It was a rare occurrence for Mark and I to go shopping anywhere. He hated it. Once I asked him to stop at Hobby Lobby on the way home from somewhere, and after a few minutes of being inside the store he asked, “Are they playing hymns in here?” I told him they were and when he asked why I told him it was a Christian hobby store. “Christian? Are we supposed to not notice that all the shit inside this shitty place is made in China,” he said and refused to cross the threshold of that place ever again.
Mark rode his bike to work year-round and was having trouble finding gloves to keep his hands warm. A chat over breakfast with the boys in the Saturday morning Polar Bear Club determined that he needed to go to REI to get the best in winter gear, and so on a Saturday afternoon we went. Not because I especially wanted to go but more that shopping was so foreign to him that he needed an expert to tag along. He found his gloves and I found a jacket for him. A lightweight, warm jacket that he said he didn’t need but I insisted he try on. He bought this jacket that weighed nothing, and suddenly became the Joel Osteen of winter coats. He preached that investment everywhere he went. When he died I gave the jacket and some other things to my nephews. It was all hard to part with but that coat was one high hurdle for me to jump. “It’s stupid but it means a lot to me,” I said to my sister and she reported back that her son loved it and wore it all the time.
Random photos pop up on my phone regularly and they are usually of Mark. Is it him letting me know he’s close by or is it random? I don’t know. All I know is that they stop me in my tracks, usually make me sigh, and think, “Oh Mark, if only..” If only what? I don’t know any more. Last week a photo showed up of Mark and Mallory in the lobby of the theatre at her college where we waited to see our girl after a performance. I vividly remember all of it. Maggie, Nathan, and Will were there, too, because we all loved to watch her dance. It was packed with people waiting to find their dancer, most with flowers in their arms. “Damn it, Mark,” I said, “we forgot flowers.” We always forgot flowers. Every single time. In the crowd we found our girl and I took a picture of her (sans a bouquet) with her dad which is what showed up on my phone last week.
They both looked so happy and there was Mark in his REI jacket. I couldn’t stop staring at it, and over and over the same thought kept going through my head. Was this even real? Was he really here or did I imagine all of it? Did we build a life together or was that some story I told myself? I remember us at REI buying the gloves and that coat, of going to the movies with friends and him saying, “Brian, you need to get this coat. It’s the best.” I remember a hundred times hanging it on the hook inside the coat closet, of seeing him wearing it and thinking “damn he’s good looking” and now all of it feels like a dream.
The first thing you notice on the If Only…Trail is that it is clogged with travelers. The ones who missed their mother’s passing by seconds and are unable to forgive themselves, parents of children who go out to play and never come back home, spouses who watched lives withered away by disease, by accidents, by chance, by a split second decision, missing best friends, siblings, cousins, favorite neighbors, mentors. Mothers who never see the face of a baby they loved since they stared in hopeful disbelief at a pregnancy test. Empty chairs, empty beds, empty cribs.
On the If Only…Trail, the wounded and the wise clear the brush and preach to the newly ordained who are desperate for a copy of the instruction manual for rebuilding a life. Listen to me they say to tear-filled eyes. No life slips through our fingers without a trace. Look at your hands. They are coated in stardust so they can lead you out of the dark.
Two months after the 1st anniversary of Mark’s death, a symposium was held in his honor at the med center where he worked for 28 years. I have wanted to write about it ever since, but it has been difficult for me to convey what it was like for the kids and I to be invited to step into Mark’s world of scientific research.
It was set in motion by Mark’s dearest friend, Tom, who is a professor at Brandeis. Both he and Mark were the stewards of a shameless and inappropriate sense of humor. They met at the University of Illinois where Tom was a post-doc and Mark was a graduate student. They were willing cohorts in antics around the lab that as Tom said, “It was the kind of stuff that nowadays would get you hauled into HR in a minute.” Tom got the ball rolling on this symposium and worked with Mark’s department to make it happen. The gratitude I have for Tom is hard to measure. He was so dear to Mark through decades – absolutely one of Mark’s favorite people, he stays in regular contact to see how I’m faring and that means so much to me, and he was the reason there was a day to honor Mark and his work.
Many of the people who were coming for the symposium were friends from years ago that I hadn’t seen in decades. Because of meetings and conferences, Mark would run into them but I rarely did. I wanted to have a happy hour the night prior to the symposium to catch up with them, for my kids to meet the people that formed their dad’s career, and to start it off celebrating Mark’s life and the people he met along the way. It was important to me that it not be somber or laden with grief.
We had the happy hour at my daughter and son-in-law’s house. I invited a few people from the med center who Mark was close to and loved, as well as his graduate students because there were a lot of contacts in that room that they needed for a future job. It was a lovely, boisterous night, and one of my favorite memories of that second year which was much harder for me than the first. Most of those who were there weren’t able to come in for Mark’s funeral so I threw some of the mass cards we made on the table in case they wanted one. Tom asked what they were and when I explained he said, “Wow, a Mark Fisher trading card. These might be worth something one day,” then burst out laughing which is exactly why Mark loved him so much.
