Month: December 2022

On our first Christmas together as a married couple, I was working at a bank and Mark was a grad student. The bank was open on Christmas Eve until noon and I had to work. Mark decided to go into the lab for a few hours, and the plan was to meet back at our apartment, get our stuff, and drive the two-and-a-half hours to Chicago. We woke up to snow, and as the morning progressed the weather got worse. By 11:00 the interstate was closed due to blowing, drifting, and ice covered roads and there went our opportunity to get home to family. Because we had been planning on leaving town, there was little food in the fridge. On Christmas Day, we ate minute steaks and canned green beans on tv trays while sitting in lawn chairs (our furniture at the time), drinking the last two beers in the fridge, and watching MTV. I was either crying or napping from crying until Mark declared we were leaving the house and going to the movies. We saw Terms of Endearment.

Every year we would talk about that Christmas and how it was an Epic Holiday Shit Show. Terms of Endearment? What were we thinking? Mark was in love with Debra Winger and came out of the theatre so bereft over her dying he could barely talk. We drove home in silence, killed some roaches in the bathroom like we did every night before we brushed our teeth, and fell into bed. “Thank god this day is over,” I said to Mark before we both fell asleep. The following day the sun was out, it reached the high 40s, and you would have never known there was a winter storm the day before.

For decades we would drive back and forth to Chicago for Christmas. When we lived in Maryland it was twelve hours each way with two kids, from here nine hours with three kids. A few years before Mark died, I said “enough” and we stayed in our own house for the entire holiday. Turns out there are no trophies for driving through treacherous weather or ending up sick and exhausted from stress. I loved it and never wanted to go back to how we used to do it. Mark came to love it, too, especially when the kids piled through the door, but for all the happiness he felt for us to be under one roof opening presents, he was a horrible gift receiver. He never asked for anything extravagant, every year it was socks, biking stuff, new pajamas. The kids would call me and plead for ideas but Mark was never enamored with stuff unless it was useful. Every year when it was his turn to open, I had an underlying feeling that he felt a little embarrassed as if he didn’t deserve any of it.

Now I have a hard time being near the men’s department of any store. Sometimes I’ll be brave (or maybe punish myself) and wander through to see what I would have bought and put under the tree if Mark were still alive. Useful things like sweaters and dress shirts for work, maybe a pair of slippers, new biking gloves, and socks, good wool socks. He, on the other hand, always went overboard with me, and as they got older I’d send one of the kids with him to keep him in check. “Don’t you dare go over our budget, Mark,” I would say to him as he left and he waved me off in that way he did when he thought I was being ridiculous.

Last year we had Mallory and her boyfriend in California on a video call as we opened our gifts from Secret Santa. Later when I talked to her, she said that they both felt spoiled with everything that was sent to them for Christmas. “Good,” I said, “that’s exactly how I wanted you to feel.” In writing this blog, I often feel spoiled with love and support. I am grateful that openly talking and writing about loss has an audience, when for so long grievers have felt forced to stuff that pain so deep down it exploded out in other ways. Writing is a quiet and solitary endeavor, so if you have shared my work, left a comment or feedback, called or texted me after reading something I’ve written, I want you to know how much that means to me. I don’t think of this as a journey of mine alone but for all of us. I just happen to have figured out how to put it into words.

My life is proof that the most unimaginable things can happen when you least expect it, and if this season hits hard, terribly hard with longing, you are not alone. Maybe if we promise to stay the course, to not give in or give up, we’ll find a clearing in the woods under the stars where all of us heartbroken can gather to dance in the joy of loving and being loved so perfectly it hurts.

Merry Christmas,
k.

After Mark died and I started therapy, I told my therapist that I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with not only the absence of Mark, but the absence of his career that loomed so large in our lives. Like him it was layered and complex, but one of my favorite things in the course of my work day was when Mark and I would email back and forth about our jobs, and seemingly being the only sane ones plopped against our will into the Land of Misfit Toys. I would laugh out loud at my desk at his takedowns, while across the state line he’d do the same with mine until we had to cut it off to actually do our jobs. My therapist said my life would eventually fill in with other things, and that Mark’s career and the med center would no longer be something I daily missed. Like many things I was told back then it seemed like utter bullshit to me.

