Month: May 2022

When I had my job at a local university, I was responsible for managing the finances of our student organizations. At the time there were over 300 student orgs, of which roughly half were active. Each organization had to submit a budget that was considered for approval by the student council, and once they got their final numbers they could spend on their events. The majority of expenses were for food and t-shirts which they used a university credit card to purchase. Every purchase request came through me, I’d approve, decline, or ask for more info and then they’d come to our front desk to use the card.

I interacted with students daily regarding their events and finances while my coworker dealt with them on all aspects of student activities. He was contacted by a couple of students who wanted to start a new student org for a gun club. He turned them down because it went against university policy to promote guns on campus and they showed up one day with a faculty advisor determined to get their organization approved. It was a heated debate, and after much back and forth with our office and the administration they were approved for a Historic Gun Club – the focus and interest being in vintage firearms. Once they were approved, the org president came in with a gift for me and my coworker. “My mom made these,” he said and we were given sugar cookies in the shape of a handgun.

The first year they were an org they were pretty active, the next year less so until spring. The org president contacted me to request to use the credit card to make a donation to a local shooting range in exchange for targets for shooting practice. I turned him down because we didn’t allow use of student activity funds for donations. It was pretty cut and dried on my end but then he looped the owner of the shooting range into the email and there were many emails back and forth regarding their rights. I bowed out and passed the email to my boss who declined it for the same reasons I did, and because from the onset it had been made clear that student funds were not going to be used for ammunition or targets.

The org president was at my desk often in the beginning to learn the ins and outs of requesting and using budgeted funds. He wanted to know every detail and I’d go over it and then a few days later he’d stop by and I’d go over it again. “I don’t want to mess this up,” he said and I told him it was a learning process and once he’d done it a time or two he’d be fine and not to worry. He was always polite and very nerdy. I wanted to tell him that chicks love nerds, that I was married to a science nerd, and that to me he seemed far too sweet to be swept up in the gun culture, but my job was managing money not giving life advice to young adults who weren’t asking.

*****

Last week I was getting ready to leave work when I checked the news and heard of the shooting in Uvalde. The story was unfolding and as the hours went by it kept getting worse. That night I checked on my daughter, the one who has spent the last thirteen years inside an elementary school, and she was not okay. As a librarian, she told me, it would be impossible to hide twenty kids in her space and what about her own daughter down the hall?

The next day I went out to lunch with her and my granddaughter and couldn’t stop staring at Mabel. How in God’s name could anyone go into a school and take their rage out on children? And how do we continue to allow this to happen over and over and over? Mabel brought along her Disney cookbook to show me all the recipes that she and her mom are going to make this summer. When the check came she said she would pay for it and gave me a nickel from her sequined mermaid purse then skipped to the car under her umbrella, the one she was swinging around earlier when her mom had told her she needed to learn umbrella etiquette. “What’s etiquette?” she asked. “It’s manners, Mabel,” her mom said, “so you don’t hurt anybody when you’re using it.

*****

I was at my desk cleaning up student org accounts getting ready for our audit after the academic year ended. I opened an email requesting that a student be removed from all mail lists immediately due to his sudden death. I saw the name and jumped out of my desk to talk to my boss.

His name was Ryan, he had graduated a week earlier with a masters degree in engineering, he was the president of a gun club at an urban college, and the cause of death was a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

In the weeks and months following Mark’s death, when I rarely slept more than a few hours every night, I would lay in bed and listen to the sounds of the trains. I decided that if I paid close attention to the time and the blast of their horns I could figure out their schedule and thus know the exact train that hit Mark. This never happened because at some point I’d fall asleep and then I’d have to start all over again the next night and the next until I ended up back again at Tuesday.

To say this was an exercise in insanity is an understatement but that’s where I was in those days.

A few months later I started going to therapy every Monday. I was working close to the therapist’s office and would leave work a bit early and talk about train schedules and last day walks in the park, about the summer of foreboding I could not figure out, and all the other things that go with a traumatic loss. One week I told her that the staff in our office received an email about a student who was kicked out and had his eyes set on making things right, specifically with our office. His picture was included in the email. An hour later the building services manager went desk to desk to show his photo to all of us with instructions on what to do if we encountered him, and that’s when it occurred to me that this was some serious shit.

Campus security showed up to patrol our floor and that’s when the wheels of my fragile state of mind came apart. I walked out the doors of the office to go deliver something and approaching me was an officer, his hand resting on a weapon. As soon as I saw his uniform I panicked. I made a beeline to the bathroom where I hid in a stall until my heart stopped pounding. The rest of the week I went up and down the stairwell at the back of our office so I didn’t have to see him because if he couldn’t find me he couldn’t tell me my husband was dead.

This is how a traumatic death leaves its calling card.

When I talk about therapy, it often feels like it’s met with a “Oh, that’s nice you have someone to talk to about your feelings.” And that is true, but it’s also about managing trauma that resurfaces over and over. Working through scenarios where every police officer who happens to cross my path isn’t there to deliver devastating news, stopping the movie in my head that says I did something wrong and made this all happen, letting go of train schedules, of learning to live daily with the sound of their long, urgent blasts day and night.

