Month: January 2021

A few months before Mark died, I took a yoga class. For eight weeks I’d leave the house on Tuesday night, and as I was walking out the door Mark would say, “Have a good class,” just like I’d tell him to have a good ride on Saturday mornings. On the second to last class, I was doing a pose and felt a slight muscle pull in my lower back. The rest of the week I babied my back so as not to make it worse, but during the last class I did a pose where you leaned over touching your fingertips to the floor while raising your opposite leg as high as you could against the wall. Should I have done this with my back already hurting? No, but as one of the older women in the class I wasn’t going to sit that one out while those younger seemed to be doing it easily.

It only took a few days for that pulled muscle in my lower back to morph into sciatica that lasted for months. I went to a chiropractor who said in six sessions I’d be back to my old self. After twenty, meeting a deductible, and a lot of copays, I quit. I went to two different physical therapists, had a steady diet of ibuprofen, and after five months without much success, I was finally given a referral to a pain specialist. That appointment was scheduled to take place two days after Mark died, and it wasn’t until January that I rescheduled it. The doctor recommended a steroid treatment and I was so desperate I agreed to it immediately. I was told it wasn’t necessary to bring anyone with me and arrived late in the afternoon on an overcast winter day to a full waiting room. One by one patients were called back, and at one point a nurse asked me my name, my appointment time, and how long I’d been waiting. I gave her the information and she said, “Okay, I just noticed you’ve been sitting here awhile and want to make sure I have you on my patient list.” She left the waiting room and a man sitting directly across from me looked at me and said, “She waltzes in here after all of us and gets priority treatment. Looks like we have reverse discrimination going on here, folks. Guess it pays to be a woman,” and then he snapped the pages of the newspaper he was reading to emphasize that he really was a toxic jerk. I was so taken aback and finding everything about being there too hard that the only defense I could muster was to curl up in my chair in a fetal position.

I did get called back when it was my turn and not a minute sooner, and while the waiting room felt accusatory and ugly, the other side of the doors were frantic and stressful. The portable xray machine for the department wasn’t working and they had spent the day having to share the ER machine making everything backed up. The doctor came in and gave me a two minute briefing before I was wheeled into the procedure room to get multiple shots into both sides of my lower back. I should have been able to go home soon after but my blood pressure was too high to release me and I had to hang around waiting for it to go down. When I got the okay from the nurse that I could leave, I couldn’t get out of that place fast enough.

The next morning I woke up and had no side affects from the shots and no pain, my sciatica was gone. I was so happy and told everyone at work that they’d seen the last of me hobbling around the office with my bad back, and that lasted less than a week before it came roaring back. The doctor had told me that sometimes these shots work with one treatment, sometimes it takes as many as three. It didn’t matter to me. I managed my first health hurdle without Mark while being harassed by a stranger in the waiting room and I had no intention of repeating that experience again.

After death everything is a first-time hurdle and it’s unpredictable what will knock you flat. There’s plenty of warning for the first holidays, the first birthday, the one year anniversary of death, but there are other firsts that don’t come with a warning label. Mark and I were both passionately political from a young age, we followed it all whether it was local or national politics and we loved watching election returns for state races and the presidency. We always voted together, standing outside in a snowstorm for two hours for a presidential election when we moved here because the county didn’t expect a heavy turnout and there weren’t enough voting machines. I expected voting this past November to be hard without Mark, but there were so many volunteers yelling Covid protocol every thirty seconds that it felt like the security line at the airport and I just wanted to cast my vote and leave.

When inauguration day arrived last week and I watched it all day long like I always do, when night fell and Mark should be coming home from work and celebrating with me, when all of a sudden absence was the loudest sound in the room, I felt like a bird that flew into a plate glass window and slid to the ground in a stunned and shaken heap. All the excitement and hope that I felt earlier in the day set with the sun and it turned into a lonely winter night that I didn’t see coming.

It would be days later before it felt like I was returning to myself in a way that I have learned to manage. A new day in a new week presented itself with an unrelenting cold rain which seemed especially fitting, and every unwritten word about Mark’s death remains firmly planted up one side of my spine and down the other.

