Author: Kathleen Fisher

Sometimes when I think about the unfairness of these last few years, I want to gather every breakable thing in this house and fling it against a brick wall. Not because I think it would be especially helpful, but because the thought of it feels satisfying. I considered it when I was having the kitchen remodeled last year and was getting rid of some old dishes. Maybe, I thought, I should take those plates to the basement and start chucking them against the wall and breaking them into hundreds of pieces. Midwest values, though, won out and smashing things that are still usable felt like it would fall into the sinful category. Instead, I put them in a box to donate and later found out about a business that does the very thing I needed, a place where you spend money to go in a room and smash things. I told my therapist about it and she said I’d be surprised by how often she advises someone to do that very thing.

These dog days of summer coat me in sweaty misery. “My people,” I used to tell Mark, “thrive in overcast, chilly days. Give me one of those, a candle burning, a decent book, and some music playing in the background and I’ll be happy.”

This summer has been hard, way too hard for someone who has been on this ride for nearly four years. I told my therapist about driving somewhere and out of nowhere crying so hard I had to pull over. I told her nothing had happened, the day had been fine, and all of a sudden I’m in my car bawling. “There was no reason for it,” I told her. “Maybe,” she said, “the fact that your husband died will always be reason enough for tears.” That sentence was a gift to me. It let me off the hook, stopped my overanalyzing, and allowed me to let things be what they are whether good, bad, or in between.

I used to work with someone who had a life story that should be made into a movie. When I arrived at the store one day for my shift she told me she was pregnant. It made me teary-eyed and I immediately offered to have a baby shower at my house for her. Two months later I walked into work and learned she had a miscarriage. When I talked to her about it, when I said how sorry I was for her and her husband, she said something I will never forget. “I learned a long time ago,” she said, “that the Universe trusts me with her most precious gifts, but I don’t get to decide for how long.”

Besides getting rid of plates last summer when the kitchen was being remodeled, I went through the ridiculous amount of coffee cups Mark and I had accumulated over the years. I didn’t keep too many of them except for his favorite Periodic Table of Elements cup and my 1969 Chicago Cubs Bullpen one. They have seen better days, are so stained inside that they don’t come clean, and I don’t use either one of them. They sit nestled inside of each other in the cabinet over the coffee maker, and on those summer mornings when the dog days seem like they will never fold over into cooler mornings and changing leaves, I think about hurling them into oblivion out of frustration and grief.

It’s a fleeting thought, though. Both of those coffee mugs are older than my kids and carry the stories of how two people who fell in love on a blind date began their days. One who loved science, the other who loved the Chicago Cubs, and a Universe that entrusted both of them to each other for a very long time.

As spring was winding down, I told my therapist that I was dreading summer. Both of our girls have summer birthdays, Mark’s birthday is on the first day of summer, followed by our anniversary, then the anniversary of our first date which both of us recalled with 100% accuracy unlike the date of our wedding. When that is over, that dreaded day in September shows up and hits like an annual head-on collision.

“Maybe,” she said, “you can not look at the whole summer but section it into weeks and then it won’t seem like too much.” I said I didn’t think that was possible, because even though I’m paying her to help me with this exact sort of thing, sometimes I am pissy and tired and want to pay her to make all this go away.

The kids’ birthdays have their own particular sting as every year Mark and I would reminisce about their entrance into the world. How when I was pregnant with Maggie, Mark sat next to the phone in the lab for weeks for fear that someone else would answer it and forget to give him the message that I was in labor, how we walked the halls of the hospital to speed things up and I kept stopping at the waiting room to watch the Cubs game, how Will’s labor started during Sunday Night Football and the doctor was running between two woman, the other who screamed relentlessly, how my nurse was so annoyed at her for the ruckus she was causing, and it was her who delivered Will because the doctor couldn’t get to my room in time, how The Circle of Life from Lion King was playing on the radio when we were driving to the hospital to deliver Mallory. When the doctor arrived and asked who was watching our other kids Mark said, “Since this is our third we figured it was going to be quick so we left them in the car but they’ll be fine because we cracked the windows,” and he and the doctor laughed and laughed while I laid there like a bloated extra in a buddy movie.

