Month: June 2021

I recently went to a wedding for the daughter of some dear friends. It was three days before Mark’s birthday. I had very mixed feelings about going alone, but it seemed cowardly on my part to bail when they did the opposite when my life fell apart. On the spur of the moment that day I decide to buy a new dress. Not where I work and get a very generous discount, but at another store where I pay full price for something linen and embroidered and just my style. As the time got closer for me to leave the house, my oldest daughter starting texting me to fill my confidence tank. “You got this, Mom,” she said which was sweet and not the least bit accurate. I drive to the church. The church Mark and I went to for years, the one where his funeral was, the one I’ve been to twice since he died because all I see when I go there is a box in the center aisle with his ashes in it. Some friends ask me to join them which is a huge relief. I sit at the end of the pew, eyes on the center aisle and have an immediate flashback to the funeral and the box, the box, the box. The priest, and the reason Mark became Catholic after 25 years of marriage, talks about Covid, about us needing each other, about loving bigger and more generously. He has not lost his touch. I do not cry at this wedding like I usually do. Instead, my mind drifts back to Mark’s baptism at the Easter vigil, when he came back out in regular clothes and stood on the side of the altar. He is wearing a linen suit and a light blue shirt. Most of my family has flown in for this occasion, Joe from work comes, many friends are there. In the formality of that night, while the priest offers a prayer, Mark catches my eyes, winks, and then smiles. I am overwhelmed and grateful. It had been a long journey for him to believe in something bigger and he did it on his own terms like he did everything. Now I’m utterly confused by it all. My recurring thoughts about heaven are that it seems like Disneyworld for dead people.

The reception is in the parents’ backyard and absolutely lovely. I stay longer than I planned and when I do decide to leave I find the mother of the bride. “I had a good time,” I tell her. “I made it and I didn’t think I would.” “I know,” she says and we hug so hard and then both cry because we are very aware of what is missing. On the way down the driveway the father of the bride is sitting alone in the dark on a bench and tells me good night. I think about turning around and sitting next to him for a few minutes but decide against it. These momentous family occasions when everything is good and beautiful must be reflected on alone. To do otherwise would break the spell.

The next day I go to work. This job kicks my ass every which way to Sunday. It is never not busy or without a lot to do which means that it is perfect for me now. It gives me no time to think about my life. In passing, a coworker asks if I want to go next door after we get off and have margaritas. “I would love to,” I say and ask somebody else who asks somebody else. We are all running on fumes but it is the promise of margaritas and fajitas that carry us to the end of the day. We cram in a booth, gossip about work, have a hundred ideas to make the place better if we were the ones running it which none of us want to do. I go home. I’m exhausted. I fall asleep after three a.m.

I wake up to Father’s Day and am full to the brim with sadness. I don’t even know where to place it. It’s obese and fits into nothing. I have coffee, I give myself a pep talk, I get on Facebook and see post after post of gratitude for fathers. I want to rage at all of it. My father is dead, so is the father of my kids. But my son-in-law is a father and they are coming later for dinner so I go to the grocery store. I don’t know what to make. Every summer Sunday Mark grilled, now it’s me every week flying by the seat of my pants. I get groceries and stop at a local nursery on the way home. They are closing for the season in a few days. Their plants still look great and are cheap. I get begonias. Top hat begonias that grow 12″-16″ high. Begonias on steroids seems like a good idea. The color is called badabing. I smile. Mark used to go around all the time and say in a very heavy Italian accent, “Badabing badaboom,” which always made me laugh. The kids and grandkids arrive. Things get better. I perk up. I go to bed and fall asleep sometime after 3:30. Mark used to say sleep was the street sweeper for the brain, essential to keep away Alzheimer’s and dementia. My brain is as big a clogged mess as the bathroom sink upstairs. I don’t know how to unclog either.

That Monday is Mark’s birthday. I am not in despair. It ran out the day before. I have therapy. With her kind eyes and soft voice, my therapist asks me how I’m doing. “I’m okay,” I tell her, “better than yesterday which tried to kill me.” We talk about the usual baggage and I say that these hard days have a pattern. “The week before is crushing, the day less so, the after takes about a week to work itself through me. And during it I buy myself a bunch of shit to compensate.” She says, “Within reason, right?” “Of course,” I answer back, “nothing over the top,” and smile. Later I ask myself what is within reason in the aftermath of your husband’s suicide. The crocheted sweater that drapes oh so beautifully was over the top but it looked like something a writer would wear so I bought it.

