Kathleen Fisher

Parallel

When Maggie was a mere six weeks old, Mark and I packed up the graduate student life and moved to Maryland where he had accepted a position with the National Institutes of Health as a post-doc. The whopping salary for this illustrious career move in 1987 was $24,000. When we arrived, Mark ended up moving nearly everything out of the truck himself until a new neighbor came along and helped him with the heavy stuff. That would be our first indication that this move and the neighborhood we landed in would be a good fit for our little family.

That night as Mark was breaking down boxes at the dumpster, he met Betty. Betty was the mother of one of our neighbors, one who had a baby that was three weeks old. “I saw you moving in earlier,” she said, “and I saw that you have a baby. See that house over there? That’s where my daughter and her husband and her baby live, and your wife needs to meet my daughter soon.” Mark nodded. “Soon,” she said. It wasn’t so much of a suggestion as an order.

“So am I just supposed to go over there and knock on the door?” I asked Mark when he told me about the conversation with Betty. He said he thought so and it all seemed kind of odd to me but I knew nobody and was already feeling lonely in this new city, so one morning I took my baby and walked a few doors down and knocked on the door. Betty, who had never met me, knew exactly who I was. “Oh, I’ve been waiting for you,” she said. “Come upstairs and meet Carla and Christopher.”

The rest, as they say, is history. Carla’s husband, Jim, was an OB/GYN at Bethesda Naval Hospital – across the street from the NIH. With no family close by and husbands who were always working, Carla and I and our babies spent a lot of time together. After a few years and another baby, Jim and Carla would move a few miles away to a rental house but we remained close. Sometimes meeting at the mall so our kids could run off some energy in the play area, a wading pool in their backyard, a weekend at the ocean with all of us, including our elusive husbands.

When I was pregnant the second time, ultrasounds were the exception and not the rule for prenatal care. My dad’s cancer had come back and I was under enormous stress, and despite begging my own doctor I was told I did not need a scan. I told Carla and she arranged for Jim to give me one at the Naval Hospital. We would sneak in after hours – me, my husband, my toddler, Carla, her toddler, and her baby boy so that Jim could give me an ultrasound. In that little, darkened exam room he would tell us that both mama and baby were healthy, and when he was done he opened the door and yelled, “It’s a boy.” Carla came in with all the kids she’d been wrangling on her own in the hallway and we were all so happy and excited – our own little reveal party before those were even a thing.

As the years went by, Jim and Carla had a third baby (this time a girl), moved to Italy, then back to Maryland and finally home to Cleveland when Jim left the navy and went into private practice. We would leave Maryland for a move to Kansas City where Mark had accepted a position at a university and a third baby (another girl) would come our way too. In different cities with our husbands and three kids, we bought houses and cars, weathered scouts and sports, ACT tests, injuries, boyfriends, girlfriends, break ups, and break downs. Through it all Carla and I would always say that we were living parallel lives.

Four years ago, Jim and Carla came to Kansas City for Jim to compete in a triathlon. It was the first time in all those years that it was just the four of us – no kids to corral as they were all on their own by then. We went out to dinner, an art museum, had margaritas, and fell into long-established patterns. Jim and Mark talking about science and medicine, Carla and I about being empty nesters and travel and what was next. Despite the time and miles that had been between us throughout our friendship, there was never any awkwardness to navigate. The bond that we had established in those early years in Maryland never wavered.

The summer of the following year, Carla texted me that they were on their way to Sloan-Kettering. Jim had been diagnosed with a cancer that did not respond to chemo or radiation, surgery was his only choice. During the time that they were there, Carla and I texted and talked many times throughout the day. Mark and I were so worried about Jim but another bombshell would drop a few weeks later. Carla was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Carla would fare better than Jim. I wouldn’t find this out until May when I texted her a cheery update on Mark and I and the kids and she texted back the news that Jim’s cancer had come back and there was nothing more to be done. When I told Mark his whole body slumped. This world without Jim, he said, not possible. I called her the next day and on every Friday after that I texted or called her to check up on how they were both doing.

On my daily walks this summer, I would think of things I could do for Carla in the future when all those lonely days set in. I decided that her and I would take a trip to Maine next summer. Mark and I had been there for only a day last year and loved it, and it seemed like something Carla would probably like as well. I told Mark my plan and he thought it was a great idea.

At the end of June, Jim, Carla, and the kids took a last vacation together at a resort in Missouri – about three hours from our house. Carla invited us down for a get-together. I had my doubts. This seemed intrusive on what had to be an emotional gathering for them but she insisted. Mark and I drove down with plenty of anxiety. We had not seen Jim in four years after competing in a triathlon. Would he be so thin and sick that the shock show on our face? Would we stick our foot in our mouths and say something stupid? Would both of us start crying?

We needn’t have worried. Jim looked exactly like Jim, Carla was beaming, and we had the best time with them and their kids. All three hours on the drive home and for the following weeks, we talked over and over about how great it was to see them. On the other end of Missouri and then back home in Cleveland, Carla would tell me they were saying the same thing.

