In one of my therapy sessions my counselor told me that as the shock and devastation of Mark’s death subsided and time moved forward, that something different would takes its place. I longed for something different than the constant pain, and while I am receptive to everything about the subject, there are other times when my mind can only take in so much information before it waves the white flag and says, “If you could not tell me one more thing until I figure out how to get myself up off the floor that’d be great.” But things post death come fast and furious and with the constant reminder that you are in charge of nothing.
There was never a day in early grief that was not terrifying, but it kept Mark front and center right next to me all the time. I constantly tried to think like him, often asking myself, “What would Mark do if he was here?” I was the designated pinch hitter for him at events at the med center, showing up for everything I was invited to and then sobbing in the parking garage afterwards. I stayed in touch with his graduate students to encourage them to keep plowing towards the finish line of their PhD. I took them out to lunch at Christmas and gave them gift cards like he did every holiday season. I tried to figure out investments that wouldn’t be too risky because Mark was never risky with our money. I talked to his old and dear friends when they, too, struggled with his loss and we would be on the phone for hours. I listened to the kids when they were making career decisions and tried to balance my thoughts with what Mark would advise. I never stopped trying to fill his shoes, to prove that though an incredibly poor replacement for him, I could be a decent stand-in because I knew him better than anyone. All the while that he remained first and foremost, I drifted further and further from myself. Without even consciously deciding, my mission after Mark’s death was to make sure his life came before my own.
The girl he loved never lacked self-esteem, she liked what she liked and never cared what anybody thought, she was fun and upbeat and could tell a great story over a cup of coffee, dinner, or glass of wine, she enthusiastically loved all things girl and shared her finds with everyone, she was a creative gypsy that moved from one thing to the next with ease, the one who caught the eye of that roofer and never looked back because he told her every day she kept getting better with age, the one who left for work each morning like her pockets were stuffed with sunshine.
A few weeks ago I got an email about picking out a new spot for a memorial bench outside the building Mark worked at the med center. I had gone this summer and met with the landscapers who were putting in a new garden where the bench would be included. The bench is from donations from friends, family, and colleagues, and so the biochemistry department has deferred to me as to where it should go. I looked at the drawings and picked a spot beside the pond, had a long talk afterwards with Mark’s closest friend at work, and before I left looked back at Mark’s office window and felt my stoic walls caving in. Six weeks later the pond was axed, they needed me to pick out a new spot for the bench, and a date was agreed upon to meet with the landscapers again. Two hours before I was supposed to be there I emailed and said I couldn’t do it. I could not stand outside that building again, I could not even think about the absurdity of a memorial bench let alone decide where it was supposed to go and they could figure it out without my input.
That’s when I knew the early grief was subsiding, when I no longer considered what Mark’s thoughts might be before my own. I understood that the chasm had arrived, widening the space between then and now, between the life I cherished with him beside me and the life I now had. It is a different kind of pain, less terrifying but deep and in places that I thought had scabbed over. I understood how loss makes time abruptly stop for some people, how I’d never fault anyone for never being able to move forward, how choosing to stay in the the storybook tale (whether real or imagined) was so much easier than the alternative of filling the space of a blank future.
***
Once upon a time a handsome boy and a lovely girl fell head over heels for each other. They lived a charmed life for decades until another block got added to the Jenga tower that the handsome boy had been building in his mind since he was a boy. It was already precarious and leaning, but then it tilted the tiniest bit and all came crashing down, and he believed he should gather up the pieces and leave before the sun rose so the shattered remains wouldn’t hurt his wife and kids and so many others. She had no idea that he had been spending years building that tower, so when he suddenly left the only thing she was certain of was that her heart was broken. It would take her a very long time to realize that with every breathe she took after that her badly damaged heart was being mended, stapled, glued, taped, and put back together again. It would never be what it once was but it beat steadily which meant it still worked. In order for it to keep working there was one condition.
The lovely girl had to agree to stop being a stand-in for anyone’s life but her own.
Many years ago I started going to estate sales. At first I thought it was kind of creepy to be scavenging a dead person’s stuff, but I acquired many things I loved and changed my mind to thinking that I’d rather have somebody enjoy my good taste after I’m gone than to see useful things end up in a landfill. Every sale always had a handful of aggressive buyers that would plow you over to get something, and so I started going to the basement and garage first. Those were where the random, cheaper things were, where the furniture that wasn’t perfect was parked, the stuff that wasn’t collectible or very valuable. If Mark and I were out on the weekend and passed an estate sale I’d make him stop. He didn’t share my love for this but he indulged me, and once tried to convince me that we should pass on the dining room table and buy the house.
On the way home from work one day I saw a sign for an estate sale and stopped. It was the home of someone who owned a local theater and was well traveled. It had some amazing stuff but what caught my eye was a raw pine dresser in the garage. It had a lot of issues but that finish gave me all the heart eyes and I wanted it bad, but it was priced at $120 which was highly inflated for all of its flaws. I sweetly looked it over and said, “When you’re half price in two days you will be mine.” I needed Mark to go with me to help me get it in the car and told him that after his Saturday morning bike ride and breakfast we needed to “Chop chop get going as soon as you get home.” Mark wasn’t much of a chop-chop-hurry-up kind of guy, especially for an estate sale he didn’t want to go to, so he took his sweet time getting ready to go and all the way there I kept hoping that dresser was still in the garage. As we were walking up the driveway I saw it and was so excited, but as we got closer I noticed the SOLD sign on it and the air went out of my secondhand balloon. Mark said it was too bad it already sold and tried to make things better by offering to go inside the house to see if there was something else I might want but I declined.
As we were driving back to the house I asked Mark to stop at the bakery because I needed to eat my feelings. When we pulled up he said he’d wait in the car because he’d already eaten his wheat germ whatever when he was out with the boys and wasn’t hungry. I found that especially irritating and it must have showed because as I reached the door to go in he was right behind me. We spent $50 and filled a box with scones, ham and cheese croissants, and cinnamon rolls. We scarfed half of it down over a fresh pot of coffee and Mark said it was better than that crappy dresser we missed out on which wasn’t true but I loved him and those scones for trying.
