Author: Kathleen Fisher

I am always hesitant to talk about any unusual things that have happened since Mark’s death as he was highly skeptical of that kind of stuff. I’d read my horoscope every day and over coffee tell him whether I was going to have a good day or not before it even started. Did I believe it? No, but Mark did outrage better than anyone, and so I’d read it out loud to him to get under his skin and he’d take the bait, mansplain the utter bullshitness of horoscopes, and then say, “Okay, Nancy Reagan, you better to call the Astrology Police and tell them they need to rearrange the stars to your liking.” Then he’d take a 45 minute shower to figure out his day and cleanse himself of my Pisces angst.

But odd things happen that defy explanation, most recently when I went to the dealership to trade my car in and pick up my new one. The entire car buying process was handled by my son-in-law who searched and negotiated and did everything but write the check. I had decided that I wanted a Honda CRV which was similar to what I had in size, but on a walk in the neighborhood I saw a Honda Fit, came home and read everything I could about it, changed my mind, and placed a new order with Nate. My only request was that it have a leather interior. He found one, met me at the house where they brought it over for me to test drive, and in that cute black leather interior that matches most of my wardrobe I said, “Is it bad to want to marry the first boy I date?” It wasn’t as I have no bandwidth to agonize over decisions. Nate worked out a deal for me and I went with my daughter on a Saturday morning to pick it up. I woke up that day, looked at the Escape in the driveway, cried, and left the house with the keys and title in my hand and all the enthusiasm of someone getting a root canal by a student in his first semester of dental school. But my daughter, who is like her dad in so many ways, bounced into my car like Tigger and was bound and determined to make this an adventure.

As is the strategy of car dealers, we were there forever so they could break me and wear me down with a $3000 extended warranty. Little did they know that this chick is so worn down already that an extended warranty (especially on a Honda) was never going to happen. But they have to do their thing and before we got to the hard sell, I said to the finance guy, “What’s with the old guys in this place who won’t wear a mask? All of you have to wear one and their wives are wearing one but they aren’t. Is it like this every day or do they just come out on Saturdays?” He looked at me and said, “Well, I’m not sure you are aware of this but men know everything,” and then he did a show and tell of the half-ass ways said men would try to comply, the favorite being the mask dangling from one ear. It was the snarky kind of humor I love and so I said, “Maybe they can be the sacrificial lambs for the murder hornets.” This was the invitation he needed to launch into an explanation of a Youtube video he’d watched of a murder hornet getting into a beehive. The bees (who never forget that it’s their job to save the queen) surrounded it and flapped their wings so fast that it created enough heat to kill the murder hornet. I said, “What??? Really? You just type in murder hornets and you get to see that? Get. Out. Of Here.” “Yep,” he said, and from there he talked about hummingbirds and the way they can see ultraviolet light, that the scales on sharks create no resistance in the water which is why they swim so fast, that a drop of water can sit on a leaf and not disperse and one day cars will have that kind of technology so that a wax job will last for the life of the car, that his mom has had breast cancer three times and how one day medicines will target the cancer only and not kill everything in its path. There was no end to the passion and enthusiasm he had and I turned to look at Maggie and she said, “I know, Mom.” “Know what,” our new friend Josh asked, and Maggie explained how this car thing was an emotional powder keg for me but he resembled her dad so much it was like he was here. I asked if he had any interest in science and he said a little bit and that as a kid he could not watch enough nature documentaries and grew up with David Attenborough. “Now when I watch them,” he said, “I have to turn it off before something gets killed because it gets to me,” and we talked about the cruelty of big game hunters and how elephants mourn when someone in the herd is killed. We were in his office way too long which was okay, and when I sat in the driver’s seat of my new car in the dealership parking lot I cried and said, “I’m a little bit happy today, Maggie, and I’m not faking it like I usually am,” and she said, “That’s good Mom. You deserve it.” “I think so too,” I said but did I think Josh the finance guy was a sign? Not really but it felt like a stamp of approval from another world that I was doing the right thing and I desperately needed that.

A few days after that I was going to walk and went into Mark’s closet for one of his shirts. When I was pregnant with Mallory, a pair of leggings and one of Mark’s big white shirts was my daily attire and I went in there to find one. I have been in Mark’s closet dozens and dozens and dozens of times. Usually it begins with a pep talk that I can clean it out, I can donate his clothes, I can fold them, box them, and let go. I can move forward in life without all his stuff, but the pep talk fizzles out as soon as I open the door and look at his shirts, dress pants, sports jackets, the shoes he wore until they fell apart, the shelf of ball caps stacked one on top of the other. On that day I looked over the big white shirts and wasn’t feeling it when I noticed a gray polo turned inside out on the shelf next to the ball caps. That is how all of Mark’s shirts ended up and many times we’d be out and I’d say, “Your shirt is inside out,” and he’d say, “It’s been on like that all day and I never noticed,” because in every single way Mark was the absent minded professor. I grabbed the polo, turned it right side out, and wore it to walk.

The next morning it was on the bedroom floor when I picked it up to put it in the laundry basket. I held it up to my face, this shirt that is one of the remains of a life that vanished, and it smelled just like Mark. I kept turning it over and every single spot smelled like Mark. I sat on the floor with it pressed again my sobs and was so grateful because I miss that smell so much, and so confused because I swear on all that is holy that that shirt was not there before. And how could it still smell like him when nothing else in his closet does?

The next day was Sunday and the kids came over for dinner. We took a walk afterwards and when they left I finished cleaning a few things up, got the coffee ready for the morning and started turning lights off downstairs. As I was turning the dining room light off I saw two pieces of paper sitting on the table. I had earlier wiped the table off and there was nothing on it so I walked over and picked them up. There were two receipts – an itemized receipt and a credit card receipt. They were from the IHOP across from the med center, the IHOP Mark was so excited to have close by because he could walk over there and have pancakes for lunch which was his kind of thing.

The receipt was dated November 6, 2015. He had the breakfast sampler.