After that visit I thought about this trip to Maine every day. How I had to make it happen, how I had to research the area for things for us to do, how her and I were going to get there come hell or high water. But every time I thought about this trip, every single time, Mark wasn’t there. I would start to walk and think about it and surmise that he would be home and going to work. The next day I would start thinking about it and when there was no Mark I would wonder why it mattered to me so much. He fully supported this week away with Carla that didn’t include him. The next day I would start walking and planning again, and when there was no Mark I thought maybe he would be gone on a work trip at the same time. This happened over and over and over until as soon as I started thinking it the same question popped up.

Where was Mark? I could not see him. I could not place where he was. He was gone and it bothered me so much I stopped thinking about this trip to Maine.

On the early morning hours of September 5th, I texted Carla the news about Mark. Her and Jim, like everyone else were stunned. A few days later she called me while sitting outside looking at a lake. Jim was being settled into hospice and I told her the heartbreaking details that were too much to share earlier. She told me the heartbreaking end days of life with her husband.

Eleven days after Mark died, Carla texted me that Jim had passed away that morning. The goofballs are together, she said.

Thirty one years and three months after we met we were both widows in a span of days.

Parallel again.

Ben

Dear Ben,

I saw you standing at the back of the church by yourself when it was still just family there. You looked uncomfortable, like you’d rather not be there. I could relate. I didn’t want to be there either. Before you even introduced yourself I knew who you were. Mark talked about you often when you rotated in his lab. He told me that you learned differently than the other grad students and that once he figured out your rhythm he was able to steer you in the right direction. In that short rotation time, he saw your progress and when you wanted to join his lab he was so excited.

It turned out that Mark already had a couple of grad students and so your #1 choice wasn’t going to happen. Mark was known to buck the system when he knew that students weren’t being served and he took that decision up the chain. He was turned down and months after the fact he’d still get riled up about it.

Before you came along Mark had another student that would need help. His name was Hiroo and he was from Japan. He and his girlfriend came to our house one year for Easter and when he was leaving he came into the kitchen to say goodbye to me. I said goodbye, hope you had a good time, it was great having you here, and they both stood there looking at me until Hiroo finally told me that Dr. Fisher said I should give them some leftovers because he was a starving graduate student. I thought that was so funny because I remember early in our marriage and those end of the month meals of ramen noodles.

Mark would say that Hiroo had magic hands when it came to working on the bench doing experiments. He was so close to graduating when the tsunami hit Japan. Here in the middle of this country with his family and girlfriend back in Japan, he became frantic with worry. He watched or listened to the news constantly. Even when he found out that everyone was safe he could not stop worrying. He wouldn’t show up in the lab for days on end so Mark would ride his bike over to his apartment. He’d bang and bang on the door and finally Hiroo would answer. Mark would tell him that he had to check into the lab regularly to show him his writing progress on his dissertation. He would say he would and he’d come in a few days and disappear again. This went on for months. His father once emailed Mark because he was so worried about him because he wasn’t answering his phone. After all those years of training, Hiroo eventually returned to Japan without his degree. Mark never heard from him again and would always refer to him as his lost soul. Isn’t it funny that Mark could see that Hiroo was a lost soul but he couldn’t see when his own soul was lost?

The chance of us crossing paths again is highly unlikely, but here’s what I wanted to tell you on that Wednesday morning; Dr. Fisher believed in you. He believed that you were capable of the work and that the med center owed you the chance to try, that their job was to work with your challenges to make you successful. I can’t even tell you how many times he told me that.

I hope you reach the goals you have set for yourself, and when you doubt your ability or your place in the field that you remember that from the very first day Mark saw your potential.

He would want me to tell you that. That science needs you, Ben, exactly as you are.

xo,

Currency

Whenever Mark and I would go to a social event and someone would ask him what he did, he would say that he worked at KU Med Center. Then they would ask what he did there and he would say that he worked in the Biochemistry Department. Then they would ask what specifically he did in that department and he would say that he was a biochemistry professor. I watched this interaction dozens of times. Finally I asked him why it was that people had to drag that information out of him, why he didn’t just say what he did for a living. He said that people tended to think it was a bigger deal than it was and that he found it awkward. “If I say that right off,” he said, “then they would think that there wouldn’t be anything that we would have in common and I don’t want that.”

A few weeks after he died, his friend, Tom, called me. At one point in the conversation he said, “You know that Mark was world famous in his field, right? That everybody was hot on his tail to catch up to what he was doing?” Well, no, I didn’t know that. I knew that he was traveling a lot in the last two years, mostly in the U.S. but there was also a trip to London and Switzerland this year and Portugal last year. I only started to think he may have been a bigger deal than I thought when I got so many sympathy cards and emails from around the world. Mark was doing groundbreaking work in his professional life and it is among the many heartaches of his death to not see all those years of labor brought to fruition.