In the spring when Covid hit and everything was locked down, when I was working from home and stuffing my feelings with whatever I could find in the fridge, I got an email from Match that I could join their very successful dating site for free. Between that and some encouragement from a friend I made a login, password, and created a profile. While you can create all that for free, in order to communicate with anyone, or they with you, you have to join Match and make a monthly payment.
Nevertheless, and maybe as an enticement to go full on match, I would get a notification of my mutual picks which conveyed dateable tidbits like…..
No arguers. I’m worn slick from arguing. In my free time I like to smoke pot and go for a walk. Don’t message me if you’re a liar. Let me complete you. I prefer a woman who likes to cook. Conservative by day, liberal by night. I’m a gym rat. Are you? Let’s hook up.
Day after pandemic day these awful matches show up in my email. I’ve seen the same faces over and over and every once in awhile a woman shows up so things have gotten Covid sloppy and unorganized at the Mutual Pick Committee Meeting. Every other day I get an email for a special deal to join to get the full benefits and meet my forever match. It is always my last chance or the best deal ever offered and what started at $36 a month has been whittled to the never-before-offered price of $18.99 if I act now.
Last week someone new showed up in my email. His name was Ben, he was attractive, he was an architect. He liked to build things and I don’t know how this guy slipped through the border wall of duds and was practically begging me to let him build my new kitchen, but Ben the Architect had some potential. That’s when I figured out that all this time that I was getting the free benefits because I was too cheap afraid to join and pay the monthly cost, I was attracting the guys in the basement and garage. If I wanted quality benjamins, I needed to fork over the benjamins to see the better stuff inside the house. But as those things tend to go for me, I forgot my login and my password. I even forgot the fake name I used so I was back in unmatched limbo.
That didn’t last long as a few days later I met someone who did a Tarot card reading on me and I love me some of that hoodoo voodoo witchcraft. She pulled the magician card which means that when it comes to romance I am the one who is going to make the magic happen. That seemed like such a foreign and impossible concept to me that I took notes on what she was saying. Her advice was to make a list of the qualities I would like in someone which took a second since the only thing on the list was Absolutelynone of the above in mutual picks.
And now what?
Considering I have enough baggage to jam an airport conveyer belt, and the kind of exploding creative chaos that would make weak men cry, I’ve decided to tuck that magician card into my bag of Crazy Shit I Never Thought I Would Need and abracadabra this wobbly little life of mine.
On a Saturday night two months after Mark died, as I sat in our once lively house that was now deathly quiet and lonely, I thought that if I spent one more minute in it I might be tempted to set it on fire. It wasn’t the craziest thought I had except for the fact that I imagined setting it on fire with me in it, so I grabbed my keys and drove to Target. It wasn’t much of a solution to all that was wrong but it was a distraction. On the way home I got pulled over by the police. I had no idea why until the officer came to the window and asked me if I knew that I was driving without my lights on. I did not, nor did I care, but he did and so he took my license to run it to see if there were any warrants out for my arrest. I sat in the car with my forehead resting on the steering wheel and thought that I should be arrested for my husband’s suicide. “It was on my watch,” I’d tell him, “of course I’m guilty.” I got a warning that night and thanked him because that’s what you are supposed to do when you’re pulled over instead of screaming, “Where were you two months ago when I could have used a warning? Why didn’t you or anybody else tell me that the lights in my husband’s eyes were going out and he was in trouble?”
So much of the first year after Mark’s death is missing from me but there are pieces of it that I am starting to remember. I called off work three times. The first time I said I had a sore throat and my boss told me to feel better, the second time I said that I was either getting the flu or food poisoning and my boss told me to feel better, the third time I said I was too sad to get out of bed and my boss told me to take care of myself. I’ll be okay tomorrow, I texted back, because isn’t our productivity the scale on which we judge ourselves? Be useful, be busy, show up, produce something even if it’s shuffling papers from one side of your desk to the other, but I was too broken to be any of those things.
Every day was a monumental effort to get to work and do my job, to take care of all the paperwork that accompanies death, to figure out my health insurance, a car alarm that kept randomly going off, a dishwasher that wasn’t working, a dog that was neurotic. Some days I’d come home and realize hours later that I had not taken my coat off. I always felt cold, empty, and lost, and a thousand times I told myself the same thing.
You are pathetic. You need to get your shit together. You are damaged goods. Who could possibly love you when you can’t even get yourself out of bed?
In the last month I have completely redone the upstairs. I painted, moved out of the bedroom Mark and I had since we bought the house, bought a new bed and bedding, new nightstands, lamps, and switched over closets. I could not walk into the room we shared for so long without being completely engulfed in sadness. I spent two years in it alone and never slept. In the process I went through every thing in Mark’s dresser. I saved some of his favorite bike jerseys and every one made me cry. I went through his socks, underwear, and tshirts. I made stacks of save, donate, ask the kids if they want. I told myself that what is left of a life isn’t reduced to what fills a black, plastic garbage bag, that it’s okay to sift through it all and keep what is meaningful, that letting go of most of it isn’t letting go of his essence, that a life without Mark is still a life and making everything a shrine is an unhealthy tribute to something that no longer exists.
When I think of me two years ago it makes my heart ache. I want to cup that face that sobbed over and over and tell her that she was shattered, traumatized, and in shock. That the life she had and loved had collapsed due to the person she trusted most in the world, that he didn’t mean to do that to her and she wasn’t responsible for it. I want to tell her that every day she kept herself alive she was productive enough, that nobody will ever understand her loss but her, that healing will take the rest of her life and most of that arduous and unrelenting work will go unnoticed by everyone, that one day she will be able to open the drawer that held his socks and see her tshirts and it won’t make her feel like throwing up.