Nearly every day since Mark died, I have lived with a sense of outrage. How is it possible that he is not here? How did this happen? How is it that the world keeps turning without him? Add to that a global pandemic and it’s like a match to tinder. When friends say that TJ Maxx reopened and the shelves and racks were emptied by the time they got there, that Clorox Wipes are only available on the black market, that half the people at Target weren’t wearing a mask, I raise my hand and say, “Oh, I know. It’s all ridiculous and can you believe that Mark Fisher is still dead? If you want to talk about outrage have a seat and let’s light it up.”

Last week Outrage knocked on the door and said, “Listen, sis, we don’t think your world has been upended enough so buckle up.” On Tuesday, I got a text from my boss about a Zoom meeting with him at 9:00 where he delivered the news that after five years at the university my position was being eliminated due to budget cuts. “I know you don’t like bullshit,” he said, “so I’m going to give it to you straight.” I have been expecting this for months and was not surprised, and yet I was shocked. After this emotional (on both sides of the screen) meeting ended, I wanted to reschedule another one so I could say, “Just for the record, that’s true about me liking to be told the straight up truth but this time I could have used a couple of shakes from the unicorn rainbow sprinkle jar. Meeting adjourned. All in favor close your laptop and drop kick it out the window.”

The next day was the thesis defense of Mark’s graduate student which I was invited to watch online, and oh my, she took that Anthrax Pore Transformation, lobbed it in the air, and knocked it out of the park. She was poised and confidant and in command of her work, and Mark would have been so proud. Throughout his career most of his students left with a masters degree and she was only the second to graduate with a PhD. It would not be an exaggeration to say that he would have been like a kid on Christmas Eve, unable to sleep the night before out of pure excitement for the next day. It was an honor to witness and one of the hardest days of my life. She paid tribute to Mark at the end, saying he was a feminist, an ally, and a professor who always kept the best interest of his students at the forefront of his days. It was genuine, professional, and a heartbreak.

On Friday I had to go to the med center to meet with the landscaping team for options on a memorial bench in Mark’s honor. The new garden, pond, and outdoor meeting area will be outside his building and I stood there looking at the window of what used to be his office and wondered how it was possible that it would remain unoccupied by him for close to two years, and I was the one there picking out a bench with his name on it.

Saturday I traded our car in. By Sunday, which not only was Father’s Day but Mark’s birthday, I was done by noon. It had been a solid week of emotional avalanches and I had no energy left to pretend I was okay. I was not.

A few close friends knew the kind of week I’d had and kept checking in with me. Those regular check-ins keep me tethered to here when I often yearn to be in a place less painful. A long-time, dear friend texted me Monday morning and said she was thinking of me and praying for me. I texted back that if I could have a warm body next to me at night so I that I could at least sleep (or whatever), maybe I could handle things better. She suggested that I buy a blow up doll. I said with my luck it would come deflated. She said only when I was done with it.

Thank God above that I have the most outrageous friends.

After Mark died, people looked at me all the time and said, “You are so strong,” or “I don’t know how you find the strength.” I always flinched whenever it was said. I think it was meant as a compliment but it didn’t feel like a compliment. It felt like an observation of what the outside of me looked like which bore no resemblance to the inside. The inside had to talk herself out of bed every morning, she crashed into everything, she cared about nothing, and she daily wished she was dead. But the outside had to suddenly manage health care choices, fill out paperwork for life insurance, make decisions about investments, and had to accomplish these things under crushing grief.

A few months after Mark died, I went to the bank to notify them of Mark’s death. As was the norm then, I always carried his death certificate with me. I sat with a bank rep who was so gentle and kind when I told him, he noted it on our account, told me I could keep using the checks I had for as long as I wanted, and when they ran out I could replace them with just my name. I was stunned. I was supposed to order new checks without Mark T. Fisher at the top? His name gets erased from the decades of our hard work and savings?

I had to get out of there but I had a check for $1400 made out to both of us that I needed to deposit. “Well that’s going to be a problem,” the bank rep said, “because we can’t do that without his signature.” I stared at him for the longest time and finally said, “I’m not trying to cash it, I’m not asking you to give me $1400, I’m asking you to put all of this in our account. I’m asking you to take care of this when you can see there is more than enough money to cover this.” After an awkward pause he got on the phone with the higher ups and when he hung up he said,” I’m sorry. You’ll have to send this back and ask them to issue it in your name only. It shouldn’t be a problem but they’ll need his death certificate in order to reissue it.”

I tried to plead my case and when I opened my mouth the only thing that came out was, “I can’t,” and I could not move. I couldn’t stand up, I couldn’t argue with him, I couldn’t get out of the chair. I think I could have kept sitting there after they turned the lights off, locked the doors, and all left for the night. After a very long time he picked the check up from the desk and said, “Let me see what I can do.” A few minutes later he came back with my deposit slip and handed it to me.

Mark used to cycle in a lot of charity rides. He was years ahead of the cycling trend and one of the earliest ones he did was the Tour De BBQ, where the ride went all over town to the local barbecue restaurants. At each stop you could rest, have some water, and sample the bbq before moving on to the next one. Each of these rides required a fee and came with a jersey. When the Tour De BBQ got more popular, and every weekend jock started participating, Mark quit signing up for it. He hated that it had become bumper-to-bumper with amateurs but he saved the jerseys and rotated them with the other ones he wore for his daily ride to work. Because they are as familiar to me as he was, I like to open the drawer and look at them. Often I think, “They’re all still shoved in your dresser drawers, Mark. Come back and put one on and shake me awake from this bad dream.”

Our son had one of his dad’s jerseys at his apartment and decided to bring it back home. It was from the Tour De BBQ and it sat on the couch for several days. I kept looking at it and there was something off about it that I couldn’t figure out. Finally I saw it – on the side where it was supposed to say “Unity Is Strength, it instead said, “Unity Is Stregth,” which I found hilariously funny. I wished Mark were here so I could have pointed it out to him and said, “Can you believe nobody proofread the dang jersey before you guys put it on and rode all over town?”

That is how the inside of strength goes, the unceasing awareness that somebody needs to call the manager and explain that the “n” is missing. That somebody in charge should know that the absence of a single letter makes everything feel precarious, wrong, and on the verge of collapse. But then you realize that even though it’s as plain as day nobody else can see it but you, and over and over it keeps making you stuck and unable to move until you figure out that the only way through is to rest, hydrate, and push on to the next stop.