In a social media world that he didn’t have much use for, his likes were people he met along the way. A Holocaust survivor that once sat next to him on a plane, fellow bikers he would meet on the way to work, a young kid he met when he waited six hours at the DMV this summer to get his license renewed, the owner of a lawn care business that our neighbors used.

I was not prepared for the number of people outside of our family that came to his funeral. Everyone in his department, every department chair he ever worked for, friends, neighbors – current and past, fellow dads from Boy Scouts who he hadn’t seen in years. I would find out later that the med center chartered two busses so that all the graduate and medical students could attend. It was an overwhelming show of love.

After the service ended, I greeted people who I hadn’t had a chance to talk to during the visitation. A man came up to me and introduced himself. “You don’t know me,” he said. “I live on 42nd Street and your husband used to ride his bike down my street on his way back and forth to work. My dog used to hassle him whenever he rode by so one day I went out to yell at him to stop barking and your husband stopped to talk to me. After that, he’d always stop whenever I was outside and we’d talk. Your husband was a good man.”

Of all the people there……

How did he even know Mark’s last name? How did he know he died? How did he know where or when the funeral would be?

Despite the title of Mark’s occupation and the years of training it took to achieve that, more years than not were tough financially. We struggled to put our kids through college. I would often complain about things around the house that needed fixing or renovating that it seemed we could never afford. Mark would nod and agree and then say he thought we were just fine.

In a world that is more and more impoverished by money and fame, Mark Fisher’s currency was his connection to every living thing. I never saw him kill a bug that was in the house but rather scoop it in his hands and take it outside. The squirrels who ate his tomatoes all summer were trapped and transported to a park. We even argued over killing weeds.

Now he is gone and my reflections are forty years of memories that I play over and over in my head. My daily prayer that he always stays connected to me.

Be Not Afraid

I pretty much have lived most of my life afraid. Afraid in grade school of never cracking the code to learn how to read, afraid in high school of never having anyone to eat lunch with in the cafeteria, afraid of never finding a partner in life, afraid I’d never get pregnant, afraid of being broke, afraid of a terminal illness, afraid, afraid, afraid.

I have been afraid of heights for a very long time and yet went to the top of Mt. St. Helens. This was Mark’s idea on a trip back from Seattle after seeing some old grad school friends. I was terrified. It took us forever to get to the top, but there I was curled in a ball on the front seat Lamaze breathing my way up. As scared as I was the view was worth it. I have never seen anything like it in my life. According to the locals things were coming back to life in leaps and bounds, but to my eyes the devastation years after the top of that mountain blew off were beyond words.

Four years ago on a trip to Montana for a biochem meeting, we took a detour on the way home to Glacier National Park. The Road to the Sun is a steep climb up thousands of feet and on the way Mark drove and pointed everything out to me, not because I couldn’t see it for myself, but because he knew if he kept talking to me it would keep me calm. When we did reach the top he told me to relax in the car for a few minutes while he looked out on the gravel edge. It seemed like a reasonable suggestion for my phobia, but watching him taking that view in made me realize I was missing out and so I jumped out of the car and joined him. Not as close to the edge as him, but close enough to know that I’d always remember that stunning landscape.

There were many adventures with Mark. Wading in creeks looking for fish, trekking through knee high weeds along the roadside and leaping back when he’d flip a discarded piece of wood looking for snakes, hiking up the sand dunes along Lake Michigan, swatting mosquitos in a dense, humid nature center. Mark did not live small. He found adventure in his daily life and was on a near constant search for all signs of life.

With Mark by my side I was less afraid of everything. Even when I thought it was a bad idea, or in my anxious mind a highly dangerous one, I went along for the ride. Sometimes he made fun of me because even I knew I was often being ridiculous, sometimes I could feel his gentle hand on the small of my back, sometimes he would give me a lengthy explanation of how proteins fold for distraction.

In all these years of being afraid, there was no fear more terrifying to me than that of someone I love dying suddenly. Many times I read of those deaths, those come from nowhere accidents or the intentional ending of one’s life, and I could not fathom how anyone could recover from that.

My biggest fear is now my daily life. There was no goodbye, no I love you, no hey buddy don’t you even think of leaving me because you made everything better. No kiss, no wink, no hand reaching for mine before we both fell asleep, no please wait one day for things to get better before you think about ending your life. No but the kids, Mark, you know the kids and Mabel adore you.

One day he was here and the next he was gone and ever since I have looked for him everywhere. Two months later my heart still skips a beat when I see a cyclist. There you are, Mark. We’ve all been looking for you. I look in the cold, cloudy sky, in the wind, in the nearly barren trees, in the dark night. I never stop looking but I have always known that Mark was an explorer at heart. That given the chance to see it all he’d soak in every minute, every experience, every flutter of life. That he really is everywhere and trying to tell me that the universe, the goddamn universe, Kath, is blowing his mind. Everything has its season and so I have faith (very, very tenuous faith) that one of these days he’ll stop wandering and come back to rest in my soul where he belongs.

And when that day comes, that sweet, longed for day, my eyes will no longer see the devastation but the life.

Strong

The one thing I have heard daily since Mark died is…..