After therapy I mow the lawn. The back is easy and always looks great when I’m done. The front and side are nothing but weeds which I never think about until I’m mowing. Mark didn’t believe in using chemicals and would spend hours digging them up. I’ve neither used chemicals nor dug them up and think that if he was so adamant about that kind of stuff on the lawn he should have stuck around. Then I think about dead bees and birds and know I could do without one more lifeless thing in my life. I consider the options and decide that at least the weeds are green so from a distance the lawn looks fine. Same as me. I have to stop mowing. There is something dark laying near the base of the tree inches from the sidewalk. I think maybe it’s a stick or a beer bottle flung from a car. It is neither. I gape at it in shock. I look up and down an empty street for some explanation. Where did this come from?

I open my emails the next morning and there is something from Mark’s student. “A birthday present for him,” she writes me with a link to a paper on Mark’s work that has been published in Nature. “Nature, Kath,” he would say, “that’s the big guns.” I read the end. Mark Fisher is deceased. Why is that so brutal to read after all this time? We would probably go out for a big gun dinner that night but instead I go to work. I am working the register when a woman comes in with returns. We are supposed to ask why but I rarely do. She offers me an explanation anyways. “I paid extra for expedited shipping and it didn’t come in time for my daughter’s rehearsal dinner. I was heartbroken.” I look up. The heartbroken don’t say things like that. They don’t have to. It is their eyes that convey a sadness that can never be adequately expressed. I offer to refund her shipping. Her faux heartbroken eyes perk up. I come home and make popcorn for dinner. At 11:00 my neighbor texts me about her shitty life. I ask her if she’s outside. She is. I pour a bit of whiskey over ice and head down still wearing the dress I wore to work. We cry about how everything keeps going south in our lives on a regular basis, we talk about Bridgerton which I have just finished, we end up laughing uncontrollably about how we may have gone a bit overboard in gardening this year. She has bought her own badabing begonias and I imitate Mark. We repeat badabing badaboom over and over. She has spotlights in her backyard and I tell her if I had those I’d garden in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep. “I have,” she tells me. The conversation and whiskey have cleansed me of the heaviness of the last days and at 12:30 I decide to walk home. I fall asleep at 2:30.

The next day my friend invites some of us over for happy hour in her yard. It’s hot but beautiful. We discuss politics. I act normal except I’m so tired I could face plant on the table. A different set of friends is meeting for drinks the next night. I tell them I’ll be there, leave work, and in every direction there are orange cones. It takes me forever. I have lost my mojo for drinks and conversation but smile and talk and wish the earth would swallow me whole in slow motion like a parked car tipping into a sinkhole.

Some guy is hot on my trail on a dating site. We go back and forth with messages. He seems kind and funny in the absurd world of online dating. After several days he gives me his email and phone number. I talk this over with the women I work with. They are all much younger and more versed in this stuff. “Go for it,” they tell me. I decide that I need to put myself out there and call him up. He seems surprised. Maybe this was the wrong week to put myself out there. Five minutes into the conversation he’s talking about the Bush/Gore election and I’m confused. Is this small talk? He is talking so much and I feel like I’ve stumbled into a traveling preacher’s tent and there’s bodyguards blocking all the exits. I talk about Covid and how overwhelmed I am after a year of not doing much. He tells me he’s no conspiracy theorist but don’t I find it weird that people on meth, cocaine, and heroin don’t get Covid? I have no fucking idea what he’s talking about. I ask him if he’s been vaccinated. When he says no I tell him that (besides being batshit crazy) this wasn’t going to work for me. He says, “You’re not listening to the other side. What you’re doing, sweetie, is building blocks around yourself to keep out information and pretty soon you will be walled off in your own world where nobody can get in.” I don’t know what is more offensive – getting life advice from a complete stranger or being called sweetie by the same stranger. I think how the old me would have argued with this kind of stuff but instead I hang up on him mid-rant and block him from everything. I want to talk to Mark. We would laugh-cry at the whole I’m no conspiracy theorist. “You don’t want to peak too early in this, Kath,” he would tell me. “You do that and you have nowhere to go.” He said this all the time. People would talk to him about their kid’s interest in science. “Let them have fun,” he’d say. “Don’t meddle in their curiosity. You want them in it for the long haul and if they peak too early it’s over.” I should be grateful I’m not peaking too early. Instead I’m pissed at Mark for leaving me. I never stay pissed. I ask my therapist why that is. Why can’t I be raging mad that he left me alone in life? She tells me that the loss is so huge that it dwarfs everything else. “Yes,” I say quietly, “so huge.”