Some things to note regarding this story: 1) I embrace all things female, and am, therefore, a gatherer in life and not a hunter. Mark once told me that as a pioneer I’d make it a day in the wild before the wagon train threw me over the side and never looked back. 2) Cats are absolutely worthless in a crisis. 3) All previous things I have ever written about wanting to be in nature are bullshit.

In the early days of spring, before a single thing had even bloomed, stink bugs started showing up on the windows in the living room. This had never happened prior to last year. I blame global warming even though I have no proof or even looked it up to see if this was true. All I know is that Mark and I bought this house 28 years ago and beetles hanging out on the windows for months never used to be a problem and now they are. At first there would be a few here and there. They are the “C” Team of bugs, slow and dumb and easy to kill which you are not supposed to do because once squished, they stink (hence the name). In the beginning, I would scoop them up and let them outside where they would fly away, only to land on the outside of the window and try to get back in. On nice days when I had the windows open, they’d whistle for the relatives and there would be a reunion in my living room. I’d get distracted trying to work from home or talking on the phone and have to stop what I was doing to take care of them. After weeks of hanging out in the living room they got bored and decided to move upstairs to the bedroom. Since they have hard backs, I’d hear them land on the blinds, or even worse, get under the lamp shade and bounce back and forth inside it. Twice one of them landed on my arm while I was reading, and after that happened whenever I saw one I’d grab a Kleenex and wrap it around the lumbering doofuses and drop them in the toilet. One of them had the audacity to fly right back out and when I found it I smashed it with a poetry book so the end was quick but probably peacefulish.

While they were making a home on the inside, the cats were dropping dead mice on the back porch like they it was their only job in life. Every day there’d be one or two on the porch, and one morning when there was five of them, I called somebody to rescreen the porch. He used a heavier duty screen that the cats couldn’t tear and it cost plenty, but between the warmer temps taking care of the stink bugs and a refurbished screened-in porch, I finally felt like I was free from beetle and rodent removal.

And then the universe said, “Hold my beer.”

Before dawn on a Monday morning I woke up to the sound of something scratching the carpet in the bedroom. I turned the light on and saw nothing. Five minutes later I heard it again, and that time when I turned the light on there was a POSSUM IN THE BEDROOM standing by the door. I screamed. The possum turned to look directly at me like “Whoa, it’s cool,” and crawled underneath the dresser. On shaaaaaaky legs I stood on the bed, reached over, slowly opened the door, and then made a beeline for the office beside the bedroom, slamming the door behind me. I bent over, hands on knees, my heart pounding right out of my chest and told myself to thinkthinkthink.

And the only thing that my brain could think to tell me was, “Kath, you’ve got a MFing possum in your MFing house,” which, duh, I already knew so I laid on the floor in a fetal position and waited for stress to finish me off. And I waited and waited and waited while my heart thumped thumped thumped and nothing happened so I got dressed for a Possum Hunt.

I’m kidding. I wasn’t going to hunt for a possum. I was going to go to the Shell station down the street to fill the gas can to the brim, come home, splash it all over the house, and then throw a match over my shoulder as I walked away for good. First, though, I had to get out of there so I slowly opened the office door, tip-toed out of Dodge and bolted down the stairs. All morning things (especially possums and arson) should start with coffee and while that was brewing I wondered who I could text to rescue me. I could text nobody because my phone was upstairs with You-Know-Who. So I posted a plea on Facebook for any early risers, an SOS call from my Hindenburg and googled how to get rid of a possum.

It is highly unusual for a possum to ever enter a home. And yet…..

At 6:30 my neighbor walked down the street, the first of the Possum Posse to arrive. She sat on the porch with me while we both drank coffee and then volunteered to look for the possum. A few minutes later she came down with my phone in hand, said she saw no sign of the possum but that she didn’t look real hard, and called her husband to bring a trap. In the meantime, my daughter came over with their terrier who had been hunting possums under their deck for weeks. Between the dog and the two worthless cats who were in for the day, we had three animals against one, and none of them showed much interest in finding the squatter.

While my neighbor’s husband went to get the trap, we all started talking and I was gently asked if maybe I dreamed there was a possum in the house because really, who has a possum come into their bedroom? I said, “I don’t think so,” but immediately thought maybe I did, maybe I’d caused all of this commotion over a dream, maybe I am taking a swan dive off the deep end, that people who knew me would run into each other in the grocery store next to the beets and say, “She seemed like she was doing better after her husband died and then I heard that she started seeing possums. Yes, I know, possums, and now they say she just lays in her bed all day long staring at the door.”

My neighbor’s husband arrived with a small trap, and between them and my daughter they all went possum hunting upstairs. Maggie, my oldest child, the one you have to scrape off the ceiling when there is a spider, went looking in the closets and under the bed for the possum, and it’s a little late in the game to find out she must belong to somebody else. There was no sign of Mr. P. and the captains of the Possum Posse decided the situation called for more traps and left to go to Lowe’s. Before leaving my neighbor said, “Everything is fine. Wherever he is now he’s asleep and won’t bother you.” They seemed to have mistaken me for a big girl who could hang out in my house with a possum like IT WAS NO BIG DEAL. If it weren’t for the smidgen of pride I barely had left I would have clung to their pant legs and begged them to stay.

Back they came with two more traps, baited with cat food and the fervent, sweaty prayers of me who suddenly needed confirmation that there really was a possum on the premises. They decided to leave for a bit and my daughter and I started talking. I told her that one morning I was drinking coffee and could hear something crunching cat food. The cats were still outside and three times I got up to look and there was nothing there. Then twice there was the most disgusting poop in the upstairs bathroom and I thought the cat was sick, and DEAR GOD that had been four days earlier. “There’s been a possum in my house for four days, Maggie!! Roaming around, going upstairs, having a good time like he was a paying roommate. Sweet jeezus, tell me how somebody has a possum in their house for four days and not have any idea???” And Maggie said, “There there, Mom, you’ve been under some stress. How were you supposed to know you were living with a possum? It could happen to anyone.”