On three different occasions since Mark has been gone, I have received a text with news that someone had committed suicide. Committed suicide is a gut punch and I never word Mark’s death like that so to read it in a text is even worse. Because I did not know any of these people there was no reason for me to be informed. In one case it was to cover a work shift and since I was on a leave I couldn’t work it anyways. That one went on and on until the point I had to turn my phone off. “If you’re ever thinking of ending your life call me even if it’s in the middle of the night….” it said. That night I was in a terrifying loop of memories of the days before Mark died, that day, the days after.

Reliving. Reliving. Reliving.

That took weeks to shed and several therapy appointments, and in retrospect it now seems funny in a ludicrous way. Like you are on the precipice of life and death and suddenly remember that you and Angela worked stock that one time and she seemed kind of nice so maybe you’ll give her a ring-a-roo so she can talk you off the cliff.

I no longer have the job I did when Mark died and have since moved my therapy appointment to earlier in the day since I am off on Mondays. They are often still surprisingly hard, and as I told my daughter recently, it is talking about how Mark the boy grappled with his childhood that does me in. “You know, Mom,” she said, “you gave him everything he needed. You gave him your big family, the three of us, security and safety.” I can remember so many times watching Mark interacting with my family and looking so happy, Mark with his colleagues and biking friends, Mark at Thanksgiving with our friends and her siblings deciding he was to be named an honorary brother, Mark when our house was full and the table overflowed. He loved that.

Those things have taken me a long time to take credit for, to acknowledge that maybe he’d have been gone sooner if not for me. But the anguish of death lurks around corners and surfaces with no warning flares, so I am begging you to not share your devastating news with someone who deals with the long-term effects of a traumatic death in ways you will never know. Because though she may look the same on the outside, on the inside there hasn’t been a single day that she doesn’t remember how it used to be, and how she must make peace with the weight of an untimely and violent death that has settled deep inside her bones.

When Mark and I had been married for more than two decades, he decided to become a Catholic. I’d long given up on that, and though I hoped it would happen one day, Mark was Mark and he did everything in his way and on his own time.

It came to be because I started going to a new church, one that was much more welcoming than the one the kids and I had been going to for years, and also one with a very charismatic priest. I’d come home and tell Mark about it, how every Sunday this guy managed to tap into current events and stun and surprise me with a message, and how my retelling of it could never do it justice. “You’ll just have to come one day and hear it for yourself,” I said, and to my surprise Mark announced one Sunday morning that he was coming to church with me and the kids. He kept coming, I got involved in the annual auction, he started riding with the newly formed bike team, and things evolved. After a week long ride across Kansas where he spent a lot of time cycling the flat terrain with Fr. Matt, he came home and said, “I’ve decided to become a Catholic,” and I was speechless. He asked a dear friend, a doctor at the med center and fellow biker, to be his sponsor and went through the RCIA program. Every Thursday night he’d come home and tell me something he’d learned that night, something he would ponder until the next week, and in all matters both academic and spiritual, Mark flourished most when he was a student.

He got baptized at the Easter vigil while me, the kids, and much of my family who flew in from Chicago sat in the front row. I looked at him getting drenched and coming out a few minutes later in his linen suit and thought, “Never say never because this is a damn miracle.” He stood to the side of the altar, I smiled at him, he winked at me. The next day we had our annual Easter open house – our little house full to the brim. Mark thanked everyone for being there, got very emotional, and it was one of those lovely days that feels good to return to over and over.

If there was any gift at the time of Mark’s death, it was that this priest was in the country on that horrible day. Fishing in Alaska but on his way back to Kansas City before returning to South America. Our dear friends, Mark’s sponsor and his wife, contacted him to see if he could preside over Mark’s funeral. There is much I could write about that day, but it often feels like a dream, or maybe like I’d told Mark years ago, you had to be there. I remember Fr. Matt talking about he and Mark riding side-by-side on those Kansas roads, how Mark turned to him and said, “I want to be a Catholic,” and then taking off on his bike leaving Matt in the dust. “He was a Catholic long before it was official,” he said to all of us brokenhearted, and that was true.

This Easter our table was full and lively, and even though I find that beautiful church I went to for so long to be weighted with emotional flashbacks, I still possess the Easter spirit of someone who was raised Catholic, who raised her kids in that faith, and then surprisingly saw her husband ride a bicycle down that path. The following day I felt awful – dizzy, nauseous, and a headache that lasted for a week. I assumed I’d picked up a bug somewhere until I remembered that like clockwork I get sick after every holiday. Though my head and heart move forward, my body fiercely remembers how it used to be and needs to shut down for a few days to catch up with reality.

The grass has turned green again, the lilacs have started to bloom, the peonies are budding. I’m outside constantly, even in the cold and rain, to watch it wake up, to see what rises from the dead and comes back to life. A thousand times since he died I’ve asked Mark the same thing. “Where are you?”

“I’m everywhere, Kath,” he answers, and it is in the spring that I know that to be true.