You are so strong.

I am not strong. I cry for that day, for the past, for a future that absent of Mark feels empty. I cry for my kids, for feisty, adorable Mabel that he was crazy about, and the new baby boy to come. I cry for his Saturday morning biking and breakfast buddies. I cry for his colleagues who continue to reach out to me. For his graduate school best buddy, Tom, who called me and said, “I didn’t call earlier because, frankly, I was too chicken to pick up the phone and talk to you.” I cry for his dear friend who knew him since middle school and found out a month after the fact, because in those shocking, early days I could not for the life of me recall his last name. When I think of his graduate students that he loved like they were his own, I cry. I cannot imagine what they are going through. Mark was their boss, the director of their future, the mentor they chose to work for and to get to the finish line of their PhD. He was demanding and had high expectations and they delivered in spades. “These kids,” he’d say with so much pride, “these kids are so smart.” Today I cried about a car repair that is NO BIG DEAL but it’s another weight piled on and there is so much piled on right now.

So strong I am not, but I might be brave because I have managed to push through. I have things I have to get done. Financial things that only I can take care of, and if you have ever dealt with the death of a loved one you would know that there is a ridiculous amount of stuff to do and none of it is easy. Today I called a business about an automatic charge to our credit card for a periodical that was posted to our account a month after Mark died. They told me they would refund it to the card and the credit would show up in 3-5 days. This is the first time something got taken care of with one call and without sending a death certificate. I cried when I hung up the phone because finally something was easy.

I don’t even know what being strong looks like from the outside looking in but I do know what it looks like to me since this happened.

It looks like you.

It looked like you coming to our door with stunned grief and ringing the doorbell. It looked like you with a catch in your throat telling me, “I don’t know what to say.” It looked like you with the weight of your own sadness and fear and nothing in the adult toolbox to fix any of this. It looks like you sitting in the uncomfortable silence when I stop mid-sentence because loss has choked the words out of my mouth. It looks like you with the cards and messages and flowers and plants and food that keep coming. It looks like you showing up when you have nothing to gain, nothing to offer, no words to break the unbroken.

In these days that overwhelm me at every turn, it looks like love and there will never be enough days in my life to thank you for choosing to walk this path with me.

We are brave in numbers and empathy. We are going to be okay.

Nomad

It is an unsettling thing, this grief. It feels like it’s going to strangle me every night, but sleep keeps it at bay until the alarm goes off. As soon as I roll over to stop the beeping it grabs me by the throat as if to say don’t you dare mistake today for an ordinary Monday. No, honey, daybreak likes to remind me, this is another day where you are here, and he is God knows where.

Since going back to work after Mark’s funeral, I find myself feeling resentful on the drive there. A drive anywhere makes me cry so by the time I get to my desk I look and feel exhausted. Would staying at home be better? This home that we’ve had for twenty-six years, the only home we have ever owned, doesn’t fit me very well these days. For years it was too small for us and the kids, the cats, and a dog. Now it is too big, too empty, too quiet. It unnerves me at night. The constant drone of cable news that Mark could watch for hours irritates me and so I accept most offers for drinks, for dinner, for any distraction in order to not come home. Very rarely does it work, more often I feel sad and lonely midway through and want to bail, so I leave and drive and cry, and then sit in the driveway wondering what the rush was to leave friends and food and conversation for a dark, empty house.

A few days before Mark died, I went to Target. I texted him while I was there to see if we needed dog food. He never answered. When I talk of his last day and say he left his phone at home, people gasp. A sign they say that he had made up his mind and didn’t want me or anyone else to call him and divert his intentions. Maybe, but Mark always left his phone, wallet, or keys at home on a daily basis. He was in every way the absent-minded professor so when I texted him and he never texted back that was not at all unusual. It turns out that while I was at Target he decided to walk the creek near the house and see what was living along the muddy bank.

There is some comfort in going to Target. When I am there my life feels normal so long as I avoid the aisle with LaCroix, the refrigerated case with the flavored creamer, the menswear department. I get dog food and toothpaste and long sleeved tshirts to layer for the approaching cold weather. I look at sheets and throw pillows and blankets. Sometimes I end up buying them and more often than not they get returned. I load the car and drive home and if it’s like that Saturday in September, Mark will come in the door a few minutes later with a big smile on his face and say, “I was down by the creek.” He will sit at the dining room table and pick seed pods that cover the front of his pants and dump them into the trash can. I will smile back and say, “I think it’s great that you did that. You need to do that more often like you used to do before you got so busy with work.” He will say he thinks you’re right and you will unpack the bags and put things away and show him the new flavor of creamer you got. He will tell you that one looks good and weeks later you’ll try to remember if his eyes seemed sad.

But it’s not September anymore and the house is empty when I pull in the driveway. The pants he wore that day have been washed and folded and put in a drawer I don’t open because those are the pants he wore whenever he worked in the yard. The same ones that he wore to the creek that day and the sight of them would send me down even further and that seems too risky.