No it couldn’t. I’m certain most people would know there was a possum in their house before four days had gone by. They would know before it came into their bedroom to wake them up. They would know when the cat food was always gone. They would know when it had diarrhea on their bathroom floor twice. All of them would know except me.

As we were talking, I wondered if it was in the downstairs closet because there is a small opening in it that backed up to the stove. Maggie offered to look and I clapped and said “Yeah, girl, you go do that,” and she marched off to get her Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom badge and Patrol Leader of the Week. Reporting back from base camp, she whispered, “Welp, he’s in there but he’s sleeping right now,” like we had some newborn who’d been up all night with colic and wore his little self out. “Wake him up,” I said, “and tell him the jig is up and he has to leave. Now.” She went back in, slowly opened the closet door, positioned the trap right outside of it, and closed the bedroom door behind her on the way out. She came out eager and energized because now we were getting somewhere in this hunt, and I looked over at her and said, “You know what I want? I want a boring life, a regular boring life like everybody else has. Is that too much to ask?” “Oh geez, Mom,” she said, “you weren’t meant for a boring life. Not ever. Besides this is exciting.”

And five minutes later we heard Possum Pete go in the trap. Maggie called our neighbors back and they came and got him and offered to set him loose in a kingdom far far away. Everything was fine and ol’ Pete diarrheaed all the way out the door as a heartfelt and pungent farewell.

Some more neighbors came and secured the perimeter and it was determined that the possum likely came in through the screen door. I had a friend over a few nights earlier and we had a glass of wine on the porch and then I walked her out before I closed everything up. By then the possum must have come through the kitchen door without me knowing.

At 10:30 that night when every light in the entire house was still on because of my PTSD, a different neighbor texted me. She had a pack of cigarettes stowed away for especially high stress days if I was interested. I poured two glasses of whiskey and met her outside. We went over to the creek and sat alongside it, drinking and smoking until midnight, talking about how life upends you and knocks you flat. How just when you think it can’t get crazier a possum shows up in your bedroom, and how decades earlier when you were delivered into the world, the only instructions left for your parents was to make sure that one never lived a boring life.

Postscript: I have the most incredible neighbors and they have my unending gratitude for possum hunting, ciggies, and a million other things.

Throughout our marriage, there was nothing more painful for Mark and I to do than to buy a car. We’d shell out thousands of dollars year after year for repairs on cars that needed to be replaced because the alternative was TOO MUCH. We’d think about it, talk about it, complain, ignore, and when the time came would breathe slowly into brown paper sacks and finally take the leap. Most of our cars were Fords as Mark’s dad worked for them for decades which allowed us a Friends & Family discount. You would think that would have made the whole process easier but for us it never really did.

When the kids were younger we had a mini van that started racking up the miles and would cost $800 in repairs every time we took it in. Finally, the doomsday clock on this junker rang too loudly for us to avoid and we knew we had to replace it. At the time hybrids were rather new, and after doing some research we knew we wanted a Ford Escape. Even that took months to decide, but when the van started making another weird noise we resentfully took the day off work and went car shopping. That day happened to be Election Day in 2006, a day full of hope and change as we cast our vote and then drove to the dreaded dealership to sell our bleeding liberal hearts in exchange for a new car.

There weren’t many hybrids available yet but the first place we went to had a silver one that we drove around town while the salesman pointed out the features. Mark loved being able to watch the screen to see when it was using the battery versus the engine – a techy option that he was enamored with while I fell hard for those heated leather seats. When we got back to the dealership, Mark, who believed all shopping was a reconn mission where you get in and out quickly before the enemy even knows you’re there, was ready to close the deal. All of it was happening too fast for me. Were we really going to pay $30K for a car? I pulled Mark aside and said I was teetering on a ledge of panic and we needed to go to lunch and talk this over. That sort of thing with me always drove Mark nuts. If we both agreed that we needed to buy a car, we agreed to a date to buy a car, and they had the car we wanted, what was the hold up? The hold up was always my head that thought the emergency brake was to be used for e.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.n.g.

Over lunch Mark calmed me down, told me we couldn’t keep sinking money into the van, that this car would save us on gas, and that it was past time to get something more reliable. I knew he was right and we went back to the dealer where they encouraged us to take it home for a few hours. We picked up the kids from school, took it on the highway, thought it over some more, and then took it back to the dealership where our salesman said, “I can already tell you’re in love, aren’t you,” which was some kind of over reach because we weren’t exactly car loving people. We all sat down at a table in the showroom where the negotiations started. The first great deal they thought we’d love had a payment that was more than our monthly mortgage and I laughed. The salesman said, “Oh, I thought you wanted a two year loan. You need longer? No problem. Let me run this by my manager,” and off he went. I said to Mark, “You know that’s how they hook you, right? They come out with a ridiculous payment so they keep extending the months until they’ve beaten you down and you agree.” Mark leaned over and whispered, “I think this is the part where we’ve become unwitting participants in a hostage situation,” and I nodded and kept my eye on the exit signs.

Junior Salesman bounced out of the manager’s office again with another deal and I shook my head. “No?” he asked incredulously, “you need something a little less?” Fun Fact: We’re at a Ford dealership trading in a twelve year old mini van that barely got us here. In case it wasn’t obvious we are the Leadership Team of The Less People. He went back again to talk to his manager to get us an even better deal. I looked at Mark and said,”What do you suppose they’re really talking about every time he goes into the manager’s office?” “I’m going to go out on a limb here,” he said, “and say they’re talking about hosing us.”

After a lot of back and forth and an in-person meeting with the concerned manager because we really want to put you in this car we came up with a deal. “Well congratulations, you guys!! This is great and you know what that means,” the salesman said excitedly. We thought it meant that you get the kind of debt that makes you want to puke but he said, “Every time somebody buys a car here they get to ring the Showroom Gong.” The Showroom Gong? Mark leaned over to me and said, “I hate these people and I am not getting up and ringing some fucking gong,” so I got up and rang the gong like a big dork. The salesman said, “Oh you can ring it harder than that,” and I smiled and declined because it turned out that I’d reached my limit with all of these people.