I try to unclog the sink. I research what to do about weeds that doesn’t involve Round Up. I go to work. I don’t sleep. I start packing up the kitchen for the reno that’s starting soon. I want to throw everything away. Every single thing. These kinds of weeks always threaten to sweep me out to sea if I don’t paddle furiously, but there is that thing that was at the base of the oak tree when I was mowing that caused me to stop in my tracks. I have no idea where it came from or how long it had been there. I drive by that tree many times a week when I’m going to and from work and never saw it, and now that I have I don’t know what to make of it.

I decide to not overthink this one. There are signs and then there is a sign.

I used to always joke with Mark that my mom liked him better than me. He got along with her from the start of our relationship, but after he helped her take care of my dad in the foxhole of the last stages of cancer, that relationship formed a close bond. Years after that, he started going to a conference every January in Chicago with his students – half would stay at my mom’s house, the other half a mile away at my sister’s house. Mom always looked forward to the company and would get the spare bedroom ready, make extra coffee in the morning, and have a coffee cake sitting on the counter so these hungry students would have something in their stomach before Mark hustled everyone out the door early for the drive downtown. They’d arrive back late after a dinner out with Mark’s colleagues and their students, and then get in the car to drive eight hours to Kansas City the next day. It was a whirlwind of a weekend and over the years my mom got to know Mark’s students well.

When I was home in April, my siblings and I were in a meeting with Mom’s care facility because of her multiple falls. Our mom has always been fiercely independent and so I imagine that relying on everyone around her for the basics was infuriating. “Are these falls because she’s trying to do these things on her own and can’t?,” I asked the nurse. “No,” she explained, “when we’re born we all get a ball of yarn that rolls forward with time and life and experience. When people get dementia their ball of yarn starts rolling backwards. It’s why your mom can vividly remember things from decades earlier but can’t remember that I was in her room thirty minutes ago. In her mind she’s a young woman and so of course she can do simple things herself.” I was taken aback by the clarity of that explanation because it made conversations with her seem so much more logical. It’s why when I got to see her all she wanted to talk about was her sister. When she’d been in the hospital days before, my sister heard her telling our dad, “Bill, you need to come and take care of this.”

Over and over I have thought of that analogy and how in many ways my ball of yarn stopped moving on the day Mark died. How frozen in time I was (and often still am), how getting my yarn to start unrolling has taken so much effort, and how I can never tell if it’s going in the right direction.

While I was home I texted my long time friend to see if she could meet for lunch. We have been friends since grade school, and she is one of the few people in my life that have known me with Mark from the beginning. Whenever we were in Chicago we tried to get together with Pat and her husband but were often booked solid with family obligations. A few years ago I called her and said, “We’ve got Saturday morning open for breakfast and that’s it.” “We’ll take it,” she said and the four of us got caught up on kids and jobs and current events, and Mark and I were always grateful when we could spend time with them. She is one of those people who will go where others are afraid, who genuinely misses Mark and I as a couple, who can say that out loud, and if the tears come for both of us so be it.

Over a very long lunch where Mark and my mom came up often in our conversation she said to me, “This must be hard for you. To see your mom like this and not have Mark here, to not be able to call him or have him to talk to or cry with when you get home,” and my eyes immediately welled up with tears. All around me life seems to unfairly go on without him, but to have someone acknowledge that shouldering additional loss alone takes a toll that has already cost me plenty meant more than I could ever express.

A few hours later we walked out of the restaurant into blinding sunlight. I felt so much lighter than when we walked in because a dear friend knew that she could neither fix nor ignore my sadness. She also knew that my ball of yarn was stuck on a steep hill and needed a little help to roll forward again.