After outrunning it for over two years, I tested positive for Covid when I got home from our beach trip. It knocked me flat and it wasn’t until ten days later that I tested negative and could go back to work. If I was ever sick I could tell by Mark’s eyes if he was worried about me. He knew when to take Tylenol versus ibuprofen versus naproxen, he always pushed water and sleep, he researched everything, and if he had any questions he would find somebody at the med center to answer them. What I wouldn’t have given for those eyes to have been there to nurse me back from Covid.

There’s a term in cycling called bonking which is when your body has depleted it’s store of glucose. It happened to Mark a few times and he always made sure he stayed hydrated and kept glucose tablets in his bike bag, his work bag, we even had them at home. The body experiences a hypoglycemic crash which hits suddenly causing light-headedness, nausea, sweating, and shaking. You literally cannot go on. Sometimes Mark would go on a long ride for fun or charity and come home and tell me about a bonking incident. He always said it quietly and seriously, like everything was going fine until somebody ended up prone on the ground.

After I got over Covid I was walking early one morning when a cardinal darted in front of me. “That you, Fisher?,” I asked because if cardinals are dead people he’d definitely be the darting kind that enjoyed scaring the daylights out of me. It landed on a branch overlooking the creek and I said, “Listen, I’m bonking here. Besides missing you every waking minute of the day, there’s a horrific war in Ukraine, a pandemic, inflation, half-naked Vikings going on trial for trying to overthrow the government, melting runways, massive fires, and now monkeypox which I know nothing about but that sounds unpleasant.” I don’t think that cardinal was you-know-who because he flew off leaving me with my bonk, and even a reincarnated-bird-Mark would hang around for clarification on the monkeypox thing.

When I was a little girl and there was no air conditioning, my siblings and I would impatiently wait for the call from Mrs. Glaser who lived down the street saying it was okay for us to come and swim in their backyard pool. We could never go without Mom and she’d sit in the hot sun with her feet in the water and talk to Fran until it was time to go home and start dinner.

There’s another term in biking called drafting. It’s when somebody takes the lead in a pace line and reduces the wind resistance for everyone behind them. When they tire out they move to the back of the line and someone else takes over. Everyone benefits from the work of the lead cyclist, and how did it take me this long to figure out that my mom and dad were drafting the six of us through summer for decades? That Mark and I drafted our three kids and now my daughter and her husband are doing the same so that somehow we grow older fiercely believing that there is nothing better than the long hot days of summer.

The first summer after Mark died, the kids and I went to Yosemite for a family trip and to spread his ashes. I nervously decided to mailed the ashes to my daughter in California rather than have to explain to TSA what was in the box. “Your boy arrived,” my daughter texted me a few days later when they showed up on her doorstep. We arrived in Los Angeles and picked up both of them then crammed into a mini van to head north for our national park adventure. As those kinds of things go with us, over the course of a few days and many trips in and out of the van with the ashes, some of them spilled onto the floor. I tried to scoop them up as best I could but there were still dusty traces left when we turned over the van at the airport. I told Mark I was damn sorry about how that was going to turn out for him, and I imagined he would have rolled his eyes, and with the faux outrage he perfected over the years, said, “C’mon, Kath!!! You can’t really be leaving me here to get sucked up by a vacuum cleaner.”

Last year we went to Boulder and left some of his ashes in the Rocky Mountains. You would think it would be easier the second time around but it wasn’t. I never know if I’m doing the right thing or choosing the right place. I only know that these are places he would have loved, where for a brief time his burdens may have lightened.

This year we opted not go to a national park but rather to the beach – Gulf Shores to be exact. After we picked up our rental cars and headed to the house we were renting in Alabama, we stopped at a restaurant. We got a table that overlooked the water and my Pisces heart was in heaven. After a bit my daughter said, “Mom, look over your shoulder,” and I gasped. “Jeezus,” I said, “it even looks like his writing.”