When I moved bedrooms many months ago, I cleaned out Mark’s dresser. I had been dreading it but it wasn’t as hard as I thought it was going to be. It was mostly underwear and a lot of socks with no mates, bike shorts and jerseys. Mark’s drawers were always a mess, he would put everything together in whatever drawer had room, shove the drawer closed, and then stand for the longest time in front of the dresser in the morning looking for something. I’d be especially helpful and say, “You know, if you spent a few minutes organizing it this wouldn’t be such a big deal.” Then he’d imitate me in an annoying bitchy voice because 1) it turns out I wasn’t being helpful at all, and 2) he could not be shamed into caring about an underwear and sock drawer.

After days of looking at this dresser like it was a some kind of ticking time bomb about to go off, I pulled a drawer out and started sorting everything. Some things needed to be thrown out, others went into a bag to donate. When my son came by to help me move some furniture, he went through everything to see what he wanted. The bags then got moved to the downstairs bedroom where they sat for months. I decided it was crazy to keep walking around them and put the bags in my car to take to a donation center where they have sat in my trunk for a few more months. I didn’t want to look at these bags and I cannot seem to let them go.

This weekend I cleaned the front closet. It is tiny, I cannot believe the five of us squeezed winter coats, boots, hats and gloves into it when the kids were all at home. When it got to just Mark and I in the house, you would think it would have been less of a mess but that was not the case.

I started by pulling everything out and it overflowed the hallway. Then I pulled the shoe basket out and saw a pair of Mark’s sandals. The dumbest sandals, they had a Velcro strap across them and didn’t fit him at all. Mark’s toes hung over the top and I always told him he should throw them away, but they were good for taking the trash out or running outside in the rain to unclog a downspout. Why in death shoes bring you to your knees is beyond me but they do every single time. I pictured him digging in the bottom of the closet to find them, slipping them on his feet, me seeing his toes hanging out, him running out the front door in them.

Him alive in his shoes.

It didn’t get much better after that. Biking gear, his favorite winter hat, his fleece jacket, gloves, the boots he would wear when he and Will went camping, the waterproof boots he wore when he shoveled snow, the gear of life. Like sorting through his drawers, I did the same thing with the contents of the closet, only this time I couldn’t stop crying. All of it was a heaping pile of loss.

Over these past two years I have read many grief books to make sense of this life and to confirm I am not crazy. Some have been good, others of no help at all. One of them said that when it came to going through your loved one’s belongings to use the barf test. If the thought of it makes you want to throw up you’re not ready. If it doesn’t then you are. But then what?

I often daydream of getting in the car and driving with no destination in mind, just leaving and along the way finding exits that say, 20 Miles to A Great Night’s Sleep, Welcome To Your New Life – No Reservations Required, Gas, Showers, and Bottomless Peace Next Exit. I have imagined so many things while harnessed into this rollercoaster, this being a huge misunderstanding and Mark coming back, or a horrible dream that I wake up from and he is asleep next to me. Or the possibility that it could be different and good once again, a different relationship, happier days where joy comes naturally to me like it used to.

It all churns over and over and over, but in every scenario I have yet to imagine giving away the remains of Mark’s life and not walking away feeling like I’ve lost everything.

Postscript: Like most things I’ve written since Mark died, this was an attempt to come to terms with the next step. After I wrote this I contacted one of my daughter’s friends who has worked with the homeless for years. She promises that these things are desperately needed and will be used immediately by people living on the street. I think Mark would be okay with that. I’m going to do my best to be okay with that too.

Every holiday season, Mark’s Saturday morning biking group would have a Christmas party that included spouses. I’m not sure when it started but it was our favorite party of the season as Mark talked about these guys all the time and it was a chance to get to know them and their significant others better. Between them, they would do a gift exchange that usually involved some kind of gear. If Mark seemed excited by what he got I’d say “Oh that’s great,” or “That will sure come in handy,” when most of the time I had no idea what it was.

The first year I went to the party after Mark died, I asked my son and son-in-law to go with me. I was going to attempt to be strong even if it required a couple of sidekicks, but all day I felt like throwing up. I was okay once I got there and everybody was very welcoming, but it was hard and as soon as I came home I went to bed and cried.

The following year the party was at the home of a couple I knew well and I decided I could manage this one on my own. After all, Mark had been dead for over a year. One of the bikers was moving back to Australia in the coming week, and instead of the normal gift exchange it was rigged that every gift was for him with mementos to remember his time in town and with the group. It was such a lovely and thoughtful gesture and I was so moved by it. I remember sitting there thinking that this was how you were supposed to leave a group, with a party and gifts, good wishes and a sweet goodbye. You don’t leave by ending your life so that your farewell is a funeral and your wife has to stand up and talk about how funny and passionate you were. I was barely holding it together when some guitars came out to sing a version of a Christmas song specific to the biking group. I lost it and kept telling myself TO GET IT TOGETHER but I couldn’t. I couldn’t stop crying, I couldn’t get out of the chair, I couldn’t do anything, and all I felt was shame for publicly falling apart like that.