When I was six years old, I entered 1st grade at St. Jude the Apostle school on the outskirts of Chicago. It was where me and my five siblings would spend eight years under the guidance of the nuns of the Congregation of Notre Dame. My first teacher was Mother St. Thomas, a gentle and kind woman who years later would leave the convent, marry, and have a family of her own. The classes in our school were big, often close to fifty kids, and I wanted nothing more each day than to leave and be home with my mom. That wasn’t an option and I was always placed in the front of the class where it wasn’t cool to be seen sucking my thumb.

I never liked 1st grade but over time I relied on Mother St. Thomas as my daytime alternate mom. She was often sick, though, and there was a steady stream of substitute teachers. As a result I didn’t know the basics of anything, especially reading. As the school year was winding down, it was suggested to my mom that I be held back to repeat first grade. This was common then, there’d always be several kids in a class held back and that were forever labeled “dumb.” Because I had a sister a year younger than me, my mom said, “Over my dead body are you going to be holding Kathy back. She will go on to second grade,” and so I did.

I don’t remember much of the next few years. In 2nd grade I had Mother St. Williams who was a tyrant and daily wacked kids with her ruler. Hearing the thwack of the wood hitting a hand and then muffled crying didn’t make for ideal learning conditions. In spite of that, most years I’d be awarded a certificate for perfect attendance, an honor for daily showing up at the place that scared the daylights out of me.

During the summer before 4th grade, my mom took me to the local library and enrolled me in the summer reading program. It came with my very own library card and a chart. Every time you read a book and returned it to the library you got a star. I think behind the scenes my mom talked to the librarian in the children’s section about me needing some help. That’s when I was introduced to Little House on the Prairie, and the reading switch suddenly lit up like a Christmas tree. I couldn’t get enough of Laura Ingalls and her adventures on the prairie and read every one of the books in the series. Back then you were either a Little House kid or a Nancy Drew kid. I was not only a card carrying member of the prairie camp, I wanted to be Laura Ingalls.

With so many kids and one car that my dad had five days a week, I now realize what a monumental feat this was for my mom. The three boys had their constant little league games and I had the library, and somehow Mom managed to pull off getting everyone where they needed to be. Sometimes her and I would go to the library after dinner, sometimes on Saturday. Mom would put on her pink Avon lipstick, a square of her blotted lips smiling from the toilet bowl, and we’d get in the car and come home with a pile of books for me to read. When summer was over and my chart was filled with 100 stars, Mom announced at the dinner table what I’d accomplished. I like to think that we were in cahoots with all those trips back and forth to the library, but it was Mom doing everything she could to push her kid over the reading mountain.

Every summer I think about those years I muddled my way through a sea of words that were such a mystery until the Ingalls family came along. Since Mark died, reading has been a challenge for me. In the first year my retention was so bad that I could read an entire book and not be able to tell you anything about it. I’ve burned through dozens of books on grief, some have been helpful, some a waste of time. I tend to read non-fiction as many people have lives far more interesting than could be imagined, but one summer I read Poisonwood Bible, a book about an overzealous preacher who moves his family to Africa to spread the word of God. Turns out they are ill-equipped to live in this environment and when the fire ants make their deadly march through the village I swear you can feel your skin crawling with every turn of the page. In a cottage in Washington I laughed so hard reading A Walk In The Woods that Mark wanted me to hurry up and finish it so he could read it. When we were pulled over on the side of the road in Idaho because an RV was on fire, I read the last pages of Tuesdays With Morrie. “How was it?”, Mark asked and I couldn’t talk. On the couch in Maryland bundled up in a blanket in July, I read Into Thin Air. A Tender Bar lives up to its title, a tender tale of a boy growing up to be a man under the guidance of the regulars at a bar in Boston. I cried on our back porch reading When Breath Becomes Air. I have read Bird By Bird more times than I could count. A few months before Mark died I read Educated, and every night told him he wouldn’t believe this woman’s story. I have deliberately slowed my reading on many a book because I didn’t want the story to end.

This summer I decided it’s time to ditch all the grief and self-help books to immerse myself in stories that take me far away from my regular life. Nine year old me will give herself a star for every book read, and profusely thank the universe for a very harried, young mom who fiercely believed that within the pages of a book her daughter could go on one adventure after another.