There aren’t many of Mark’s ashes left but I brought a small amount with me again. This time I wanted to be alone and walked down to the beach one morning. Mark and I loved the beach, be it the ocean or the shores of Lake Michigan in our early dating years, and we especially loved it in the morning when it was quiet. I sat there and before long noticed a heron a few feet away staring out into the gulf. I waited for the water to reach me and slowly let go of the ashes. They turned and swirled, got caught up in the surf, and quietly disappeared along with the heron.

When we were in Yosemite, I wandered over to a group of people listening to a park ranger. “You’ll notice the feet of the sequoia,” he said. “These are big trees and they have big feet to keep their grip on the earth,” and I swear that once you see that in a tree you cannot unsee it. Mark loved reading about trees, about their secret language underground, and how they leave space in their canopy for light so the little ones will grow, but I’m not sure he knew how tightly they had to grip the earth to stay alive.

One day Mark lost his grip and there have been many days since then that I thought I was losing mine. Despite the distance and now years since his death, the same message seems to travel back and forth between us.

I’ll find a way to fall in love with where I am, you find a way to fall in love where you are, and won’t we have so much to tell each other when we find ourselves on the same side of the moon.

On the day that Mark died, when I was frantically trying to find him, the police were frantically trying to find me. A close friend and neighbor of mine who was walking her dogs, told me later that she had seen them in front of my house about 10:30 that morning. When they couldn’t find me they drove to my daughter’s house, and thankfully both her and her husband were at work. Hours later they were able to contact me via my son who gave them my number.

The detective said he needed to talk to me right away. I told him I was leaving work and he offered to meet me at the house. I was terrified, shaking, and confused, but not so confused to know that I didn’t want them anywhere near my house. He said we could meet wherever I wanted and suggested a coffee shop. That seemed absurd to me which is how I ended up at the police station.

That summer I had been going to physical therapy for sciatica and was at an appointment the day after Mark’s funeral. The therapist, whom I barely knew, had heard what happened from another client who was friends with Mark, and hugged me long and hard. “Come here,” she said and led me into a back room. “I’m going to let you talk as much or as little as you want,” she said. “You can tell me anything or nothing at all and then I’ll work on your back.” I poured my broken heart out to her and will always be grateful that she was in my life at that moment. When I told her about the police wanting to come to my house to tell me what happened and that I refused she nodded. “I don’t even know why,” I said, “I just didn’t want them in my house.” She told me about her and her husband telling their kids that they were divorcing, that they all sat on the back deck, that it was such a hard conversation and everybody was crying. “I loved that deck,” she said. “We were out there all the time and from the moment I had that conversation with my kids I hated it. You did the right thing. You didn’t invite trauma into your house.”

Last week I was coming home from the grocery store, and as I turned right onto my street a patrol car was waiting to turn left. My stomach flipped, I felt sick. Police just don’t drive down our street for no reason so I pulled into my driveway and watched to make sure they were driving away. An hour later my neighbor stopped by with the awful news that our dear friend’s son had died, that the police car I saw was indeed delivering bad news, this time to a different house. Two hours later I walked into their house without a single word to offer to make anything better.

I have spent the last few years writing about grief, about the beautiful and awful things that have been said to me, and despite all of that I can tell you that there are deaths that leave you hollowed out, and that experience flies out the window in the reality of loss. Grief is pain, excruciating pain, and there is nobody who feels comfortable in it or around it. “I think I’m in shock,” my friend said as I stood beside her. “You are,” I said, “your brain is doing its job. It feels like you are going crazy. You’re not, you are being protected.”

Working through my shock and pain has been the fight of my life. I once read that trauma is the gateway drug and nothing could be more accurate. How easy it would be to pick an addiction to bury this, but instead I have paid thousands of dollars in therapy to prevent that from happening. But this death that landed on my street and to someone I care about so much has rocked that newly built foundation to its core. My therapist once told me, “All death will be about Mark because that left the deepest cut,” and the last week has proven that true. At my friend’s house and talking to her a few days ago, I saw the business card of the police officer on the table, his cell phone number on the back. “I have one of those cards,” I said to her, “I saved it.”