The next thing I felt was an arm around me telling me it was okay. I didn’t even know who’s arm it was because my head was down and I thought that if I dared to lift it everyone could see that Mark’s wife shouldn’t have come because she makes everyone sad and has ruined the party. The arm stayed there, with a firm hold on me, whispering “it’s okay” over and over, and when the song was over I got up and saw it was the wife of one of Mark’s friends. I don’t remember if I hugged her or not but I do remember whispering, “thank you,” before I grabbed my stuff and ran out the door. Though it took place over mere minutes, it is seared into my mind because that woman literally stood next to my pain. She didn’t try to fix it or diminish it. She stood next to it and didn’t move until I did and there aren’t many people who can do that.

I have heard many, many times, “Call me if you need anything.” There are times that I am capable of asking for help outside of my son and son-in-law but mostly not. I have lived my entire adult life being fiercely independent and building a support system wherever we lived. Since Mark died it is a daily challenge to support myself, to not succumb to the depression that nips at my heels the minute I get out of bed, to quiet the voice that screams at me YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN YOU OF ALL PEOPLE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN. I don’t have the energy to pick up a phone and ask for help or to say it’s a really bad day because all I’m programmed to do is to try to keep my head above water.

A few months after Mark died, a friend and I went to hear Cheryl Strayed speak at a fundraiser for the library. Her book Wild has always been one of my favorites and her talk was so inspiring and exactly what both of us needed to hear. On the way home I was talking about the utter emptiness of my life and said, “You know, I’d just like to see a cardinal and think that it’s Mark’s spirit paying me a visit. Just one cardinal. Is that too much to ask?” When I got home there was a gift bag from a friend on my porch. Inside was a cardinal windchime.

While some put the burden on me to let them know when I needed something, others were able to figure it out while I tried to process the shock and horror of Mark’s death, when the light of my life was gone and weight fell off of me pound by pound because I didn’t even know I needed to eat.

When Mark finished graduate school, he got a post-doc from the National Institutes of Health. He flew out for the interview and was hired, then kept working in the the lab of his mentor while I worked at a bank as we waited for our firstborn to arrive. Six weeks after Maggie’s birth, we packed up our life and drove a U-Haul from Illinois to Maryland.

While he was excited to start his career and prove himself in the big leagues, it was a hard move. We were moving across the country with a newborn and no family support, no friends, no job for me, and Mark’s starting salary of $26,000. Even in 1987 that was dismal. You would think all of that would be plenty to make a new mother cry and it did, but I also had to find a new home for our dog, Clem. We couldn’t afford a rental that allowed pets because it required a higher security deposit and we didn’t have the money.

Mark was aware of how hard this was on me (especially the dog part), and three days after we arrived, with a townhouse filled with unpacked boxes and a million things to do, he told me we could go wherever I wanted. I said I wanted to see the White House. He figured out the Metro system and we packed Maggie and the stroller and the diaper bag and got on the train.

When we arrived at our stop and carried the stroller up the steps, the first thing we saw was the Capitol Building. I couldn’t stop staring at it. I’d seen it in photos and on the news so many times but to see it in person felt surreal, almost like it was a mirage. We walked all over that day, eventually finding our way to the White House, and over the years we would go to the National Mall often. We went to the inauguration parade of George Bush, we decided at the last minute to hop on a train and watch fireworks on the 4th of July at Lafayette Park. We went to Arlington National Cemetery many times, Ford’s Theatre, civil war battlefields, Harper’s Ferry, Annapolis, Monticello, Mt. Vernon, Williamsburg, Andrews AFB, the National Zoo, the Air & Space Museum, the Natural History Museum. We drove to Rehoboth Beach in Delaware most weekends in the summer, we went several times to Chincoteague Island in Virginia where it was not unusual to see wild horses walking along the surf. The entire five years that we lived there we never stopped being tourists.