Hours after this marathon started we finally had a car but were we really done? No we weren’t. We needed to talk to someone about undercoating and so a very attractive, British woman had us come into her office. She explained how undercoating works, the benefits of this option, and the price. We were wary and so she said it looked like we were the kind of people who needed a demonstration. She reached into her desk drawer and brought out two rusty, metal pie tins, one with undercoating and one without and was sure we’d be able to tell the difference right away. She knocked on the bottom of one tin and then the other. “Undercoating, no undercoating.” Knock knock knock. “Can you hear the difference?” By then we were like two high-schoolers in the last hour of all-day detention and about to slide out of the chairs and onto the floor. “Actually, I can’t,” I said, “can you do it again?” So she knocked knocked knocked on one pie tin and knocked knocked knocked on the other. “Undercoating, no undercoating.” I listened harder this time and looked at Mark for input but he was lifeless from boredom. “Can you do it one more time?” So she knocked knocked knocked on one pie tin and then knocked knocked knocked on the other and I said, “I’m not hearing it,” and leaned in across her desk. With another knock knock knock on the pie tins, Mark threw his hands in the air and said, “Just give us the undercoating so we can go home.” She smiled and said, “Folks, you won’t regret this decision,” and I thought we probably would but we signed the papers anyways and waited in the showroom to talk to somebody else.

As we were sitting there, Mark looked around and said, “How much do you think this place is worth?” Before I could answer he said, “Millions and millions and millions of dollars. There’s the building and the new cars in the showroom, a lot full of new cars, a lot full of used cars, equipment and tools in the service and body shop. This place is worth millions of dollars, so why do you think they’d spend all this money on this place and then pull out those ratty-ass, rusty pie plates and knock on them? Those things are what you throw away after your grandma dies and you’re cleaning out her house. Wouldn’t you think they could have used something better?” Then he started imitating the women knock knock knocking on one pie tin and knock knock knocking on the other and I started laughing and he started laughing and we could not stop. Our salesman came by to check on us and said, “I wish all of my customers were this happy buying a new car,” which made us laugh even harder. “Oh my god, Mark, we totally fell for the pie tin trick,” I said, “and as if that wasn’t bad enough we just financed it for five years so it probably will end up costing us ten grand,” which was so hilarious to us at that point that we were crying. In the midst of our party of two, we got summoned to the Finance & Insurance Manager’s office. I told Mark I had this one.

When Mark was in graduate school I worked at a bank. My first job there was to take finance deals over the phone from area dealerships. I knew that when a customer financed life insurance through the dealership it was almost always pure profit. It was also an easy sell, unnecessary for most people, and very lucrative for the finance manager so this F & I guy had met his match. He explained the financing details through Ford with a whopping $1000 rebate and then went on to the life insurance. “This is when it gets hard, folks,” he said, “because now we have to talk about if one of you dies and you still have a balance on your loan. What would you do? How would you be able to pay this off with only having one income.” “Oh, it’s not so hard for us,” I said. “We don’t want it.” He looked concerned and said, “Nobody thinks they want it and then the unexpected happens.” Mark shot me a glance. I shot one back saying I got this dude. “Here’s the thing,” I said, “we’ve got life insurance, we have savings, we have investments. We could pay this car off if we had to, and I bet your next trick is to tell us that this is only $1.99 a day and how could we not protect ourselves for the cost of a hot dog at QuikTrip. Am I right?” The F & I guy suddenly didn’t like me and looked to Mark for some mano-to-mano back up. Mark looked at him, shrugged his shoulders and said to me, “Atta girl, let’s get out of this place.”

We took many trips in that Escape and had thousands of conversations, deep ones about life and love and death, and mundane ones about when to stop for gas and where to eat. We saw cows and eagles, hawks, deer, and even a bear cub running in front of us when we were driving out of Glacier. We had a whole life in that car. After Mark died and I became the sole driver, the car took on so much more meaning to me. I could transport myself back to all those road trips and conversations, and many times I thought that at the very least I still had that car where we spent so many hours together.

Last month I took the car in for some routine stuff and was told that the underneath of it (the undercoated underneath) near the rear axles is rusting and to fix it would cost more than the car is worth. I wasn’t expecting that news and it flattened me for many days. Not the car, I thought, not that too.

Yes that, too, and life has knocked on my door to claim something else. If Mark were here he’d say, “It’s just a car, Kath, let it go,” but I’ve had to let a lot go and this one has tipped the Unfairness Scale. Since I got the news about the Escape I’ve looked at a few cars and am test driving one this week. Like every time before, I’d rather be spending my money on something else with someone else, namely a road trip with my husband. But he’s gone and won’t be in the showroom with me to make fun of some lady knock knock knocking on rusty pie tins or cheering me on when I shut down the finance manager.

I’ll find something that will work and for months it will have that new car smell, but it could never compare to the smell of Mark Fisher’s neck, where I loved to bury my face, take a deep breath, and pretend that all of him would last forever.

I got interested in gardening when a friend, who had for years been trying to talk me into it, finally said, “Just try it. You’ll love it, it’s very creative.” I guess those were the magic words because that’s when I fell hard and fast. Since that first tiny garden that Mark dug for me for Mother’s Day years ago, I have made many mistakes and still do. I fall in love with things that won’t work in our zone, that need too much attention, that are planted in the wrong spot, that wither and die in the summer heat. Every year is a new experiment.

This same friend took me out to a place in the boonies called The Flower Farm. It was a real working farm and the husband and wife who owned it knew everything. The husband was always working on the flowers and the wife worked with the customers. You could pick her brain about something and she’d have dozens of ideas to consider. The creative energy of the two of them was inspiring, and every time I came home from there I wanted to be a flower farmer in the worst way.

One time I bought a plant from them called Kiss Me Over The Garden Gate. It is one of those old-fashioned flowers that reseeded everywhere – eventually from the front yard to the back and Mark never cared that it ended up among his tomatoes and peppers. He loved the tall, wispy pink flowers that would bloom at the top. Every year he’d forget what they were called and when I’d tell him he’d say, “Oh yeah, what a great name for a plant.” I also bought an oregano plant from her that was invasive so I pulled it out, but to this day (twenty years later) it keeps coming back and coming back.