I don’t know why. It’s tucked in a drawer, and many times I have thought of calling him and telling him that I survived the worst day of my life and the days after, that my garden this year is the best it’s ever been, that I have a different job and out of the blue they offered me a raise because they like me and want to keep me around, that I’m even dating some. How odd to want this person to know those things when he delivered such devastating news, left my life, and then everything collapsed. Maybe it’s because if he were to deliver different news, news that it was a very unfortunate mix-up, that he was clearing things up and finishing the paperwork, I would want to overhear him say, “She says that when I bring you home things will look a little different, but not to worry, that you’ll still recognize her smile.”

And I would smile hearing that because if Mark thought he was responsible for breaking the bough of who I’ve always been, of causing the thing he most loved about me to go away, that would be unbearable.

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is how a traumatic death leaves its calling card.

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

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

Reliving. Reliving. Reliving.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last week on the way to work I was at a stoplight waiting to make a left hand turn. While I sat there, the sounds of a siren could suddenly be heard. Within seconds, a fire truck came into the intersection and turned right. Immediately following was an ambulance, their sirens blaring and on the tail of the fire truck. The light turned green, I made my turn, and within a block was directly behind the fire truck and ambulance. I watched as the firemen jumped off the truck, the straps of their overalls dangling by their waist, one grabbing a stretcher, another a black bag, all of them running up the incline of the yard.

Suddenly, a woman my age came running out of the house, her face contorted with anguish, waving for the firemen to hurry. She ran back into the house and they followed her. This happened within seconds, oncoming traffic cleared, and I was able to drive around the fire truck and ambulance and continue on to work.

I remembered what my dad would say when encountering something like that. “Somebody is having their worst day ever,” and then would tell us to say a prayer for them. When he was dying and my mom could no longer manage his pain, Mark and I were there with our three-year-old, Maggie, and she told Mark to call an ambulance because he needed to go to the hospital. In her own anguish at that moment she said, “And tell them no sirens. I don’t want sirens.” It was a warm September night, and I walked out of the house, sat on the porch, and sobbed.

My parents’ neighbor, Shirley, came over and sat next to me. She asked why I was crying and I said, “My dad will never be in this house again. Once he leaves and goes to the hospital it’s over.” She said that wasn’t necessarily true and yet we all knew that to be the case. He got admitted into the hospital, was put on a morphine drip, and never came home again.

Mark loved my dad and grieved his loss greatly, but he had a wife who was bereft and needed a steady hand on her back to keep her upright when she’d rather stay in bed all day every day. It was a group effort between him, our Will that came three weeks later, and Maggie, that saved my life, that showed me that deep loss can be integrated into life, that moving forward is possible.

Little did I know that 28 years after that, I’d be in my own anguish, the details of an impossible death laid before me in a police station. Mark, the same age as my dad when a sirenless ambulance pulled up in front of the house, me, the same age as my mom when death came pounding on the door.

Last week I went to California to see that third child of ours, the beautiful dancer that came four years after my dad died. I arrived in Los Angeles, in the Southwest terminal I’d been in twice before when we were coming home from seeing Mal. The first time was when we moved her there, when Mark and I toasted late morning iced coffee to doing our job, to letting our youngest claim her future even if it was hard as hell for us to let her go. The second time we flew home from there was after a visit with her as tourists, Mark at the gate catching up on work emails, me in an airport shop buying a sweater because I was freezing. The restaurant was still there with people having breakfast before their flight, the place we bought our iced coffee. There was also the exact same shop in the exact same spot where I bought my sweater. It was as if I suddenly entered a time capsule except something was missing.

One of my favorite photos is of our young family at a lake near the Canadian border that Mark’s mom took. She booked a cabin when we traveled to see her and it was surrounded by pine trees. We loved it, and there we were frozen in time with our three little kids, who already had been planted with the seeds of adventure from their dad.