We often had visitors come to town and the first thing everyone wanted to see was the monuments. We never got tired of showing them around, but Maryland summers are brutally hot and humid. When a friend of Mark’s was visiting and at the lab with him all day, the only time we could squeeze in a trip to the National Mall was at night. From that moment on it was my favorite time of day to go there. It was quieter, cooler, and so much more reverent at night. The Lincoln Memorial was awe inspiring, the Vietnam Memorial so solemn.

To make ends meet, Mark started working on Saturdays with another NIH friend and colleague who delivered antiques. Dave’s wife worked for the store that was selling these high-end pieces and Dave needed somebody to help him with deliveries. Mark was all for it as it was strictly cash and we needed the money. They delivered across the DC, Maryland, and Virginia area, often going into the service entrance of multi-million dollar homes in Potomac. They delivered pieces with price tags that were more than their combined salaries, and held their breaths until they got it in place. They banged up their knees, their shins, their elbows. On a miserable, cold day they delivered a piece to David Gergen, long before he was a staple on CNN, and he insisted they stay for a bowl of chili.

For both of us, the years and our many experiences in Maryland held such fond memories. We made many friends there as everyone was from somewhere else, and without any of us having family close by we found our community. It was a neighbor who came and got Maggie at midnight while Mark and I headed to the hospital to deliver Will. It was a neighbor who became one of my dearest friends and who has been on this widow journey alongside of me from the beginning. It was neighbors who made it feel like home.

On our last trip to DC and the National Mall, I said to Mark as we were going up the stairs from the Metro, this time with two kids, “I never get tired of seeing the Capitol. It still takes my breath away.” He looked at me and said, “I know, Kath. I’m really going to miss that sight.”

To watch the Capitol being overtaken on Wednesday by terrorists shocked and sickened me. I had the tv on and was half paying attention to it to watch coverage of the Electoral College vote and suddenly there were thousands of people mobbing our Capitol. I watched well into the night, and the next morning woke up thinking that it really couldn’t have happened. Citizens of our own country wouldn’t have violently desecrated the Capitol in the manner that they did. Nobody could have that little respect for what that building represents to do that and yet it was true.

The thing about living in that part of the country is that it is surrounded with our nation’s history. You can feel it in your bones – the blood, the struggle, the death, the rows and rows of headstones all in an effort to become and sustain a democracy. It was hard fought and the struggle continues and always will. In that place the evidence of the struggle is everywhere.

As a scientist, Mark talked about evolution all the time, mostly in regards to diseases, but since when are we not required to evolve, to examine our lives, to open ourselves up to new ideas and new ways of thinking? On that awful day last week I saw a group of people who have stopped evolving, whose lives feel so insignificant to them that they destroy history to feel important, who wear violence and woeful ignorance like a badge of honor, who call themselves patriots as they pillaged their own country and beat a police officer to death.

I often think about what Mark would have to say about all that has happened in the last year, but it’s too painful to consider for very long. The denial of scientific evidence, the denial of the effectiveness of mask wearing, the denial of the validity of a vaccine, the denial of the results of an election. At the start of every semester, he’d often have a student who would challenge him in class about evolution, who would ask him why he didn’t teach creation as well. “If you want to learn about creation,” he’d say, “I encourage you to take a religion class. I teach science. If you don’t believe in evolution you cannot make it in this field and you cannot make it in my class. Any other questions?”

One time when we were at someone’s house for dinner, the host confronted Mark about cancer and how it was a pharmaceutical cash cow that the government was aiding to make money. Those claims have always been difficult for me and still are. Like everyone else, Mark and I have lost many friends and family to cancer including our own fathers. The idea that scientists are willfully participating in some vast conspiracy to not find a cure for cancer is antithetical to everything they do. While I did a slow burn at the audacity of the allegation, Mark calmly explained that cancer cells are constantly evolving, that protocols work until the cells adapt and change because that is their job. I loved to listen to him talk about evolution because unlike everything else he talked about I understood that, and when it came to conspiracy theories he would listen and then calmly destroy every facet of the argument with a deluge of facts that he could rattle off as easily as a grocery shopping list. He was such a bad ass when it came to that kind of stuff.

In these last two years I have been going through my own evolution. I would love to wake up one day and have this grief magically vanish and turn into a beautiful butterfly, yet life often deals cards that are anything but beautiful and that we’d rather not hold. But you cannot be married to a scientist for decades and not understand that life constantly grows and changes. The only thing I have known from the beginning is that I had a choice to make when it came to a future without Mark, and living in the stagnant waters of loss would only breed disease.

So, too, is the case for democracy.