I want to tell her that loss is brutal and misunderstood, that timelines for grief are meters of bullshit, that what should be set on fire are the words closure and new normal, that she will find her way back to herself and it will be unpredictable and take a very long time, that everyone is damaged and has wounds that are bandaged, and if staying in bed all day will stop the bleeding then that’s what needs to be done.
Mostly I want to tell her that she was never pathetic, she wasn’t supposed to have her shit together, that she would have to relearn how to love herself and it wasn’t going to be fast or easy. She was going to have to sit in the thick of her sorrow and it would terrify her most days, but if she didn’t do the work it would hide in all the cracks and the rest of her life would become stagnant and without meaning.
And if she were to allow that to happen, if she never gave herself permission to move forward from the anguish and the loss, how would life ever be able to unfold and surprise her as it always had?
When news of Mark’s death traveled beyond our house, the kids and I were immediately blanketed in such tender love and help, from phone calls and visits to express tearful condolences, a steady stream of plant and flower deliveries, and all the food we could ever need for weeks. Three days after Mark’s death the coffeemaker stopped working. I said something to my daughter about needing to get a new one and the next morning there were two on my front porch. A neighbor who was worried about all the food in the house going bad bought clear containers and spent hours cleaning out my fridge to make room for everything. When one of my brothers called to check up on me, I told him how so many people had swooped in and were taking care of everything we could possibly need and I started to cry. “It’s so overwhelming,” I said. “That’s because everybody likes you guys, Kath. I guarantee you that won’t happen when I die,” which isn’t true at all but it made me laugh which was the earliest and faintest pilot light of hope in that dark time.
Though the caretaking has trailed off since those early months, I often still have dinner delivered to my porch, packages left at my door, an invitation extended for a glass of wine, coffee, or to walk in the park, a text to see how things are going. A few weeks after Mark died, his Saturday morning biking friends showed up at the house to rake my yard and clean my gutters. They came a few more times that fall and have returned often to help me with things around the house. I miss the stories Mark always told me about them so when they arrive to help me I’m thankful that the friendships he forged didn’t die with him. When they are done and go home to take care of their own yards, I walk around and admire their work and usually end up crying because I don’t know how to repay any of this.
My life in general and especially since I met Mark, has always been one of gratitude. I was grateful a friend saw something in him that she thought would match something in me, I was grateful I said yes to that blind date when I wanted to say no. I was grateful that his career allowed me to live in several different places and meet fascinating people. I was grateful to have been given healthy kids who were challenging, fun, kind and curious, and remain that way. I was grateful for our house and finding ourselves in a neighborhood that believes community means being present for the celebrations and the losses. I continue to be grateful for the relationships we both built over the years that have sustained me since Mark has been gone.
The early days of grief overpower every sense like a tsunami, while at the same time you are expected to make immediate decisions. Every waking minute feels like fight or flight so when someone comes along to take care of something you didn’t even know you needed, it feels like you are allowed to take a breath when even that seems to have been forgotten. In those moments, the gratitude gets knotted and intertwined with the sadness like two tangled necklaces, and it seems impossible to figure out where one begins and the other ends.
When we were dating I worked in Chicago, and for a few months Mark got an internship in a lab at a hospital on the same train route as me so we’d go to work together. Much of that route felt gritty and dark with garbage strewn along the tracks accompanied by the sound of screeching brakes on the rails. The train would then go underground and make its scheduled stop at the station. We’d climb the steps out of the darkness and arrive to early morning daylight in the Loop – Lake Michigan to the right and the city to the left. Mark would head south to begin his day, I’d go north. I have thought a lot about those commutes on the train that we took together so many years ago. I’ve thought about the garbage and the dark, and how despite that when you got your first glimpse of the lake, whether it was blue and calm in the summer or gray and biting with winter’s cold, it felt like you had been anointed for the challenges of the day ahead.
Ever since Mark’s death I have been curious and terrified to know of the place where he died. When I got the death certificate that showed the location, I looked it up on my computer at work and had barely focused in on it before I needed to log off and escape to the back stairwell. I’ve imagined it in so many ways and every time it is strewn with garbage, and the thought of his last moments being amongst that saddened and sickened me. Last month as the anniversary date of his death was breathing down my neck, on a day when I felt battered and raging and so over everything, I decided to drive to the place where he gave up on himself.
Tall grass grew along the side of the tracks that swayed in the hot summer wind. There was no garbage littering the sides, no gas station styrofoam cups, no empty beer bottles, no plastic bags wrapped around weeds. There was the most unexpected sense of quiet and peace beside the hard metal of those tracks, and for the first time I wondered if the final passageway through the tunnel of Mark’s darkness was calm.
It is a hard thing to explain that in the well of loss even gratitude can bleed and bleed and bleed.
Walking into the house after finding out that Mark had died, the first thing I noticed was his sandals under the buffet in the dining room. I found them in a hiking store in Maine and encouraged Mark to at least try them on even when he kept insisting he didn’t need them. He loved them the minute he slipped them onto his feet and wore them out of the store and for the entirety of two summers. He wore them so much he always kept them under the buffet so he didn’t have to dig through the closet for them.
That night when the kids had left and Mallory was home and in bed, I walked into every room like I’d never been in this house before. All of it suddenly felt foreign and lifeless. I went into the kitchen to get the coffee ready for the morning when I saw something on the counter. Every night when Mark went to bed he wore ear plugs and a black sock over his eyes. He was serious about sleep and at some point I got him an eye mask but he didn’t like the elastic and went back to his trusty black sock. He didn’t move much in his sleep and the sock would stay on his face throughout the night. To me this was an odd and amusing nightly ritual of his and when he laid that sock over his eyes it meant he was done talking until morning. There laying on the kitchen counter was his black sock with his ear plugs on top. That meant he had taken them downstairs when he tried to sleep and placed them on the counter before he left the house for good. For whatever reason I grabbed my phone and took a picture of it and his sandals. I don’t know why. Maybe to document that he was just here, maybe to document life and death in a span of hours.