Whenever I have told the story of how Mark and I met I say that I knew on the first date that I was going to marry him. After looking at dozens of houses, I knew the minute I saw this one that this is where we would raise our family. For all these many years, it was this sweet, old, cape cod on the corner that felt like my refuge from the world.

It’s a beautiful house and I am grateful to have it, but it was always Mark who was my home.

The Day He Forgot To Say Goodbye

For the past six weeks, everyone has looked to me for the answer to Mark’s sudden, intentional death. I understand this as I have many questions myself, but what a burden this has been at times. The explaining, the wondering, the conversations that sometimes felt like a casual discussion between friends of the latest episode of 48 Hours instead of the horrible ending to my married life.

The weekend before Mark’s death the lid blew off decades old trauma that he kept tightly contained most of his life. Was there a trigger that unlocked all that anguish? Yes but that is something the kids and I will sort out, probably for the rest of our lives. On one of our many walks that weekend, he told me things I had never heard before. Things that as a boy made no sense and that as a man looking in the rear view mirror seemed very confusing and wrong. As we were walking in the park on Saturday night, me listening to him trying to figure so much out, I said that I had once read that men sometimes manifest depression as anger and that it seemed to me that at times he got angrier than the situation warranted. He stopped in his tracks and asked me where I read that. I couldn’t recall but he said, “Oh my God, that’s it. That’s what I do. Sometimes when I’m riding to work I’m so pissed off and I don’t even know why.” For his entire life Mark was a student, an avid seeker of information to put pieces together both professionally and personally, and finally this seemed like the missing piece that explained much of what he was feeling. He talked about that several more times that weekend as if it was a relief to know why he thought and reacted to things the way that he did. On Monday night, he told me he was going to make an appointment to see a therapist at the med center that he had seen years before. While I stood in the upstairs hallway, he descended the stairs, stopped, looked up at me, and I said, “We’re going to be okay, Mark.”

At 9:30 he emailed a close friend that he had seen on Saturday and who he wanted to talk to again regarding what he was going through. “I’m going to go into work a bit in the morning,” he told me, “and then ride out to his house in the afternoon.” I told him that sounded like a good plan and went to bed. I don’t know when he came to bed but sometime during the night I heard him get up. He was hot, he told me, a frequent occurrence on our second floor bedroom during the summer, and said he was going to the basement to sleep.

That morning, I got up, fed the pets, had coffee, and turned on the news. Normally, Mark would have heard me or the coffee pot and woken up on his own but I thought that since he had a hard weekend and a restless night that I would let him sleep a bit longer. He wasn’t asleep on the basement couch, and I instantly panicked. I sprinted up the stairs, saw his phone on the table and his work bag gone. I ran out to the garage to see if his bike was there and told myself to calm down – that he had left early to teach and that he didn’t want to wake me to say goodbye. But the minute I walked back in the house everything felt off.

Everything.

I went to work, answered some emails, went to a staff meeting, and then called his work number. It went straight to voicemail.

Hey, it’s just me. You’re probably teaching but I wanted to check in and make sure you were okay.

The next few hours became a round robin of calls – his work number, our home number, his cell. I emailed him. I texted him.

It’s me again. Maybe you’re at lunch. Call me when you can. Are you in a meeting? Call me when you get out. Give me a quick call when you get a sec. Are you okay? You left your phone at home but I thought you might have stopped to get it before you went to Allen’s house. Just wondering if you’re okay. Please tell me where you are. I’m so worried about you.

Three hours after my first call to his office number, I emailed my boss to say that I needed to leave early. I looked up his friend’s address, wrote it down and called his cell again.

You’re at Allen’s, right? You’re there and I’m going to come and get you. You’ll be okay, Mark. Just stay with Allen and I’ll come and get you and bring you home.

As I was packing my work bag my cell phone rang.

Is this about my husband? Is he okay? I’ve been calling him for hours and I don’t know where he is.

Twenty minutes later I arrived at the police station and was taken through a door and into an interview room. Sitting at a small, white table with four chairs, two police officers told me that my husband had died, that it appeared to be intentional, and did we have any marriage or money problems. I don’t remember how long I was there. Not long but there was my life prior to setting foot in that police station and then there is the after. The after felt like I was watching a movie of myself where I was told my husband was dead and since that didn’t make any sense I still struggle to believe that any of it was real.

Since that day I have replayed our last weekend together over and over and over. It was difficult and emotional, but thankfully it wasn’t burdened by the distractions of social commitments, our phones, or the television. It was the two of us like it’s been since he picked me up for our first date at Denny’s forty years ago.

In a better ending of that day that I also replay over and over, I would hear him close the front door and run downstairs in time to see him in the driveway. I would watch him swing his leg over his bike, hook his shoe onto the pedal, adjust his work bag over his shoulder, and look back to see me. We would lock eyes and despite all that troubled him he would know that at day’s end he should come back to me. He would tell me to have a good day and I would tell him to be careful as he pedaled down the driveway and into the street.