After a few years of going to the Flower Farm every spring, they abruptly closed when the husband ended his life. It was a shock to everyone who went there, and his wife could not manage those acres of flowers and herbs on her own so the business was shut down. Or maybe she just didn’t want to do it without him. It felt like undone sympathy to me. I wanted to say goodbye and to thank her for introducing me to so many flowers from a different time, to say I was so sorry about her husband. Her husband’s suicide was only the second time in my life that I knew of that kind of death. The first was the father of one of my classmates in grade school. He owned a pizza place, and because they were Catholic it was the only place my parents ever ordered from on the rare occasions when my mom didn’t cook. After it happened, I overheard my mom say to my dad, “That selfish man,” and that was not what I expected to hear about someone my parents knew well. At twelve years old it was so sad to me that John’s dad was dead, but it was eclipsed by the nature of his death which seemed to me to make everyone mad.

From a distance that kind of death is awful and always should be. From up close it is horrific and I am stunned multiple times a day that Mark died the way he did. I have never been more confused about anything in my life. Some things I have figured out, some I never will. Grief, uncertainty, and regret have become demanding bedfellows. I want to kick them out every night, and sometimes I am successful, but they come back for another round the next night and the next.

I don’t know how the guy who owned the flower farm died. It doesn’t matter. He and his wife created something beautiful and shared it with everyone. All these years later I can close my eyes and see that place, and it makes me long for the time in my life when the sadness will be overshadowed by all that was before the end.

Mark was a summer kind of guy and in my second year without him I endure these long, lonely days by going outside to dig, split, plant, weed, and water. And every day I look for what’s invasive so it doesn’t take over what is trying to grow and haunt my nights.

One of the funnest days I ever had with Mark was when I strong-armed him into going on a garden tour with me. It wasn’t his jam but we had free tickets and it seemed like a great way to spend a few hours on a beautiful Saturday afternoon even if he didn’t think so. House #1 with a huge vegetable garden and wandering chickens reeled Mark in, and I threw up my hands and said, “Do I have the best ideas or what?” We drove all over Kansas City to see the houses, talked to the owners, wandered the property, took a million photos, tried to figure out how we could make some of those ideas work in our yard (and how to win the lottery to pay for it), and filled our creative tanks to full.

We would go on the same garden tour again two years later. It was lovely and fun to look at so many great gardens but it did not compare to the magic of that first year. Maybe it was because our interests were so varied and did not often intersect, but on that day our gardening stars aligned, we were on the same page, and that kind of thing can’t be replicated.

This yard of ours is big and has been hard for me to manage on my own since Mark died. The spring days are labor intensive when everything is choked with weeds and leaves. Last week I spent hours cleaning out a bed in the backyard, then it rained and two days later it looked like I hadn’t done a thing. I think about hiring somebody to do some of this stuff but then change my mind. Isn’t this how you stay healthy? Isn’t this good for your physical and emotional well-being to be outside and moving? I get frustrated and think about dousing the weeds with chemicals because that would be so much easier but Mark was adamantly opposed to that because of runoff. Instead he would spend hours digging up weeds by hand. I don’t know how he did that year after year but I do know that I care about not poisoning what’s beneath my feet.

Last month I had the porch rescreened. The job cost double what I thought and took twice as long because so much rotting wood had to be replaced, but it was Mark’s favorite place to be on a Saturday afternoon so I took a deep breath and wrote the check. He would go out there and bring a paper that needed to be reviewed or tests to grade, and the combination of hot summer air and exhaustion from early morning biking and mowing the lawn would usually result in him falling asleep. I’d look at him and think, “Why do you work so hard all the time? Why do you only stop when you are so exhausted you cannot move another step?” Then he died and I found out you can’t outrun demons if you dare to slow down.

When the porch was getting a rehab and I would stand outside talking to the repair guy about another problem he found, we were always stepping around the mud that was behind the porch. Two downspouts dumped into that area, the sod that was laid wouldn’t grow and reseeding it a year later didn’t help either. Every night I’d go look at it and then walk around the yard to see what I could move or split to fill it in. Finally, I grabbed a shovel and edged out a bed. It was so easy it fooled me into thinking the rest would be a piece of cake. It wasn’t. Every time I dug I’d hit rock and then have to stop and try to pry it out of the mud. It was hard, it pissed me off, it made me want to cry, it made me want to give up. Some days I’d be out there for fifteen minutes and other days for hours. It was an ugly, futile mess that no longer became a bed but an example of my life which made me even more determined to turn it into something better.

After a lot of work I did end up doing that and since it’s been done I like to go out there and admire my work. Is this my rebirth, I wonder. Healing from Mark’s death has required digging so deep I think it will break me at best or kill me at worst, so that seems like a stretch for a small garden bed. Instead I say to myself, “You know what you are, Kathy Fisher? You are a badass,” and some days that seems like the best plan for moving forward.

When Mark was alive we had a pretty active social life. We both had our own jobs and relationships there, we had combined friends as a couple, and individual friends through our own interests. We also liked to go out often, just the two of us, for dinner or a movie. Many of those friends have stayed around since Mark’s death and included me in their gatherings. In the beginning, it felt like people needed to see me, to see that I was okay. I was so numb at the time that going to those events was easier than the ones that came later when the shock had worn off. For those I would make an appearance but before long could feel the wheels coming off, and so I’d say quick goodbyes and then sprint to the car afterwards where I could sob without dozens of pitying eyes looking at me.

How different from our before life when we would walk into a party and be greeted with, “The Fishers are here!!” Mark was far more comfortable in those social situations than I ever was. I’d always want him to walk in first and he’d say something funny and everyone would laugh and I preferred at parties to stick pretty close to him. Sometimes I’d even say on the way there, “Please don’t abandon me,” which now sounds like foreshadowing.