There have been many moments like that. A bar of his half-used soap in the shower, his toothbrush in the drawer, a pair of his reading glasses that he would set on the gas meter while he was grilling and reading a paper at the same time, his garden shoes on the back porch, notebooks from his office with page after page of his handwriting, his business cards in my wallet. On my job if any student I dealt with had an interest in science I’d ask them what their future plans were. If they seemed uncertain or in need of advice I’d give them one of Mark’s cards and say, “Call him and tell him that you got his phone number from me and that I said he could give you some help.” The student would always be rather skeptical and I’d say, “Just call him. He’ll talk to you.”
Those traces of him always take me by surprise. How could he be here and then gone? Vanished from my life without a farewell, a bedside I love you as he lay dying, a parting with sweet sorrow. Instead I sat in an interrogation room in a police station with my legs shaking uncontrollably and heard that my husband was dead. It was traumatic to hear those words, it’s still traumatic to relive it. Yet in the two years since everything suddenly changed, there are still traces of Mark’s vibrant life tucked in drawers and closets, the garage, the backyard, the basement.
For my birthday the year Mark died, he and I went shopping for me to pick something out and then have lunch. Mark rarely shopped so he was always amazed at what was out there. I used to think that he should get out more so this retail stuff wasn’t such a wonder to him, but his idea of getting out involved a bike, the lab, a creek, or the woods and he was better off for it. We went into store after store and I wasn’t feeling any of it, but when we were wandering around J. Crew he found a bag for work. Mark used everything until it was literally falling apart and he had been having a hard time finding a replacement for the bag he had that was safety-pinned together. It had to sling over his shoulder and rest on his back for his bike ride in but he never wanted a backpack. He found the perfect bag that day and since he never bought himself much it was always sweet to see the excitement he got from finding something just right.
Three weeks after Mark died and his stuff was released from the police department, I went to pick it up and there was his blue work bag. I brought it home and opened it up to see pens and business cards from work trips he went on, notebooks, allergy meds, the usual kind of stuff. I set it on the chair where it stayed for the longest time. Every day I looked at it and thought the same thing. Remember when you got that bag, Mark? When we were out for my birthday? You loved that bag. How could you just leave it?
That bag sat on the chair for months and was bursting at the seams with our life – the happiness, the arguments, the joy and the frustration, the time I had something on my kidney that a doctor said was a suspicious mass. I fell asleep when we got home from the hospital and Mark went in the backyard and cried then came inside and laid down next to me. When I woke up he said, “This has to be okay. You cannot leave me, Kath, you just can’t.” It turned out to be no big deal and we breathed the biggest sigh of relief together and now here I am without my husband and every day I think the same thing.
You loved me. How could you ever believe that it was okay to leave me?
When I was growing up my dad fixed everything. He fixed the cars, the lawnmower, the clogged dishwasher, washing machine, and toilet, he tore a Mustang apart, rust proofed each piece and put it back together, he built a new bedroom, family room, and kitchen to the back of the house. Because of that upbringing I was under the impression that men could fix everything but that wasn’t exactly what I got.
Mark could throw a bundle of 50# shingles over his shoulder and climb them up a ladder all day long, he could tear off and roof a house in the summer heat or winter cold, he could stand on top of a flat roof and slop hot tar from a bucket, but the basics around this house functioned on WD-40, super glue, and duct tape. I would get mad about it all the time and sometimes when I’d ask him about doing something and he’d say he couldn’t and we’d have to hire it out, I’d say, “For god’s sake, Mark, a monkey could do it.” Then he’d pretend to pick nits off the kids head and eat them to prove that he was in fact a monkey but not a handy one.
Because of his lack of interest and skill, I handled everything with the house and cars. I was the one who called and scheduled repairs, explained the problem, and then negotiated the price until whatever was wrong got fixed by a professional. One time I was getting bids on a new central air conditioning unit while Mark was doing a cross-state bike ride, and by the time one company came with their proposal Mark was back. The guy was shocked that there was a man living in the house and said, “Oh, you have a husband. I researched this and gave you a great price because I thought you were a single mom.” I told him that price was a-okay and Mark said, “See this is why I stay in my lane. You’re way better at this than me.”
Of all the rooms in this house, none has cost more than our little screened porch which has been repaired, reroofed, and/or rescreened three times. When we bought the house it had fake green grass carpet glued to the floor and we pulled that up only to find linoleum tile underneath. That wasn’t going to work for my bougie plans and we started scraping up the tile. Because it was so old it came up easily except for the black mastic glue which is like hardened lava. Every night after dinner we’d go out with a razor scraper and each get a small patch cleaned off, and then try again the next night and the next. But my husband, my guy who took no interest in this kind of stuff, had an idea. When he was a roofer and would be covered with tar at the end of the day, he’d clean it off with Goop. It came in a metal container and he’d slather it on his hands, arms, and neck and the tar would melt right off. “What we have here,” he said, “is a chemical problem. I’m thinking I get some Goop and smear it on the glue to break it down, wait a few minutes and it should come right off.” Off he went to the hardware store and before long he had made mastic soup and scooped it up with rolls of paper towels. Within an hour the entire porch was down to the bare concrete and I madly loved my Mr. Handycapable.
A few years and many basement floodings later, the tile on that floor was cracked and coming up. I told Mark I thought we should scrape it up and he was pretty adamant that we shouldn’t since we didn’t know what was underneath it. To me this seemed to me like his usual “I don’t want to do this so let’s just keep ignoring it,” stall tactic. I was onboard with his non-plan for awhile but after going down there every day to do the laundry and looking at all that crappy tile, I went into the garage and grabbed a scraper to see for myself how easily it came up. It came up like a dream and in no time I had a mound of broken, scraped-up tile so I did what any good mother would do. I called the kids downstairs and told them they had to help me put it into trash bags and we could make it a game to see who got the most tile in a bag and it would be so fun. They didn’t have much of a choice in playing this game and as those things usually go it wasn’t really fun.