The plan for the day of the symposium was for me and the kids to go in the morning, leave at lunchtime, and then come back for the happy hour and dinner, but that changed for us after the first speaker. We knew nothing about any of the subjects but were fascinated by all of it. Questions after a presentation sometimes felt like a DA grilling a murder suspect on the stand. My daughter leaned over and whispered, “I feel sorry for some of these people. This feels mean.” Mark’s friend, Joe, must have sensed our shock because during a break he came over to us and said that these things can be kind of intense and added, “Mark told me about one he went to where the argument was so fierce that it spilled outside and fists were thrown. Then everybody kissed and made up at the bar afterwards.” I told Joe that Mark never told me that story and he said, “Oh Mark wasn’t in there throwing punches, but he might have encouraged it because he did think it was some shit science.” Besides the science part of it, there were personal stories and Mark’s friend, Neal, said, “He was one of the kindest men I’ve ever known and I’ll leave it at that so I don’t start crying.”
In a twist of irony, the dinner was held in the restaurant of the art museum I worked at for two years. It was the most toxic work environment I’d ever been in, and when they told me that’s where the dinner was going to be I burst out laughing. If Mark were there we would have sat in the back and mercilessly trash talked the place which felt like the kind of dark humor I needed to get through it. The kids and I sat together and I told them they wouldn’t believe what I went through at that job, I fortified my nerves with a little wine, and then got up and spoke to the group.
“I fell under the Mark Fisher spell on our first date, a blind date set up by a friend. When Mark called to ask me out, a call I was expecting, I remember desperately looking around the room trying to come up with an excuse not to go. No believable answer appeared, and so a few days later he picked me up in his mom’s car, hit the curb when he parked, said, “Welp, I guess we’re here,” and held the door open for me as we went into the fine dining establishment known as Denny’s. By the end of that date I knew he was going to be my husband.
Throughout our years together, I rode the highs and lows of his career in science – promotions and pay cuts, the tenure golden ticket, increasing administration expectations, and the constant chase for grant funding. I don’t need to remind you that this is a tough business to be in. It is also tough to helplessly observe from the spouse’s seat.
Mark spoke often of what his legacy might be in the science world. What this career sometimes considers important will not be what most of us remember him for. Mark will be remembered for his quick and outrageous wit, his unwavering passion, the endless pots of coffee he drank, his steadfast support of students and faculty, and that daily dose of spandex shorts that once seen cannot be unseen.
His legacy in life is Maggie, Will, and Mallory who uniquely and fiercely loved their dad. They have always been mine and Mark’s most successful experiment, and with Nathan and Rubin have supported me and each other with enormous compassion. Mark was always so proud of them and they have risen to heights in the most difficult circumstances that neither of us could have imagined when we were raising them.
For forty years Mark was my everything, and like all of us, he had a light and a dark side. Each of you are somebody’s everything. You light up life in ways you cannot comprehend because most days it is so routine. Because of the light you cast, you owe it to yourself to be as aware of your mental health as you are your physical health.
I so wish this day came to be after Mark had sailed off into the sunset after a short stint in the Shady Acres Home for the Old & Brilliant. That is not how it turned out, and in every way, my life came to an abrupt halt on that Tuesday afternoon. The dark side claimed Mark, and for me it often feels like that side won, but by remembering how he lived and not how he died, it does not get the final say. On behalf of Mark, who is with me with every breath I take, and our family, thank you for being here and honoring his well-lived life.”
Recently there have been some high profile deaths by suicide in the news. These affect me greatly. I am too familiar with the aftermath of a decision that cannot be undone. Part of me feels grateful that Mark’s suffering is over for him, but it didn’t go away. It got transferred. I know that was never his intent but it was the result.
I struggle with suicide awareness information (especially the kind posted on social media) because I don’t believe that someone teetering between life and death is capable of googling the phone number of a suicide hotline. I may be very, very wrong about that but I can tell you with absolute certainty that whenever Mark spoke of suicide in all the years I knew him, every single time he said he couldn’t believe somebody could do that.
Instead I think we should all start being a little more honest about our lives. That there are traumas that have taken root in us that we can’t outrun or outwork, that this constant chasing of stuff is siphoning the life out of us, that periods of sadness and loneliness are not something to be ashamed of but rather our common denominator, that life is often incredibly difficult, that it’s easy to look on the bright side when everything is going your way but finding it when you’re flat on the ground is work. I am doing the work and it’s the hardest thing I’ve done in my life. Some days joy is right in front of me wildly waving, and other days it comes at the end of the day when I can crawl into bed and go to sleep.
I like to think my symposium will be after a short stint in the Shady Acres Home for the Wild-Haired-Bohemian-Gypsies, my trading cards will be limited because that’s how you create demand and drive the price up, and I’ll fly away to my everything. But now there’s a life to figure out, to be thankful for, to write about, to honor. It’s not what I wanted or ever imagined but I can tell that something is growing from it.
In the meantime, let’s all agree to stay here, shall we? So that when it is our time to see all our beloveds again, we can look at them and say, “You won’t believe the life I’ve lived since you left.”
