Month: August 2021

Dear Mark,

In a few days another year will have passed without you here. The lead up to this day takes an emotional and physical toll on me that is difficult to describe other than I feel like I’ve been run over by one of those trucks that flatten new blacktop and need somebody to unpeel me from the road. In a perfect world I think there should be some kind of Mourner’s Park, a dark, quiet cave with a turnstyle at the entrance for the comings and goings of those who need to escape life for a few days. A place where you don’t have to be strong, where the Positivity Police aren’t posted at every entrance encouraging the brokenhearted to, for the love of God, just move on already. A place where staying present with loss and sadness is encouraged for its sheer bravery instead of slipping into some kind of addiction from what cannot be outrun.

As signs from the universe go, I got a letter last week from a student you mentored who said she has sat with the news of your death for three years and could not articulate her thoughts. She wrote many things about your encouragement of her work and career path, but it was the last paragraph that stood out to me. She said that you were so supportive of her as a single mother, that she lived on a street you cycled on the way home from work and that if she were out with her young son that you would always stop and chat with both of them. Then I thought of all the times I’d say to you, “Mark, could you at least aim to get home by 7:00 so we’re not eating so late?” All those pissy back-and-forth conversations we had and now I find out you probably did leave work in enough time to get home earlier, but then saw a young mom and her kid outside and needed to give her a shove up the biochemistry ladder. Since you steadfastly believed there weren’t enough women in science I’m sure you weren’t going to allow one to fall off the radar on your watch.

In the last year, Maggie got her masters in library science, Will is crushing it in the interior design world, and Mallory just got accepted into a masters program for clinical psychology. I remember when we had a conversation about the kids a few years ago and you were lamenting the fact that none of them followed in your footsteps. At first I was speechless. You spent your entire career beating every bush for funds to keep your lab afloat and fought layers of administrative micromanaging for what was right. Why would you want that for your kids? I thought about that for a bit and then said to you, “Mark, we raised three kids who are passionate and curious about their interests not ours. We have done our job.” You let out a sigh and said, “I’ve never thought about it like that,” and then you explored their interests like the great dad that you were. Nevertheless, you still held all of us hostage at your computer to look at the anthrax pathogen you were working on like it was the last inning of the World Series and if we looked away for a second we’d miss the game winning hit.

As for me, that’s a whole other story. I recently met someone and on the way home from having drinks I had to pull over because I was sobbing so much I couldn’t drive. It was fun and I had a good time, but he wasn’t you and I cannot figure out if I like him or like the idea of a “him.” My therapist need not worry about job security. I work two part-time jobs now because I learned from you that there is salvation in work. Both jobs are fine but I know that neither are what I should be doing with the remainder of my life.

Writing is the only thing I have never given up on, and over and over I have been told I have a gift. I try not to be offended by that because a gift sounds like it was bestowed upon me and not from decades of hard work that nobody sees. You more than anyone understood that. I remember writing one time about a new post-doc of yours that came from India with nothing more than a single suitcase. I didn’t write that you foraged our house for anything extra we could give him, how you paid for his security deposit and first month’s rent from our checking account. I never told you when I posted anything new, I always wanted you to discover it on your own. You sat in front of the computer at the dining room table and looked up with tears in your eyes when I walked in. “It’s beautiful, Kath, really beautiful,” and you loving something I wrote was all I ever needed to keep going.

I recently read that death is like a wrecking ball. People think the actual death is the only swing, but that isn’t the case. The wrecking ball swung so wildly the first year that I constantly cowered in fear. It felt like every time I tried to get to my feet it came for me again. This year I set down the guilt of not being able to prevent what I never saw coming, and the wrecking ball slowed to the sway of a desktop pendulum. Not so in these last few weeks where I’m knocked off my feet again by the steady swing of loss.