And then I would go back in the house and pour myself a cup of coffee, unaware that I should fall on my knees and thank God for another ordinary day.

Mark

On the morning of September 4th, my husband ended his life. There was no warning, no chance to beg him to stay. This is what I read at his funeral the following Wednesday.

Mark always told me that I should write a book. I was never convinced I had enough material to do that until I tried to write this. Sometimes I think that people who had never met him thought I embellished my stories of him with a heavy dose of comedic flair but I promise you that isn’t the case.

As most of you know, Mark biked back and forth to work every day. This started in 2001, and he was so out of shape when he started that he’d stagger in after work and make it to the stairs where he would sit trying to catch his breath. I’d make dinner with one hand and hold the phone in the other because I was certain that one day I would have to call 9-1-1. He got better and better at this means of transportation and pretty soon he was going back and forth with ease, driving in on the weekends to swap out his work clothes. During those early biking days, I became especially concerned about his underwear. I was doing the laundry and it seemed to me that there wasn’t enough rotation of boxers and briefs. As I am prone to do, I became obsessed with it. Was he turning them inside out and wearing them twice? Was he washing them in the sink of the men’s bathroom and hanging them to dry in his office? Was he even wearing underwear? His mind was always on bigger things, and whenever I brought up the subject he waved me off and said he had that part of his life under control. I knew I was thinking about it way too much when on the way to work one day I saw a pair of underwear in the middle of the road, and hours later on the rainy drive home it was still there. Mark came home from work a bit later, drenched from head to toe. He took his computer out of his bag, set it on the dining room table and plugged it in. Then he walked back to his work bag, unzipped a different compartment and pulled out a pair of wet, white underwear, strolling over to the kitchen sink to wring them out like it was the most normal thing in the world. “Kind of crazy, Kath,” he said. “I started thinking about this underwear thing and decided to stuff some in my bag to take to work. So I’m riding home tonight and I see this pair of underwear in the middle of the road, and I say to myself hey I think that might be my underwear.” I listened in fascination and horror. “So I rode over to them and picked them up off the ground and held them up and sure enough they were mine.”

“That underwear,” I said, “has been on the street since this morning. It has been rained on and cars, CARS, Mark, have driven over them all day long.” “Well,” he said, “I guess that means I’m going to have to put some muscle into bleaching out the skid marks.”

For those of you who know him professionally, I will tell you that his mind also worked in overdrive at home. When some friends of ours had come to visit us, Jim told us a story over dinner that was featured in the Cleveland paper. A local kid who had no interest in college had started reading about raising tilapia. His dad was so happy he was interested in something that he jumped in with both feet and provided his son with everything he needed to start this business. Before long, all the best restaurants in Cleveland were buying their tilapia from him and he was making bank. Jim pulled up a photo from his phone that showed the young businessman in the basement with plastic wading pools full of fish. I was amused. Mark thought this couldn’t be more brilliant. A few days later, he’d looked into the startup on this and for a few hundred dollars we could get into the tilapia business. He’d taken some measurements in the basement and said we had enough room to start with twelve wading pools. “You cannot be serious,” I said. “Kath, this science gig doesn’t exactly have us rolling in dough,” he said, “so I’m thinking that with some commitment to this, we could be this close to becoming thousandaires.” I told him it was the dumbest idea I had ever heard. A few days after that, he came back to me and said he would settle for six plastic wading pools and we could use the kids’ red wagon and put the tilapia in buckets and roll them up to the Blue Moose to sell. “Here’s what I’m thinking,” he said. “You could hang out in the basement with the tilapia, making sure they’re not banging into each other cuz I think that might affect the price, and you can take a laptop down there and write since basically you’re just babysitting fish, and I think in no time we’ll be loading up the money truck.” “So let me get this straight,” I said. “We take the dumbest idea you’ve ever had, cut it in half and go forward with it so now we have a half dumb idea instead of a whole dumb idea.” “Well, you’re the one who is good at math so I’ll let you figure the fractions out,” he said. I told him the answer was still no. The next day he said he’d be perfectly fine starting out with three plastic wading pools to launch this business and even if they all died we weren’t out a bunch of money. Finally I said, “Mark, let me put it to you this way. If we have three wading pools in the basement with fish in them, we are going to have a lot of humidity in the house. My hair and humidity aren’t a good mix so here’s what you have to decide. Do you want tilapia in the house or me and my hair? And as he’s been known to do a thousand times over, he slapped his forehead and said, “You are so right, I didn’t factor in the humidity but I’ll research that.” And the next thing I knew he was at his computer googling Residential Tilapia Humidity.

Over the last week, many people have said to me that they wished that they had done more for Mark. No one will ever wish that more than me, but Mark didn’t suffer fools or fakes, so if you are here it is because he wanted you in our circle. If you asked him how his research was going, you did enough. If you bought him coffee, you did enough. If you asked how his vacation was, how his kids were, what kind of lettuce he planted, how many miles he rode, how many steps were on his Fitbit, how his last talk went, if he could explain the entire last season of Westworld, if the Bears had any chance of doing well this season, and especially if you made him laugh…..you, my dear friends, did enough.

