Month: October 2021

Sometimes when Mark and I would wax poetic about the freedom we had as kids, how you could be gone on your bike for hours and nobody worried where you were as long as you were home for dinner, our kids would be envious. Often they would say, “I wish I lived back then,” and I would explain that those good old days were sometimes countered with especially awful days. Physical punishment was the norm then, and my brothers on many occasions would be hit across the backside with my Dad’s belt. I can remember their pleading, their I’m-sorry-I’ll-never-do-it-again, and ultimately their cries throughout the house. Those memories all these years later have not lost their power.

As those things go as you get older, the stories took on a life of their own. I don’t know why because I think for all involved it was traumatizing. Mark had his own stories but there was one in particular that I never could shake. His mom had made a cake and the next day, as it was sitting on the counter, he asked his dad if he could have a piece. He told him no and so he did what every kid does. He went outside, found his mom, and asked her if he could have a piece of cake. She said yes and as he stood in the kitchen eating it his dad walked in. As soon as he saw Mark he slapped him so hard across the face the cake flew out of his mouth. “When I tell you no it means no,” he said and walked out of the room. There were other stories far worse than that, but that one still rattles me. Getting slapped across the face is very much about rage, but it’s also about humiliation and who does that to a kid for eating a piece of cake?

On the weekend before Mark died, as we were out walking one night, he said to me, “Do you have any idea what it’s like to be an adult and realize that in the house you grew up in the kids were the prey?” I will always be without words to describe the pain and confusion I saw in his face at that moment.

Mark was born prematurely at 3.5# in 1954. The necessity of skin-to-skin contact or bonding like there is now was unheard of in those days whether you were a full-term infant or not. There was only a tiny baby fighting for life under fluorescent lights with a lot of wires hooked up to him. When his parents talked of that time it was never about the crushing worry you would expect the parent of any premature baby to have, but more that their decisions saved him. I don’t know. That may be true or maybe they got lucky and this infant made it when he probably shouldn’t have. It was a long time into my therapy before I talked about Mark being a preemie. My therapist dove deep into that information and said that the essential need of every newborn did not happen to him until months later when he was released from the hospital. By then it was likely too late and that forming a bond with me must have felt terrifying to him because he had no idea what to make of it.

I know he could tell me things he couldn’t tell anyone else. I know he trusted me. I also know that when he went to a few therapy sessions he never went there. After he died I was so mad at him for that, for not talking about the trauma he and his sister lived through, and how I blamed myself for all of it. How I should have forced the issue, how I treated it like it was “his” problem but his problem was very much our problem. Over and over I have brought this up in therapy, how it has wracked me with guilt until my therapist said to me, “It is one thing to go to a therapist for anxiety and depression or grief. It’s an entirely different thing to go for shame.” What Mark was ashamed of was not going to see the light of day if he could help it.

Then one morning he left the house and died by his own making because that’s how you kill shame once and for all. If I could beg anyone reading about my experiences these past few years, it would be to call a professional, to pull every painful thing out of the closet and from underneath the bed where The Memory Monsters sleep every night waiting to snatch your ankle if you dare brush past them. Because little boys whose souls were broken by abuse grow up to be broken men, and the bravest thing one can do is to tell every horrible detail to a licensed counselor and believe them when they look you in the eye and says, “None of it was your fault.”

None of it.

Then learn how to forgive yourself for the years of self-loathing, and by all means, enjoy a piece of cake.

When I was looking for a therapist, I contacted a friend who worked in the psychology department at the med center where Mark worked, which is how I met Eileen. I figured I’d meet with her a few times, she’d give me some handy dandy grief tips and I’d be just fine. At the end of each appointment she’d say, “Same time next week?” And I would think, same time next week? We have to do this again?

I hated every one of those first year appointments. I hated that she wasn’t fixing anything, I hated that I had to lay bare every piece of my life, Mark’s life, our marriage, his career, his sister, his parents, everything. More than once I said, “Every single person in his family is damaged, so tell me why I’m the one showing up for this gut wrenching work?” I already knew the answer. Now I was the one who was damaged and somebody had to stop the bleed before it seeped into the lives of those beautiful kids I made with the only guy I ever loved.

One of the hardest aspects of grief is the expectation to get through it and move on, that with some concentrated effort one could be less sad. Me and my credit card tried really hard to buy my way out of sadness. Sometimes I’d come home from work and there’d be a mound of packages on my doorstep of things I barely remembered liking let alone ordering. Turns out that didn’t work and so I’d drag my sad self into Eileen’s office and tell her I was sinking into the abyss and she would say, “Of course you are. Your entire life fell apart,” and it was such a relief to be with someone who understood that.

Things tend to return to normal fairly quickly after a death unless you are in the epicenter, and from that vantage point it feels like everything has been burned to the ground. I had no normal and am still trying to figure that out, so when I am having a hard day, when I am unable to fake any sort of positive attitude and somebody asks me what’s wrong I usually look at them in stunned silence. What’s wrong? Well my husband ended his life one morning which, believe it or not, still plays out for me every day. When Eileen and I talk about these conversations, I always ask her why there are people I thought I was close to who can’t go there. “Are these people you had deep conversations with before, people who could talk about pain?” I thought about that question for a long while and said, “Not necessarily,” and she told me that I was barking up the wrong tree. “But this is different,” I said, and she looked at me and said, “It isn’t for them,” which left me so infuriated I wanted a new therapist right then and there.

When Covid hit, Eileen and I did a year of tele-therapy, and when she said she could do office visits again, I jumped at the chance. I went once. That office held so much of my pain it felt like it was painted into the walls. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough so we switched back to tele-therapy every Monday afternoon. There are times when it is still hard, times when I start out okay but cry within minutes, but not always. Eileen has repeatedly told me I have to watch Schitt’s Creek. I told her she had to watch My Octopus Teacher. The week after I told her that she said, “Before we start anything we have to talk about the octopus because I can’t stop thinking about him.” We’ve talked about anti-aging products and mascara, my job, her daughter’s wedding. I told her about a room I was cleaning out and she said, “Oh how perfect. Now you can make it your writing studio.” This never occurred to me and it was such a brilliant idea it is all I’ve been able to think about since she said it. In a recent session, I asked her how some people seem to be able to move on from loss so quickly and here I am three years later only managing to pull a foot out of the quicksand. “Because you’re a digger,” she said, “it is your nature to search for the why and you aren’t satisfied until you understand it.”

There are people in my life that I wish I could open up to and tell them how painful this still is for me, that there is no such thing as closure, that every morning my husband is still dead and will be for the rest of my life. It can be better for me and the kids, though, if the entire topic isn’t avoided, if we heard stories about Mark so that for a few minutes he can come back to life for us instead of any mention of him being carefully avoided as if he never existed. It is the nature of most of us to offer advice to someone we see in pain, to fix the broken. How Mark’s life ended and the repercussions it has had on me, our kids, and the army of people who loved him cannot be fixed. It has to be carried, and I have learned that mixed with gratitude, beauty, humor, and compassionate conversations makes the weight of it so much more manageable.

I recently read that people can only go as deep with someone else as they go with themselves, and suddenly all the pieces of those awkward conversations that stayed on the surface made so much sense. I don’t understand that because in the deep is where things get sifted and sorted and understood, and so I keep showing up on Monday afternoons with Eileen to make sense of something that still feels surreal.

Not because I want to, but because I married into a family who dug their heels so deep into the surface that they failed to notice that their pain was slowly pulling them under.