Somehow life moves forward without you in it, and on this side of the moon I feel like I need somebody to summon the manager of the death department to explain this bullshit to me. It has been nearly impossible for me to fall in love with anything since you’ve been gone, but I’m amazed at all the monarchs that have showed up in my garden this year, the cicadas that scream all day and then collectively hush themselves as soon as it gets dark, the owls calling to each other outside the bedroom window at night. “Who cooks for you,” you would say in the dark and I never hear them without thinking that.

Only you know how passionate our love was for each other and the life we painstakingly built together. I pray that it’s enough of a foundation for me to build something new, that wherever you are you can figure out a way to give me a shove up the ladder of life so that finding things to love again doesn’t seem so painful and foreign.

Ars longa, vita brevis.

Art is long, life is brief.

And I go on for the both of us.

Love,
k.

***I don’t like to share videos of Mark as I hold on to those dearly for me and the kids. I ran into an old biking friend of Mark’s who didn’t know he had died and he sent me this that he recorded ten years ago. It captures so much of his essence.***

https://carfreeamerican.blogspot.com/2011/06/bike-commuter-profile-mark-fisher.html?m=1&fbclid=IwAR2ew_VcspsbM89xh4LcVx5sV3bs1S0rBRAeCBI08doft8lU–gnbdEpbCk

Towards the end of spring during a counseling appointment, I told my therapist that I was dreading summer. “Both of the girls birthdays are in summer, Mark’s birthday, our anniversary, and then September will be here and already I feel the weight of it.” She asked me to consider looking at weeks of summer and not the whole season, which in theory seems reasonable, and which I have been unable to do successfully. Every day tick tocks ominously towards September 4th.

I can remember the smallest of details from our wedding, but neither Mark nor I could ever remember the exact date we got married. Every year it was the same conversation. Was it the 30th or 31st? We’d try to figure it out, some years I’d go rogue and say, “I’m pretty sure it’s the 29th,” and other years I’d get out our wedding certificate and yell down the stairs, “It’s the 30th!!!” Mark would yell up, “Okay, got it. Gonna store it in the vault,” and then we’d do the same dance the next year and the year after that.

When Mark died, the books in his office were put in the hallway for anyone in the med center to take. This was discussed with me as that was standard procedure, but in most cases due to retirement and not a death. Since I had no use for them I wanted them to go to anyone who needed them. Months later, I got an email from Mark’s colleague. One of his students had taken one of the books and tucked inside was Mark’s diploma from graduate school. Mark and I talked about this often. How I said he should frame it and hang it in his office like normal accomplished people do. He said, “Everybody knows I graduated. I don’t need to announce it,” and that was how things were with us when it came to our anniversary. We knew we were married at the end of July, give or take.

This year the end of the month came fast as I juggled my work schedule and the kitchen remodel, so when I opened my computer and saw a memory from eight years ago with a picture of Mark it took me by surprise. Even after all these years, even in the horrible ending, I couldn’t remember the exact date we got married which was classic Fisher style.

That night I went to hear a band where someone I met was playing. It was fun and a beautiful night to be outside. It was nice to talk to a guy, I have missed that. “Where do we go from here?” he asked which was a question I could not answer. I felt like telling him that if he heard the back story of how I ended up in a bar I never heard of, in a town I’d never been to, on what used to be my wedding anniversary he’d run for the hills as fast as he could.

“I don’t know,” I said, “and that’s as good of an answer as I can give.”

I talked about it with my therapist a few days later and made light of all of it until I described the photo of Mark that showed up that morning. Him at my sister’s wedding, wearing her hat with his usual grin and those bedroom eyes of his, and in the telling I lost it. Sobbed on a virtual appointment where not only did I get to feel all those feels, but with the added bonus of seeing myself crying on camera. I could not pull it together and kept apologizing because where did that come from?

From the dark and lonely places that nobody sees but me.

This life rebuilding balances precariously on a cheap hollow core door. When one door collapses another cheap one shows up to replace it. None of them ever feel solid enough to handle the weight of loss and years of memories, and I can feel September’s eyes on me.