The best part of any party, wedding, work event…. we went to was the ride home where we would gossip about everything. The food, the couples, who showed up, the ones who didn’t, who clearly looked like they’d rather be anywhere else. Nothing and nobody was off limits as we dragged on it all. One time we went to the summer party of a guy Mark knew via his career and couldn’t stand. I asked him why we were going, if it was something he felt he had to go to for appearance sake and he said, “No, he makes $300K a year and does nothing. Totally worthless, can’t believe he keeps his job. I just want to go to his house and eat as much food as possible until I leave there looking like Jabba the Hutt.” “Oh,” I said, “so we’re going as revenge guests. Got it.” It did not disappoint. The host had a high opinion of himself with a devoted herd of groupies that followed him from room to room. When we wandered into his office where he was holding a presser about the Green Bay Packers, Mark said, “I hate the Packers,” and walked out. I told Mark that was a little over the top and he said, “I said nothing untrue. I hate the Packers.” All the way home he railed about “that son of a bitch.” Not to be left out, I said, “Did you notice all those rabbits around the house? They were everywhere. Who does a whole house in rabbit?”

When the med center was rolling in money, there were parties all the time. Big, expensive parties with hundreds of people at hotels all dressed up, speeches and bands and plenty of food and drinks. There was also his annual department party that included the whole family. We never missed a single year of that party, dragging the kids to it every December where they’d be told how much they had grown and asked the same questions as the year before and the year before that. As they got older they hated it, and one by one they peeled off from their Dad’s work commitment until it was just Mark and I going by ourselves. The department provided food and drinks and then everyone signed up for an appetizer, a side dish, or dessert. The same people bitched every year about how other departments had far nicer parties than the lame Biochemistry Department did, so some of those dishes were heavily seasoned with bitter.

After an extended happy hour the jockeying for a table would begin. There was a distinct pecking order to that. Students in the back, faculty with big egos in the front, the rest of you losers fend for yourself. Mark and I always sat in the back with one of his colleagues and his wife where we could watch the show.

It was at one of those parties a few years ago that I got up to check out the dessert table. Before long one of the professors in the department stood beside me and asked me what I thought looked good. “That cake looks pretty fantastic,” I said, “but nobody has cut into it yet so maybe I’ll pass on that.” He put his hand on my lower back, bent down, and in his very heavy accent said, “Shall we deflower this cake together, Mrs. Fisher?” And I could feel my head nod up and down while my eyes screamed, “Holy shit.”

I went back to the table with a piece of the Non-Virgin Cake and told those guys what had happened. Mark and Joe were laughing so hard they were crying and decided they needed a piece of that deflowered cake too. As they walked away from the table, Joe’s wife leaned over to me and said, “I’ve heard he’s so virile you can get pregnant just standing next to him so you might want to get yourself a pregnancy test in a few weeks,” and there was never another ride home from a party that ever compared to that one.

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
-John Muir

Four years before Mark died he had stopped drinking. Over the years he had been drinking too much and it slowly started having an effect on all of us, and what an eye-opener to think you know the signs of alcohol abuse versus the reality of it in your home. Mark was never a daily drinker, he did not get drunk at parties or work events, he did not hide liquor, nor did he become abusive or a jerk when he drank too much. On the weekends, what started as relaxing with a beer became another and then another, followed by a couple of glasses of wine with dinner, and it took a long time for either of us to realize that he was a binge drinker.

Why Mark stopped drinking has always been his story to tell, but once he did everyone wanted an explanation from me. They wanted to know if he was okay, why he stopped drinking, was he an alcoholic, was he in treatment. It was such an odd thing to me that if this same guy had said he was getting up before dawn every day to go to the gym he would have been applauded, but stopping drinking in our alcohol obsessed society? People felt entitled to know about that decision. I got asked over and over and after awhile, I started saying, “He’s right there, you should probably ask him yourself,” because it felt disloyal for me to answer questions about something that was personal to him.

But it was a scary time for us. We didn’t know how any of this new lifestyle was going to go, Mark was afraid and I was afraid for him. He started seeing a counselor and went to a few AA meetings that he found terrifying and he never drank again. The most painful question to me after his death was, “So did he start drinking again? Is that why he killed himself?” He did not, and of all the things he accomplished in his life, not drinking had the most profound effect on everything. The work he had done for decades was taking off and he was in the best physical shape of his life. Once he stopped medicating himself with alcohol, the twinkle came back in his eye, and nothing he did made me prouder because I saw what hard work it is to choose not to drink.

Right after he decided to stop drinking we went to Montana for a meeting he had been scheduled to attend for an infectious disease conference. We packed the car and headed out west, full of uncertainty about the future. No glass of wine with dinner, no happy hour beer with colleagues, a remaking of habits into uncharted waters.

Many times over that trip Mark seemed fragile and I was so worried about him. He seemed jumpy, nervous, and lacking confidence which are words that I would have never used to describe him before. For three days on the road we talked about everything, and every day I told him that since we were in Montana I wanted to go to Glacier National Park. For a guy who loved nature, he wasn’t very agreeable to the idea. I think he wanted to go to this meeting, get it over with, and try to change his life within the four walls of our home. But I was in love with Montana and wanted to see more of it so I convinced him that after his conference was over that driving four hours north was a good idea.

We first drove to Missoula where we ate breakfast at a hipster restaurant based on the advice of a passerby. We wandered the town, bought some books at the local bookstore, and decided that maybe we should move to Missoula one day. From there we drove north through the Bitterroot Valley, stopped at Flatfish Lake where Mark announced that on the next trip back we’d stay there, bought ten pounds of Rainier cherries for a steal from a farmer on the side of the road, and found a very overpriced motel room for the night.

The next day we ate breakfast in Whitefish and then drove to Glacier. From the moment we entered, it was like the pressure of our current situation immediately deflated. We both were relaxed and excited and couldn’t believe our eyes. We stopped so many times to jump out of the car and wander off the road to a creek, a lake bed, a stunning view. One time we were so wowed by what was in front of us that when we were walking back to the car Mark told me to look up and behind us was even more spectacular. We compared photos on our phone and I said that when we got back home I wanted to plant ferns in my garden because the forest floor was carpeted in them. We made our way up Logan Pass to the Going To The Sun Road, which for a girl who is terrified of heights was no easy thing. There was snow on one side of the road and the daintiest flowers on the other and I couldn’t believe anything could grow that high up. We stood on the gravel alongside the road and stared for the longest time, and it was in that moment that I knew Mark was going to be okay. What had started as a tourist stop for us was, by far, the most healing thing we could have done.