By the time Mark came home I was so proud of myself and couldn’t wait to show him. When he saw “my work” his whole body sank. “Noooooo,” he said, “no, I didn’t want you to do that,” because there in front of both of us was an entire basement floor of black mastic glue. “We can just use the Goop again,” I said cheerfully, “it will come right up just like you did on the back porch.” Mark looked at me and said, “I can’t do the basement with that, we can’t be breathing that toxic shit in the house.” Toxic shmoxic, I thought to myself but said to him, “Don’t you worry mister, we’ll figure it out.”
Narrator: He was not the least bit worried because he had no intention of figuring out a problem he did not create.
When he made no attempt to get rid of the glue, I thought I’LL SHOW HIM and went to the hardware store and got a can of Goop. I opened the lid and smeared it on the floor and waited. I thought it might bubble up and foam like a science experiment and kept staring at it waiting for the magic to happen. I might have stared too long because I got light headed and woozy and then had to take to my bed with the vapors.
That night over dinner I told Mark that maybe if we worked on it together a little bit every day that we could solve this problem. “Teamwork”, I said optimistically, “we’ll make it a Fisher team project.” He glanced over at the kids who gave him rolling eyes that said, “That wife of yours is a big, fat liar,” and after a hot minute he said, “There’s no Mark in teamwork,” which there actually is but it didn’t seem to be the right time for a word scramble game.
Weeks went by and the midwest summer humidity settled over that black mastic glue like a boss. I’d go down the stairs with my flip flops on and as soon as I’d hit the floor they’d stick and I’d have to yank my foot up with each step. When I set the laundry basket down it would stick and I’d have to yank that up. I finally figured out that if I high-stepped it to the washer and dryer like a North Korean soldier my feet wouldn’t stick so much to the floor. Meanwhile, Mark would go down there and feed his fish and clean the litter box, whistling the whole time and he wasn’t sticking to anything, probably because his feet weren’t laden with shame. I told him this problem couldn’t go on much longer and he’d nod and ask, “So what’s your plan?” Well, I didn’t have one so I switched to my Fake WalMart Ugg boots because they didn’t stick as bad as the flip flops but every time I wore them they gave me a raging case of the feet sweats.
I was talking to a neighbor about my below ground disaster and she told me about a handyman she knew who was really good. “Call Abel,” she said, “he’ll do anything.” A few days later Abel came and surveyed the basement, sighed, and said, “It’s going to take some work, I’m not sure yet how I’ll clean this off and I have to charge you $400.” $400!!! I jumped for joy and a few days later Abel showed up at the house with his able assistant.
I went down with them to the basement and Abel said he’d get his guy to start and check on him throughout the day. I went to work and nobody was here when I got home. When I went into the basement it looked like our first attempts at the porch a few years earlier. Lots of scraping with all kinds of tools and not much to show for it.
Abel and Able showed up the next day just as I was leaving to walk the dog. When they came in I noticed Abel was carrying a gas can and I said, “You aren’t bringing gas into the house, are you?” Abel smiled and said, “Nooooo, of course not. It’s like gas but not gas.” I left with the dog and the more I thought about it the more panicky I got so I ran the last few blocks home. By the time I got back Mark was out of the shower and I said, “Mark, you have to go talk to them. They came in the house with a gas can and took it downstairs.” “A GAS CAN,” Mark said, “they can’t bring a gas can inside the house,” so he went down there with all the authority of a man in head-to-toe spandex and biking shoes that clickety-clacked all the way down the stairs like a tap dancer. I was right behind him but as soon as I hit the floor my feet stuck.
Mark started talking to Able and I was kind of in and out of the conversation because I hadn’t decided what I was going to wear to work that day which was the only highlight of my job at the time. Then I heard him talking about benzene and organic compounds and I was like sweet jeezus help us all. “Listen, Mr. Bojangles,” I said high-stepping it over there. “Nobody’s got time for one of your chemistry classes right now. Able, look at me. You can’t use gasoline inside the house or you’ll blow it up.” Able smiled and I thought why does he keep smiling about blowing up the house and that’s when it occurred to both of us that maybe Able didn’t speak English. Mark said, “Let me try. ABLE, YOU CAN’T USE GASOLINE INSIDE THE HOUSE OR YOU’LL BLOW IT UP,” which turned out to not be helpful because Able was not hard of hearing. Mark wasn’t deterred and said, “GASOLINE AND A GAS FURNACE WILL MAKE THE HOUSE GO BOOM.” Able smiled some more and Mark said, “WATCH ME, I’M GOING TO DO A DEMONSTRATION.”
That’s when Mark came up behind my head and started waving his arms up and out over and over while making exploding sounds. I should have been offended but in July and August I’ve got an explosion of big hair that rivals Mt. St. Helens so I smiled and nodded. “Look at me, Able. I’m exploding just like the house if you pour gasoline down here.”
Able nodded back and said, “Si si,” and we said, “Yes!!! See, Able, you see. That’s right. No bueno gasolino in the house. Good. Okay, we’re going to go to work now so you have a good day.” We gave him the thumbs up, I marched to the stairs, Mark clickety-clacked up and we left someone we knew for one day in the basement of our house with a full can of not gasoline.
All the way home from work I said pleasebeahousethere pleasebeahousethere and when I rounded the corner it was still standing. I let out a big sigh and ran downstairs to see that the glue was completely cleaned off the floor. Able had pulled it off.
When Mark came home later I showed him the basement. “Holy shit,” he said, “it’s all off.” As he walked around and surveyed the basescape he looked at me and said, “They totally used gasoline on this. There’s no way they could have gotten all of this cleaned off in a day without it.” Well, yes, I thought, but no harm no foul. We got what we needed done and the house didn’t blow up, but I was smart enough to not say any of this out loud because I was on the thinnest of ice with the husband.
