets repeated over and over and over with the maple trees and the oak trees, and Mother drinks all day because he goes off the deep end every autumn and no matter what she says he rides that rail all the way to Crazytown. “Why do you think it’s him?” Mark asked me. “Maybe she’s the one obsessed with the leaves.” I asked him how many women he’d ever seen with a leafblower in their hands. “I’ll answer that for you,” I said before he had a chance to open his mouth. “None. Speaking for all women we hate leafblowers. We hate the sound of them, we hate men’s obsession with them, we hate the minute the garage door opens and that thing comes out.” Mark pointed out that we didn’t even own a leaf blower which was true, but I have a fondness for making sweeping generalizations to prove an inaccurate point.

Then winter came along and up the street from the House With No Leaves was a house that was decked out for Christmas. I drove by it many times and my thoughts were always the same. What in the ever loving…….? This house had every kind of Christmas decoration in their yard and on their roof that you could imagine. There were cables running up into the trees with lights wired to them and a star haphazardly dangling from the roof. Every time I drove by I felt like knocking on the door and offering unsolicited advice on behalf of a neighborhood that was dazed and confused. I made Mark drive by it one night on our way home from a party and he asked, “What am I looking at here? I can’t even tell what all this is.” “Right??? “It’s like they go out and shop the after Christmas sales and buy everything that’s left, store it in the garage for months, and then shove it all into the yard every December. There’s no theme. There’s no cohesion. It’s a gigantic Christmas cluster.” Then we laughed and high-fived each other because even that plastic half-price Jesus with Frosty stalking him knew the Fishers were better than everybody else.

The other day I drove down the street of The House With No Leaves. The lawn is still immaculate and the Christmasclusterpalooza House was its annual mess. I wished Mark were around to trade scathing critiques and snarky observations with me, how everyone tends to think I’m so nice, so sweet, so blah blah blah, but he was on to the scam. Now he’s gone and what am I supposed to do if I meet someone that actually buys into the idea that I’m a nice person? How long can I keep that up before I let it slip that there’s landscape architects for a reason? That you don’t hodge podge your boxwoods, roses, and hostas like some outdoor checkerboard game, that just because they’re on sale doesn’t mean you load dozens of them into your SUV.

If I already pre-pity the imaginary oldmanfriend who wants to get to know me better over dinner, a guy who drives a cool vintage truck, has a nice smile and great laugh, who likes to read, and is up on current events, maybe it means that I really am nice.

I’m kidding.

It means Leaf Man and Christmasclusterpalooza Guy have saved a seat for me on the rail to Crazytown.