By virtue of death, I was suddenly thrown into the job of being Mark’s designated hitter, and three months later went to his department Christmas party. When my ticket number was called and I won a door prize, I walked to the front of the room in my party dress and misty eyes, and wished a sinkhole would swallow me whole rather than having all those pitying eyes on me while I was handed a box of cashews. The following year I went again, that time with Joe and his wife. Was it any easier? I don’t know, I don’t remember any of it. Then Covid hit, the parties came to a halt, and I was so relieved to not have to show up and be on.

In the aftermath of Mark’s death, the med center wanted to honor him with the donations they received in his name, and I was in contact with his department on a regular basis. We mutually decided that a bench outside his building would be fitting, so on a hot summer afternoon I met Joe, along with the head of the landscaping department, to discuss the bench and pick out a spot. I stood there looking at the window of his former office, empty and still unused, and tried to pay attention to what was being said to me. I was so distracted, so shocked at being there without Mark that I kept mumbling “okay” over and over regardless of what was being said.

After years of delays, the bench was installed and dedicated a few weeks ago. I was dreading it and my anxiety was off the charts. The kids pointed out to me that this time around it wasn’t a solo mission, but one that they would be at and that we would all prop each other up. I was sick, tested myself that morning to make sure it wasn’t Covid, and drank cough syrup straight from the bottle so I could get through it without sounding, as Mark would say, like I was coughing up a lung. It was a warm, sunny November day and most of his department was there for it. It was brutal and it was beautiful. The bench is perfect – simple, quiet, the most understated stone. It faces the road alongside his building, the apartment buildings many of his students lived in, and the Vietnam Cafe, now torn down, where he would often eat lunch. The engraved dedication on it was the idea of his department chair and grad student. Whenever Mark would introduce a speaker, a class topic, or his own research, he would set it up and then say, “Without further ado….”, which then Joe said would blow the doors off and always be much ado. In the fastest decision ever made, the kids and I agreed it was the perfect thing to put on the bench.

In those many years at the med center, speakers would often come to town, and Mark (along with other faculty) would be obligated to take them out to dinner. Spouses used to be included and I’d go along every once in awhile, but then they put the brakes on that and Mark would go solo. When he’d get home I’d always want to know every detail. He’d give me the stats on the person and their science, which was very much him, when what I really wanted to know was what everybody had to eat from appetizers to desserts. Every time he’d order a pork chop and every time he’d tell me it wasn’t very good. One night when he was disappointed in his meal yet again, I asked him why he kept ordering that and he said pork chops were his thing whenever he had a work dinner. I don’t know how long Mark had been gone when I was thinking about those stupid pork chops again and how in this entire city nobody seemed to know how to cook one. How is that even possible? It made no sense and then it hit me. He down played every bit of those fabulous dinners because he knew I was at home eating a bag of microwave popcorn.

My therapist was right in that other things would eventually fill in my life to take the place of Mark’s career, and while I am grateful for that it will never be close to what I had. I miss hearing about lousy pork chops at expensive restaurants, papers published, colleagues, Mark’s exuberance and joy of discovering new things. Someone recently told me that they’ve thought of Mark so many times during these Covid years and asked me what he would have done. “I’m not sure,” I said, “but I do know that it would have been his Superbowl.”

With the last piece of business being taken care of at the med center, it no longer feels like showing up and being on is an obligation that is mine to fill. It took a long while and a lot of emotional work for me to get to this point, and like many parts of this journey unseen by most. After I spoke at the dedication, the department admin said to me, “Mark was always so proud of you. He’d come into my office and talk to me about you all the time. Sometimes he’d tell me about something you wrote and made me promise that I’d read it.”

Of course he did, because everything about him was about about blowing the doors off and making people pay attention to what he thought was important.

How do you not miss that?