We talked often about that trip, how shaky it started and how it put a bandaid on so much that was hurting in both of us, how one day we’d go back and stay for a week. Sometimes I wish that the weekend before Mark died, we would have gotten in the car and drove until we found a spot to land, a spot that would put a bigger bandaid on everything that hurt in him.

A friend asked me recently how I am faring in this quarantine life and the answer is not good. I started off with projects around the house and have accomplished many of them but am losing my mojo. I want my husband back, I want my old life back, I want the guy who could make me laugh until I cried back, I want the guy who introduced me to the woods, the creeks, and the rivers back, the guy who could make me stuff down my fear of heights for a view I will never forget. I want to have had this time with Mark to sleep in, to make dinner together, to walk to the grocery store, to watch movies, to pick his brain about this virus, to flirt all morning, have sex in the middle of the day, and a lazy nap afterwards because a monotonous stay-at-home order calls for all of that.

I can’t have any of those things and so every day I think about wandering off into the woods where I could scream and the canopy of trees would say, “You keep screaming. Look how tall and sturdy we are, we can withstand your pain.” I think about finding a creek and watching the tadpoles dart around while the hawks overhead circle in hopes of finding their next meal. I think about my boots getting caked with mud and sweat trickling down my back. I think about wandering a path that spills into a clearing where the pain and the trauma and the loss gets disbursed by the wind. I think about nature cleansing me like it did before so that I am brave enough to move forward in my life.

Anything less would diminish all that came before it, and I already know that would be a loss I could not carry.

Usually when I write something, I plan it out in my head for days or weeks or however long it takes me to figure out what I want to say. There are times when I am surprised by how a thought takes on a life of its own once I start writing and goes in a completely different direction than I had planned. But for this one, the story of Mark and his sister and their relationship, there has not been a single clear path to writing it no matter how many times I roll it around in my head.

I thought about writing of their connection to each other through ice skating, Mark as a hockey player, Vicki as a figure skater. How Mark started in figure skating (which was always a hilarious visual to me), and how he could do jumps and turns because his sister taught him. How he played hockey in high school and then at Purdue University where he was Rookie of the Year in his freshman year. How when we were dating we would go ice skating and he’d bolt around the rink a dozen times, and once he got that out of his system he’d come behind me wobbling on his skates, grabbing me by the waist and pretending that we were both going down. How he was as at home on hockey skates as he was on a bike. How Vicki made a career of figure skating, in private lessons and as the first person in the country to bring synchronized skating to the collegiate level at Miami of Ohio University. How the team won fifteen national titles, qualified for international competition eight times, and how she was twice named Synchronized Skating Coach of the Year. How both her and Mark in different ways changed the lives of thousands of college students in the course of their careers. How the year we went to Ohio for Thanksgiving, Vicki and her husband opened the rink so we could all skate and she gave Will lessons by having him push a paint bucket around on the ice.

I thought of writing about them being in the foxhole of childhood together with their stories of laughter, ice rinks, summers in Michigan, and much that did not see the light of day. How my presence in Mark’s life steadied those waters but the ones needed to steady Vicki were not good choices. That up until Mark’s end he flourished while his sister spent the last few years floundering.

How Vicki came to see us two summers ago, and when I picked her up from the airport I almost didn’t recognize her. How she seemed so frail that I called Mark at work and told him ahead of time to prepare him to see his very athletic sister in declining health. How when we went to bed that night I said, “We might need to think about the possibility of Vicki coming to live with us at some point.” How when he said, “I was thinking the same thing,” you could feel the weight of his sadness in the dark. That the following morning, Mark sat at the dining room table and dove into work because that was his fall back when he couldn’t face hard things, and that night I said to him, “Please don’t do this, Vicki needs you,” so the next morning he took her on a tour of his lab and out to breakfast and told me when they came back that they had a good talk.

That her coming to live with us never happened because a few months later I had to call her and tell her that Mark had died and she kept saying, “no, no, no,” and I had to repeat it three times because she could not grasp what she was hearing. How for the entirety of Mark’s funeral and reception afterwards she never stopped shaking. That she never recovered from his death.

How Mark was so gentle with her, how even though he was only two years older than her he always called her “kiddo”, how he felt it was his duty to protect her even when he was hundreds of miles away. That his inability to do so would eat away at him more than he ever let anyone know, including me. How Vicki’s self esteem was so damaged that she built a wall that only allowed Mark and a few others in.

Ten days ago, Vicki died quietly in her apartment from a heart that gave out. It felt like I was reliving Mark’s death all over again, and talking to my niece, my mother-in-law, and my kids felt like we had been collectively dropped into another bad dream. Once again it was too much, too sad, too confusing. Vicki’s difficult life ended in a whisper, without sirens, interference, or another trip to the hospital, and while there is some peace in that it does not diminish the loss.

Years ago I put an old, small photo on the bathroom shelf of Mark and Vicki when their family had taken one of their annual summer trips to Michigan. Over and over I’d see the photo face down and I’d stand it back up. Sometimes the frame would get cracks in it and I would glue it back together. I couldn’t understand how it kept getting knocked over until I had a conversation with Mark one day. That afternoon I replaced the photo with one of just him and Vicki and when he came out of the bathroom he said, “I know why you did that. Thank you.”

On the day Vicki died, I took the photo off the shelf and looked at it closely. After all those years of it being there, it was the first time I noticed how tightly their little hands were holding onto each other. I knew what it was like for Mark’s hand to grab yours. He reached for mine thousands of times in the years we were together, and most nights before we fell asleep. It made me feel confident of my place in his life and the world, it made me believe I deserved nothing less, and it is the reason that I know I will be okay.

Maybe the only thing that needs to be written is that when I heard the news of Vicki’s death, I prayed that Mark’s hand was there to grab hers and protect her on her final journey out of this world. That the comfort they always found in each other was ever present, and that she was showered in love when her brother introduced her to the other side.