Mark’s needs were few. He never got tangled up in material things and he loved an engaging conversation on any subject more than anyone I know. He loved his work and often told me that he spent so much time on it because he believed it to be his legacy. More years were stressful than not, where the the regular process of getting funding for his lab felt like a recurring, bad game of Chutes and Ladders.

More than anything, Mark believed in basic research. He loved his coworkers and adored his students, and despite how hard this field can be, he would never want any of you to give up the commitment to the work. He thought research science was the noblest of professions, and for most of his life I think he believed that a guy who started as a roofer spitting nails out of his mouth won the career lottery.

Last summer, we were in Vermont for a biochem meeting and I picked Mark up late in the evening. The drive back to our hotel was pitch black. “I bet the stars are amazing out here,” I offhandedly said and he immediately pulled over to the side of the road. We both jumped out of the car and took a good long time gazing at that lit sky, and that sweet, quiet night will remain one of my favorite memories with him.

I would rather be anywhere but here today, but life had other plans for me and my favorite guy. So if you want to do more for Mark, behold the wonder of the world around you like he always did, and please tell our kids stories about their dad. Many years ago, a friend said to me that she wished her husband looked at her once the way Mark always looked at me. I pray I see those eyes again in my dreams. Last Tuesday, everything in my life got knocked off its axis, and at this moment the only two things that I am certain of is that Mark’s love could never be contained in one life, and that I couldn’t have been luckier to have had him beside me.

He took me on the ride of my life.

The Recipe Box

With only two adults left in this old cape cod of ours, I have spent the last year trying out new recipes, searching for them on cooking blogs and Pinterest. Some are vegetarian, some meant just for two, others are low-carb, low-fat, and sometimes low-taste. Bookmarked on my phone, I can shop for the ingredients at the grocery store after work and then come home and start dinner. Cooking via cell phone, though, is frustrating for me due to the constant need to refresh the screen when time management of sizzling ingredients and the need to know the next step is critical. But if a digital recipe is deemed a success after a few tries it gets printed and stood up in file folders next to the microwave marked Main Dishes, Appetizers, Sides, Vegetables, Desserts.

And if I forget to print it? Then I go down the rabbit hole of my Pinterest account for the thousandth time trying to find the breakfast casserole that was kind of spicy and had sausage. Or was it bacon?

A couple of weeks ago I made corned beef and cabbage, and from the cabinet over the stove I pulled out my recipe box – plain, black, plastic. A relic from Office Depot of a time before computers when 3×5 cards were what everybody used to keep track of the important things in their life. From the first section of main courses, I pulled out the hot pink piece of paper with my mom’s recipe. This one was written by me as I sat at her dining room table and asked her to word-for-word dictate to me every step of the process in cooking her corned beef. It has never come out less than perfect so I know she didn’t miss a step, and my writing it on a hot pink piece of paper was deliberate. I always wanted to see it when I opened up my recipe box.

There is another recipe from my first adult job in Chicago where I worked with a guy named Frank Chico. One day when we were talking about tacos, he said I needed to know how to make tacos from a real Mexican, and so he wrote down his recipe and included hot sauce and beans. I’ve kept that recipe since 1982 because Frank Chico was one of the finest men I’ve ever known.

I have a recipe for Hawaiian Glazed Ribs from the mom of my best friend in grade school. She included it in her shower gift to me for my wedding 35 years ago. Years later, after having a stroke in her 40s, she wrote down the recipe for her Zucchini Bread – one of the things she could still make with her good hand.

I have my mother-in-law’s Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe which Mark will bake a couple of times a year because he doesn’t think anyone else’s can compare. Someone I used to work with wrote down her Coffee Cake recipe, another her Cherry Cobbler.

Around the holidays I always make my sister’s Toffee Apple Pie recipe. The other day I made my other sister’s Enchilada recipe – a 3×5 card so faded I have to hold it up to the window to read all the ingredients.

I have often thought of starting a recipe box for my own kids. Sitting down and writing out the recipes for the things I make that they love. By now I have made some of these things so often I don’t even need a recipe. It is muscle memory to pull out the ingredients, brown the meat on one burner, make the sauce on another. I can remember my kids as little ones, standing by the stove when the smell of dinner drifted through the house. “Spaghetti? You’re making us spaghetti tonight?” Yes, I would say and and off they’d run to be the town crier announcing the good news.

Many of my recipes are fragile – used so often that they are on the verge of disintegrating. Some have never even been made, but they were handwritten on an index card by someone I loved and so they will always have a place in my recipe box.

While thankful for many of the things a digital world offers, it is fitting that the written recipes that have been passed down to me are in a box that can’t be closed. Butter, aprons, flour on Grandma’s wrinkled hands from making her famous sticky buns, the smell of a roast, Thanksgiving dinner, Easter brunch, the written documentation on an index card of a conversation about a favorite dish.

Memories, my own and those of many others are in that box, and with a flip of the lid I can spend time with them again. In my empty house making dinner for two I am not alone.