Like I was taught to do, I said a prayer for the women frantically waving for help from the driveway of her home that one morning on my way to work, and think about her every time I drive by. I’ve even thought of leaving her a note saying I hope everything turned out okay, but if it didn’t I don’t think I want to know.

Yesterday I was a young mom with three kids, married to a newly appointed assistant professor who was trying to get tenure and a lab up and running. I blinked and thirty years went by, I blinked again and my professor was gone. Maybe it was the way I was raised, maybe it’s life experiences, but I knew as those early, hard days of raising a family unfolded before me that it was to be cherished, and so I have to believe that while this one precious life guarantees nothing it also promises more to come.

On our first big family road trip, Mark, me, and the kids drove for three days from the midwest to Spokane, Washington to see Mark’s mom. After we had been there a few days, we left our two little ones with her while we took Maggie and drove to Seattle to see some of Mark’s friends from graduate school. It was a quick trip, and on the way back to Spokane, Mark noted that we weren’t far from Mt. St. Helens. “It sure would be a shame to be that close and not go see it,” he said. In reality it was a few hours away in a different direction but we decided to go for it.

I don’t think either one of us had any idea how long it took to drive up that mountain with the blown off top, but it took a long time and for me it was harrowing as we climbed higher and higher on the narrowest of roads. Mark would point things out and I would scream for him TO NOT TAKE HIS EYES OFF THE ROAD while Maggie giggled in the back seat at her panicking mom.

Before we headed up, one of the locals asked if we’d been there before and we said that we hadn’t seen anything but the news reports when it erupted. “Oh,” he said, “then you’ll be surprised at all the new life that’s sprung up.” By that point it had been fifteen years so we were expecting something vastly different than what we saw. As far as the eyes could see was tens of thousands of dead, flattened trees in every direction, stripped bare and laying like oversized toothpicks. “This is coming back?” I asked Mark. “I guess so,” he said as we stood in awe at the destruction before us.

As harrowing as the drive up had been, coming down was even more so as we hugged the paved road with barely a foot of gravel next to it, and a descent to certain death if you failed to pay attention for a second. Mark didn’t need me freaking out and said, “I’m going to tell you this and I need you to listen. Don’t look down, okay? Don’t look down and we’ll be fine,” and that’s what I did. I looked out, I looked in the backseat at Maggie, I looked at the pages of the visitor’s guide over and over, but not once did I look down.

Mark would say that to me another time when we were in Spain. While the entirety of his day was at a science conference, mine was hanging out with spouses I barely knew and that wasn’t going well. There was complaining about everything and it was spoiling the trip for me. After two days of that, I ended up doing things on my own, exploring the city and the beach every day after breakfast, meeting Mark back at the hotel for lunch, hanging out at the pool in the afternoon, and then meeting up again for dinner. One of the complaints that was valid was that the back staircase to the dining room always had dead roaches on it. Every day they were there and you’d think somebody would make sure they got swept up before meals but they never were. Mark never noticed them and when I said something about it he said, “Then just don’t look down.” I thought that was really dumb advice but I took it. We’d meet with friends in the dining room for dinner and drinks, followed by star gazing on the patio until midnight. We’d repeat it the next night and the one after that, me never looking down when we descended the stairs, and that dumb advice made for the most magical trip of our lives.

Recently, I was given some grieving advice. It caught me off guard because people just don’t do that anymore. As it goes when it comes to that sort of thing, I got defensive, and I hate when I get defensive. It sounds to me like I am bordering on hysteria and that is not who I am. One of the things that Mark appreciated in me was my calmness (sans the height thing) in most situations. But when it comes to being told what I should do about my life since the top of it blew off I push back hard.