Just kidding.
As he went up the stairs I followed behind him and said, “Don’t you think I have the best ideas? I know it takes some time and money to get to the final result but go me. I knocked it out of the park, wouldn’t you say? Just you wait, Markie, I’ve got more big plans to come,” and Markie clickety-clacked up step after step and didn’t say one word. If there was any fight left in him it had evaporated faster than gas fumes in a basement.
Many years ago (in the hey day of Lance Armstrong) when the Tour De France started being televised, Mark watched it avidly. He’d watch as much live coverage as he could early in the morning before he had to leave for work, and then the replay every night. He’d explain the stages and the yellow jersey to me, the teams and their support cars trailing behind, the drafting off each other to save energy. I was only interested because he was, and he’d often call for me to come look at the racers pumping up the mountains and say, “Can you believe this, Kath? The power in their legs to get up a damn mountain?” I preferred when the race went through small villages and everyone showed up along the side of the road, where bikers and fans were bottlenecked together through narrow and harrowing streets. Because Mark and I were dreamers, every year we’d watch and I’d say that we should go to France for a few weeks so that we could see the Tour De France in person.
For two years there was a professional, organized race in Kansas City that we watched. Mark was so excited and we went to the starting point to see them take off and then jumped in the car to catch up to them racing along a beautiful and scenic parkway only a few miles from our house. To watch professional racers on t.v. versus in person was a night and day difference. The speed at which they cycled was incredible, if you blinked you would have missed them whooshing by. It was an adrenaline rush, and for someone like Mark such a thrill to be so close to athletes that were at the top of their game. We stood along the road as they came by then ran to the other side to catch a glimpse of them as they circled back.
I was talking to a friend who mentioned the Tour De France was ending Sunday with the famous ride through Paris. I turned it on in the morning and only lasted thirty minutes before I had to turn it off. Like just about everything since Mark has been gone, it didn’t hold the excitement that he brought to it, and while I try to return to the things that mattered to him it never works. Sometimes that makes me so pissed off and other times sad. Can’t anything be the same?
The answer to that is no, nothing is the same, especially me. The hardest thing about Mark’s death in the early months was seeing a future that was completely blank. There was nothing there and it was terrifying, not a single plan, not a how-to book, not a map towards another place that while not where I wanted to go was at least a destination.
After growing up with five siblings, then getting married, then raising three kids, these last two years have been all about me and I am so sick of me. Tired of asking myself how I am doing, weighing in on how my anxiety is, meeting weekly with my therapist, managing my triggers so they don’t take me under. How small conversations with some people can set me back for days if I don’t redirect them away from personal questions I don’t want to answer, how exhausting it is to manage this life that is so foreign to me I don’t even recognize it, how keeping my head above water is never a certainty on any given day.
As I start another year without Mark you would think I’d stop imaging him coming home but sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and think he’s here, I see cyclist after cyclist ride by the house and beg one of them to round the corner and come up the driveway. I tolerate the days, I hate the nights, the nights where he is supposed to be next to me instead of God knows where. I don’t want to reinvent myself. I want my goddamn life back.
And I don’t get that.
Several years ago Mark and I were at a wedding for one of his colleagues and I was sitting next to a student I’d never met before. We were chatting and she said, “I love your blog. I read it all the time.” I was taken aback and said, “How do you even know about my blog?” “Oh,” she said, “Mark talks about it all the time. At the end of class, in the hallways, to anyone and everyone. He says you’re a great writer and we need to read it.” I looked over at Mark who was deep in conversation with someone else and thought, “You do? You tell everyone I’m a writer? I don’t even call myself that.”
When Mark was here there was a road map we drew together and it was surprising, unpredictable, and full of life and love. The destination never mattered because I got to do it all with him. Then he left and it’s taken me all this time to realize that he left a road map for me and every stop says the same thing.
Pay attention to this life because it all matters. Revel in the joy, laugh at the absurdity, sob when it breaks your heart, and celebrate the moments you manage to pull yourself out of the black hole of sad days.
In case you hadn’t heard at least a dozen times by now, September is Suicide Prevention Month. For those of us who have lived through this kind of tragedy, every day is a walk down the Prevention & Awareness Path as we constantly recycle what we should have seen and could have stopped. I stare at every chart that shows up on my social media feed with its list of signs and say, “Not that one, not that one……”, and while I think awareness on something that is in the top ten of leading causes of death is important, often the warning signs are achingly absent. When those graphics are circulated but don’t match my experience in any way and I have a dead husband, it feels like a heaping pile of shame on top of shame.
I did not know. I don’t think Mark knew. I think he went to sleep that night (or maybe not) and at some point this became the solution that made the most sense to a brain that had become badly fractured in a very short time.
Anyone who knew Mark knew what he was committed to. He had stopped drinking four years earlier, was healthier than he’d ever been – still biking ten miles a day to work and back, and getting in his 10,000 steps. He got a new Fitbit from the kids two months earlier for his birthday and started tracking his sleep. He had done a lot of personal research on cognitive health and aging and read how important sleep was. He’d show his sleep cycle to everyone in an effort to convince them about rest and the brain. “Sleep is the street sweeper for your brain,” he’d say over and over. He was committed to social justice, to promoting science as a career especially among women, he was committed to the success of every student he taught regardless of whether they worked in his lab or not, he was committed to meeting his biking buddies before dawn on Saturday mornings and going out to breakfast after, he was committed to preserving energy which is why he rode his bike and had a battery charged lawn mower. He was committed to being an outspoken advocate for faculty at the med center and he never backed down from what he believed to be right.
But above all that, he was committed to me and to our kids and none of us doubted that for a minute.
Now two years since Mark’s death, I still don’t like meeting new people. I don’t like telling my story. I can say that I’m a widow but cannot answer, “How did your husband die?” without a blank stare and eyes that immediately fill with tears. The word suicide gets stuck in my throat and I feel so exposed that nothing comes out. The longer time has passed the less I can talk about the details of that day. Before I had to, now it feels like I was part of a sacrament that was holy in its heartbreak.