Cancellation Notice

Long before I dated and eventually married my Mr. Science Guy, I was smitten with a guy named Andy. I have no recollection of how we met – most likely at one of the many discos my friends and I frequented back in the day. I’m sure that somewhere in the introduction mixed drinks were involved. By most dating standards, Andy and I didn’t go out a whole lot, but he was creative when it came to inventive dating nights which was just one of his many charms.

When I told my mom I was dating someone new and that he was a tennis pro, you could feel the weight of the world descend upon her already weary shoulders. Her oldest daughter, who was striking out spectacularly in the dating world, now had a prospect that couldn’t have been more unstable. “What exactly does that mean,” she asked me. “It means,” I said, “that he goes around competing in tournaments.” I could tell that this didn’t seem one bit legit to her. “Oh you mean the kind of guy who hangs around country clubs and teaches housewives how to hit a ball,” she asked. Poor Mom with her six kids and her cooking and cleaning and ironing in suburbia couldn’t possibly understand the glamour of my life as the girlfriend of a tennis pro.

Because Andy would be off traveling to play in tournaments around the country, there would be long gaps in our dating. It didn’t matter to me. I would get on the bus to go to work in the city every day and pine away for him every night, waiting for him to get back in town and for us to pick up where we’d left off.

After Andy had been gone for many months, I got a letter in the mail. My heart skipped a beat. He was coming back to town and I was the first person he wanted to see. Instead it was a generic Christmas letter. The kind you run through a copier, hit print, and shove in with your Christmas cards. On the bottom scrawled in pen it said, “Living in California now. Hope things are going well!!!” California? Hope things are going well? I was sitting on a bus choking on exhaust every day, daydreaming about my wedding dress and being the wife of a tennis pro, and all the while he was in California???

Mom wanted to know what I got in the mail and I showed her his hastily scrawled dismissal of our relationship. You could feel the weight of the world lift from her shoulders and get squarely dumped on mine. She would never have to explain to her relatives and church friends that the best her daughter could do was end up with someone who taught housewives how to hit a tennis ball. I, on the other hand, had been flung once again into the deep end of the Loser Boyfriend pool.

******

Fast forward a few decades and I met another man – an insurance man. I have no recollection of how or when we met but I do remember there being long, lingering talks about deductibles and protecting our house, cars, and family jewels. One time he made a visit to the house to discuss all this. He told us that he and his wife were a very exciting couple – he being the insurance man, her a librarian. I found this to be funny and honest and I liked Mr. Insurance Man even more. Over the course of the next twenty years I would talk to him occasionally. Cars would come and go, kids would get their drivers license and need to be added, accidents would happen, and each time I was grateful for his help. A few years ago I had a question about our homeowners and a painting contractor who never finished the job so I called him to see if I had any recourse. He suggested that the next time I get a contractor to get a copy of his insurance policy as I might be able to collect from them. “Oh, I do have that,” I said and he heaped praise on me. “Maybe you’ll get something from them, maybe not but I can tell you hardly anybody does that and they should when they are having work done on their house so good for you for asking for it.”

I think my insurance man thought I was very smart.

Over the years, though, this insurance kept going up a lot. Each year when the homeowners bill would come the prior incremental increases turned into hundreds of dollars. I thought this was typical of everyone due to more destructive storms, wildfires, and tornadoes causing so much property damage. If the subject ever came up and I thought to ask others, though, it seemed I was paying way more than I probably should be. Then I would go down the rabbit hole of quotes and immediately get overwhelmed and put it aside for another day. Days would become months and then years and another bill would arrive and the mortgage company would pay it and I would repeat the cycle.

This year when our escrow account was short twice by a significant amount, I decided to finally get serious about our policies. My biggest worry, though, was having to tell my long-time insurance man that I was dating another. That my loyalties now lay with someone else. I would get flustered just thinking about it. What were Insurance Man and Librarian Wife going to do without our business? I dreaded the conversation.

In talking with my new insurance agent I found out that once I was committed to them they would notify his agency. They would be the bad guys and I was off the hook for delivering the news of our break up. Still, I thought, after twenty years he would probably want to know what happened, what he could do, how he could keep us as the loyal customers we’d always been. I practiced imaginary conversations in my head, each time thinking I’d probably end up paying for two insurance policies because cancelling anybody isn’t my strong suit.

None of that happened. After all those years there was no begging, no crying, no asking for forgiveness, no request to patch things up and make them better. In black and white there was a Notice of Cancellation that came in the mail. An abrupt end to a long insurance marriage and that was that. For days I thought about calling him and saying, “Geez, Andy Insurance Man, aren’t you even going to come back and fight for me? Doesn’t what we had mean anything to you? Oh, and just to set the record straight, you should know that I moved on LONG before I even got this stupid letter.”

Once in awhile Baby does get put in the corner but when she does she saves more than 50% on her insurance and has imaginary conversations to keep her company. And Mr. Science Guy. She’s got that too. Things are going well.