We live in a society that tends to want grief to be like the express checkout lane at the grocery store, twelve items or less, move along, see you next time, don’t forget your detergent. Better yet, check yourself out so we don’t have to keep dealing with that sad vibe thing you’ve got going on. The weird thing about that encounter was that I wasn’t the least bit sad. I was fine, so when someone tells me what they think I need to do I want to shout THAT I AM DOING ALL THE THINGS and I’m here for yogurt and paper towels not life advice.

In the days leading up to Mark’s death, it felt like everything was unraveling in slow motion. When I told my therapist this week about something he told me years ago about his childhood, she said to me, “You know that’s just the tip of the iceberg, right? That’s what he could talk about. Imagine what he couldn’t,” and after forty years of knowing and loving him, I am still brought to my knees by the layers of loss he endured before he even met me.

And the oddest thing of all? He couldn’t look down because he couldn’t bear to see what was on fire all around him and I have to look down to see what’s growing from the ashes.

It was a rare occurrence for Mark and I to go shopping anywhere. He hated it. Once I asked him to stop at Hobby Lobby on the way home from somewhere, and after a few minutes of being inside the store he asked, “Are they playing hymns in here?” I told him they were and when he asked why I told him it was a Christian hobby store. “Christian? Are we supposed to not notice that all the shit inside this shitty place is made in China,” he said and refused to cross the threshold of that place ever again.

Mark rode his bike to work year-round and was having trouble finding gloves to keep his hands warm. A chat over breakfast with the boys in the Saturday morning Polar Bear Club determined that he needed to go to REI to get the best in winter gear, and so on a Saturday afternoon we went. Not because I especially wanted to go but more that shopping was so foreign to him that he needed an expert to tag along. He found his gloves and I found a jacket for him. A lightweight, warm jacket that he said he didn’t need but I insisted he try on. He bought this jacket that weighed nothing, and suddenly became the Joel Osteen of winter coats. He preached that investment everywhere he went. When he died I gave the jacket and some other things to my nephews. It was all hard to part with but that coat was one high hurdle for me to jump. “It’s stupid but it means a lot to me,” I said to my sister and she reported back that her son loved it and wore it all the time.

Random photos pop up on my phone regularly and they are usually of Mark. Is it him letting me know he’s close by or is it random? I don’t know. All I know is that they stop me in my tracks, usually make me sigh, and think, “Oh Mark, if only..” If only what? I don’t know any more. Last week a photo showed up of Mark and Mallory in the lobby of the theatre at her college where we waited to see our girl after a performance. I vividly remember all of it. Maggie, Nathan, and Will were there, too, because we all loved to watch her dance. It was packed with people waiting to find their dancer, most with flowers in their arms. “Damn it, Mark,” I said, “we forgot flowers.” We always forgot flowers. Every single time. In the crowd we found our girl and I took a picture of her (sans a bouquet) with her dad which is what showed up on my phone last week.

They both looked so happy and there was Mark in his REI jacket. I couldn’t stop staring at it, and over and over the same thought kept going through my head. Was this even real? Was he really here or did I imagine all of it? Did we build a life together or was that some story I told myself? I remember us at REI buying the gloves and that coat, of going to the movies with friends and him saying, “Brian, you need to get this coat. It’s the best.” I remember a hundred times hanging it on the hook inside the coat closet, of seeing him wearing it and thinking “damn he’s good looking” and now all of it feels like a dream.

The first thing you notice on the If Only…Trail is that it is clogged with travelers. The ones who missed their mother’s passing by seconds and are unable to forgive themselves, parents of children who go out to play and never come back home, spouses who watched lives withered away by disease, by accidents, by chance, by a split second decision, missing best friends, siblings, cousins, favorite neighbors, mentors. Mothers who never see the face of a baby they loved since they stared in hopeful disbelief at a pregnancy test. Empty chairs, empty beds, empty cribs.

On the If Only…Trail, the wounded and the wise clear the brush and preach to the newly ordained who are desperate for a copy of the instruction manual for rebuilding a life. Listen to me they say to tear-filled eyes. No life slips through our fingers without a trace. Look at your hands. They are coated in stardust so they can lead you out of the dark.