Much has changed over the years regarding suicide. Maybe that has to do with it being an epidemic, maybe because in recent years high profile public people have ended their lives and shocked the world. As such, saying someone “committed suicide” is no longer acceptable but rather “died by suicide.” Advocates argue that to say the former implies that the person who ended their life can be equated with a criminal.
For someone like me it makes a difference for other reasons. I knew what committed looked like. I saw it every day with startling passion and energy, and yet my husband ended his very vibrant life to the shock of everyone. On that day, the day he thought his last action on earth would make that emotional pain go away, it instead got transferred to me, and the demons that tightly clung to the backs of him, his father, and his sister came and sat next to me and said, “So are you going to do something about us or should we move on to your kids?” Every day since then I have looked them in the eye and said, “Over my dead body will you touch my kids,” and committed looks vastly different and daunting after you find yourself on the losing end of a fight you never knew you were in.
In a few days it will be two years since I’ve looked deep into your gorgeous eyes or seen that smile that always did me in. I don’t know what happened to you that day and I’ve never been the kind of girl that likes mysteries. I don’t know if you slept that night, I don’t know when you left the house, I don’t know how it could all break inside of you and I could not know.
Since that day there is nothing in my life that is the same. How or if I eat is different, the groceries I buy, the water, electric, and cell phone bill, the bank balance, the amount of laundry I do, the car I drive, the job I have, my social life, what side of the bed to sleep on which I have yet to figure out. I even took the dog back to the shelter. In the first week we had him I said I didn’t think he would work out but you said that we should keep him because somebody had abused him, that you two had that in common. After you died, I reached my limit of looking into the eyes of something else I could not save.
My whole life I have wondered how a person can survive the tragic, sudden death of someone they loved. I mostly worried about the kids, but every day when you left for work on your bike I worried about you until you rounded the corner at day’s end. You ending your life in the way you did was something I never saw coming and the cruelty of it will haunt me for the rest of mine. I used to love to lay in bed at night and listen to the sound of the trains as their horn blasts cut through the cold winter air. Then you ran in front of one and that sound unnerved me to the point that I thought I would go mad.
To lose you that way means that I replay that day over and over. How panicky I felt that you weren’t calling me back, how everything felt off kilter, the police station, the calling the kids to come home, the shock on their faces when I told them you were dead, the call to Mallory who answered so cheerfully and then I had to deliver the most devastating news of her young life, your sister who kept saying, “No, no, no, that’s not true,” your mentor from graduate school who called and said, “When I heard the news I said I wouldn’t believe one word of it unless Kathy told me herself.” Joe calling from work. Joe, who you talked about every day like he was your brother, and the two of us crying and barely able to choke out a single word.
So many people showed up at our door, each one repeating the same thing, “I don’t know what to say.” Over and over I told the story of that morning. I learned later that this is common. You have to keep repeating it so you can believe it yourself. Even now I am still shocked daily that you aren’t here, and every night when I go to bed I try to figure out how to save you. I know it’s impossible to save a dead man, and yet I keep thinking of that one magical thing I should have said that would have stopped you from leaving us.
You are deeply missed by more people than you can imagine, but it is the kids who have risen and faltered on every step of this journey alongside me. You should know that they are not mad at you, none of us ever have been. For a split second that weekend I saw a glimpse of the broken boy inside of you that never healed. How could I be angry at the sharp edges of wounds you tried to keep bandaged until you couldn’t? How hard you worked to keep them from overtaking you and still they grabbed hold and took you under? Since your death the kids and I have talked about how you might have fared if the situation had been reversed, if I was the one who went first. You had enough pain in your life and I’m okay with taking this for the team to have spared you. I wish, though, that the kids could have been spared. They have had to learn too soon about so many conflicting and difficult thoughts and emotions and were far from done needing you in their life. It would be impossible to imagine any of them being more empathetic than they already were, but they allow me and each other grace that stops me in my tracks. You would be so proud of them. We taught them well, and despite all you accomplished in your professional life, it was each of them that were our best experiment.
Remember when I would show you the numbers on my blog when I had a good response to something I’d written? I write now about what this road has been like and I have those kinds of numbers all the time. My story of grief has become public and there are good and bad things to that. I write hard stuff, mainly as a source of understanding and release for myself, so people often make assumptions about me that aren’t true. It’s odd and yet I don’t care because expending energy on that sort of thing seems pointless when the work before me is to not become a raging shell of who I used to be. That would be the second tragedy of this and I couldn’t face you again if I were to allow that to happen. For so long I knew what it was like to be loved, to be heard, to be respected and admired. I wanted so much more of you and that life, and then the story ended with a harshness that I never could have imagined.
While my story is public I have kept most of yours private. There have been so many times when I have been asked why you ended your life and it’s so layered and complex and something I still struggle to understand. That has come with a heavy, emotional price and I regularly talk about it with my therapist. She once asked who besides me you would confide in and I said, “Nobody.” “Then I think,” she said, “that’s your answer to who is entitled to know your husband’s breaking point.”
Carla and I have had many long talks about dating which is absurd to think that either one of us would even be in this position and at the same time. She asked me one day what kind of guy I thought we’d end up with and I said, “He’d have to be somebody who was divorced, who couldn’t stand his ex-wife because who wants to keep hearing about the perfect first spouse? Making lasagna and him saying that Barb used the kind of noodles you don’t cook first and thinking she didn’t know what she was doing but you can’t say that because Barb hangs over the place like an inflatable from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. No thank you. Besides one house isn’t big enough for two altars to dead spouses.” Then we both laughed until we literally cried because, Jesus, how did this happen that we were even talking about something so ludicrous as both of you guys being dead and us dating? When I mention meeting someone to anyone outside of the Widow’s Club, I get two reactions. “You absolutely deserve to be happy,” or “I don’t think you’re ready for that.” You would be surprised at the amount of people who feel it necessary to weigh in on my life, and every time I hear your voice saying, “Fuck ’em, Kath,” which always makes me smile. One of your friends told me that the world would be a richer place if I were to fall in love again and the generosity of that statement still takes my breath away.
When you died and people said to me, “May he rest in peace,” I thought it was absurd. I was going through the motions and didn’t believe for one minute, even at your funeral, that you were actually dead. Anybody that knew you knew that you were constant motion. For you to rest, either here or there, has always seemed unlikely but the emotional torment about your death often feels like a hand around my ankle coming from the other side. I can’t tell if it’s you or if I am the one that is preventing myself from moving past that September morning. Neither one of us could give up a good fight, but I do know that if I stay in this place of reliving that day over and over it will kill me. For 40 years we were a beautiful, passionate couple and there isn’t a single waking minute in the day that I don’t miss that. I miss being happy. I miss being your girl. I miss stability. I miss bad jokes, recycled jokes, and inside jokes. I miss dinners, movies, road trips, and wandering around the garden center with a cup of coffee and a million ideas. I miss being at a party and you finding me and saying we should go home and do something more fun.
This has been the most painful two years of my life and my daily prayer is that your tender soul rests knowing that you were the joy and love of my life, that the way you lived made a difference in this world, that we all try to be better versions of ourselves because of you, and that despite the constant ache for you to be with us, the kids and I still try to live our days with passion. Daily being shocked at your death has been an unwelcome gift, for we know better than most that the expiration date can come at any moment. Knowing that changes everything so we live accordingly and trust that wherever you are you are wildly cheering for us. That keeps us going in a world that has lost much of its brilliance.
Tu me manques, Mark Fisher, tu me manques.
You are missing from me. You are missing from us. You are missing.
I started working at the age of sixteen at the local Dairy Queen and except for a few years raising kids have not stopped. Mark’s long-term plan was to keep working until he was a crotchety old geezer, eventually giving up the professor life to work the bench for free for an up and coming younger scientist. I have always liked to work but was certain I’d kick back much sooner than him. We both came home every night and told our work stories/frustration/gossip and then did it the next day and the next. Mark worked at a university medical center, I worked across town at an urban campus.
My work history has always looked like someone who really didn’t know what they wanted to do with their life and that would be 100% accurate. Mark never understood why I couldn’t stick with one thing, but I’d get bored and want to try something new. When I got the university job it was the 11th interview I’d been on that summer. Some jobs I interviewed for seemed so bad that I never considered working there. Others I really wanted but didn’t get, and so I was shocked when the HR department called to offer me the job. My interview had been in a tiny conference room where eight people sat around a table and round-robin grilled me. It seemed like overkill for a part-time, accounting position and I should have been intimidated, but I could not stop sneezing before I left the house and took a Benadryl that kicked in as soon as I arrived in the parking garage. My only goal during that interview was to not do a face plant on the table.
I started a few weeks later and the learning curve was so steep I daily thought I wouldn’t make it. The training was awful with a convoluted reference guide the size of War & Peace. My coworker would pass contracts off to me for processing and payment and say, “You know how to do this, right?” I had no idea but I’d give a thumbs up and scramble to figure it out. Somehow I pulled if off and one year turned into two and eventually five.
When Mark died I took off work for three weeks. I felt like I needed longer but when I wasn’t there my job got dumped on someone else and it was one more thing to feel guilty about. I called my boss, we arranged a date to return, and walking back into that office was excruciating. Nearly everyone seemed to be somewhere else so I sat down at my desk and tried to figure out what needed to be done first. Like my early days there, I immediately felt like I was in over my head and didn’t even know where to start. It wasn’t long before the building services worker on our floor showed up at my desk. “Baby girl,” she said, “you don’t have to say one thing to me but I had to come here and see you with my own eyes to make sure you were okay.” I hugged her and said, “I’m not,” and we both cried. I barely survived that day and every one after for months. When the alarm went off each morning I wanted to call and say that I was quitting, that my life was too much of a mess to be able to produce anything, that they’d be better off with someone else. I kept going back, though, because I didn’t know what else to do. It was the only stable thing in my life, it was the only place I didn’t cry (much), it’s where I knew what I was supposed to do. Gradually it got easier and I could push through the payment requests, talk to students about their organization’s budget, and get back into my work routine. For that I credit my boss immensely and all of my coworkers who propped me up every day, who kept me busy with things that weren’t sad, who didn’t run away when I was having a hard day.
But after awhile I still felt the familiar push to move on to something else, then Covid hit and we were given notice in March to start working from home until further notice. Fast forward three months and the university is in dire financial straits, everything is in flux, and my position was eliminated. My boss texted me to schedule a meeting and I knew what was coming. I told him that it was okay, that I would miss him and everyone else dearly, that he was doing me a favor because I needed to leave and didn’t have the guts to do it.
I spent the next two weeks finishing things up then logged off for good, promising myself that I would take the rest of the summer off and not panic about having so much time on my hands. I slept a lot, I opened Mark’s closet and took all his shirts off hangers and folded them. I started walking again and making myself better dinners than microwave popcorn, and when that new routine was established I started crying and could not stop. Sobbing meltdowns in my quiet house with the clock tick-tocking like thunder towards two years of living without Mark .
One day the phone rang and it was from a retail job I got hired for months before, a job that was supposed to keep me busy on the weekends but one that I actually never worked because it closed due to Covid. “Would you like to come to work for us,” they asked, “because we’d love to have you.”
It might not make much sense to agree to that in a pandemic but I have grown accustomed to my life not making sense. I grabbed the life preserver being flung in my direction, opened my closet, picked out something to wear, and started something new. I haven’t worked on my feet in a long time and am too tired when I get home to do anything, but at day’s end I make another imaginary tally mark under a heading I never could have conceived.
Number of days the tentacles of sorrow didn’t grab me and pull me under?
