A Speckled Trout

This neighborhood of mine is full of cape cods that were built in the 1940s and surrounded by trees, lots of trees. It was the appeal of these old homes and well-established trees that drew Mark and I to this area and why we wanted to live here. Those trees, though, can cause a lot of problems. Many years ago we had an epic ice storm in October. The branches were heavy with leaves that hadn’t fallen yet and then got coated in ice. When I took the trash out in the late afternoon, all I heard from every direction was snapping limbs. It was terrifying, and Mark and I were awake all night listening to branches crashing to the ground as the sky lit up with blown transformers all around us. We would be without power for five days until an army of lineman cleared brush and climbed pole after pole to restore power.

While the fall isn’t usually that dramatic, it does bring an avalanche of leaves that seem to never let up. Every weekend, homeowners are out raking, blowing, and bagging leaves. Mark and I tackled it year after year, and when the kids got older we made them help us. At first it would be a fun kickoff to the fall season, but that got old quickly when after a marathon raking day the yard looked no different 24 hours later.

A few blocks away is a house that never has any leaves in their yard. I first noticed it because it was the only house on the street where you could see green grass, and then I got kind of obsessed with it. How did they go through the entire fall season without a single leaf on their lawn? How did they not have them clustered around the bushes and blown against the fence?

It was so odd to me that I needed to talk to Mark about it, and when I did he asked me why I cared. “I care,” I said, “because every yard in every neighborhood in this entire town is covered with leaves but that one. You don’t think that’s strange? Doesn’t it make you think of a Dateline show with Keith Morrison asking in his husky, doubting voice, “Where did the leaves go?” Besides Mark having no idea who Keith Morrison was, there was only so much of me he had space for in his head and The House With No Leaves was encroaching on more important stuff. One day I made him drive by to see for himself and still he did not care, so I was a lone wolf trying to figure out what was going down inside that perfect house. Weeks passed by until Mark came home from the hardware store one day and said, “I went past that house and you’re right. There’s never a leaf anywhere in the whole yard. It’s weird,” and I loved him so for finally noticing that something was very wrong in Mayberry. That opened the door for me to tell him that I think this couple must sit in their living room and watch for leaves to fall and Leaf Man screams, “MOTHER!!! We’ve got a trespasser,” then goes outside, shakes his fist, locks and loads his leafblower, and blows that thing to kingdom come. How this gets repeated over and over and over with the maple trees and the oak trees, and Mother drinks all day because he goes off the deep end every autumn and no matter what she says he rides that rail all the way to Crazytown. “Why do you think it’s him?” Mark asked me. “Maybe she’s the one obsessed with the leaves.” I asked him how many women he’d ever seen with a leafblower in their hands. “I’ll answer that for you,” I said before he had a chance to open his mouth. “None. Speaking for all women we hate leafblowers. We hate the sound of them, we hate men’s obsession with them, we hate the minute the garage door opens and that thing comes out.” Mark pointed out that we didn’t even own a leaf blower which was true, but I have a fondness for making sweeping generalizations to prove an inaccurate point.

Then winter came along and up the street from the House With No Leaves was a house that was decked out for Christmas. I drove by it many times and my thoughts were always the same. What in the ever loving…….? This house had every kind of Christmas decoration in their yard and on their roof that you could imagine. There were cables running up into the trees with lights wired to them and a star haphazardly dangling from the roof. Every time I drove by I felt like knocking on the door and offering unsolicited advice on behalf of a neighborhood that was dazed and confused. I made Mark drive by it one night on our way home from a party and he asked, “What am I looking at here? I can’t even tell what all this is.” “Right??? “It’s like they go out and shop the after Christmas sales and buy everything that’s left, store it in the garage for months, and then shove it all into the yard every December. There’s no theme. There’s no cohesion. It’s a gigantic Christmas cluster.” Then we laughed and high-fived each other because even that plastic half-price Jesus with Frosty stalking him knew the Fishers were better than everybody else.

The other day I drove down the street of The House With No Leaves. The lawn is still immaculate and the Christmasclusterpalooza House was its annual mess. I wished Mark were around to trade scathing critiques and snarky observations with me, how everyone tends to think I’m so nice, so sweet, so blah blah blah, but he was on to the scam. Now he’s gone and what am I supposed to do if I meet someone that actually buys into the idea that I’m a nice person? How long can I keep that up before I let it slip that there’s landscape architects for a reason? That you don’t hodge podge your boxwoods, roses, and hostas like some outdoor checkerboard game, that just because they’re on sale doesn’t mean you load dozens of them into your SUV.

If I already pre-pity the imaginary oldmanfriend who wants to get to know me better over dinner, a guy who drives a cool vintage truck, has a nice smile and great laugh, who likes to read, and is up on current events, maybe it means that I really am nice.

I’m kidding.

It means Leaf Man and Christmasclusterpalooza Guy have saved a seat for me on the rail to Crazytown.

Many years ago Mark and I went to Spain for a conference he was attending. We had three young kids at the time and it wasn’t cheap for me to fly there with him, but he came home one day and said he’d booked the flight despite me repeatedly saying we couldn’t afford it. His mom came into town to take care of the kids and when we got to Atlanta and checked in for our flight to Barcelona, we found out we’d been upgraded to first class. Everything from that point on was perfect and there is something about exploring a new city with someone you love that elevates all the senses. We would go on other great trips but there was never another quite like that. Maybe it was because it was our first international trip together, or maybe it was two young, exhausted parents who found their way back to each other in a beautiful place. Whatever the magic was, whenever we made travel plans it always circled back to that trip. “Spain,” we would both say sighing. “Nothing will ever beat Spain.”

But whenever I talked about it to anyone else and was asked what part of Spain we’d been to, I could never remember. Over and over I’d have to ask Mark. He was like an encyclopedia. He had an ability to remember a multitude of specific facts on many topics with ease. A year before he died we saw Dunkirk, and all the way home he spoke in detail about WWI – things that were completely unknown to me. When I asked him how he could remember so much with such accuracy, he said that whenever he found out something interesting he’d sink into it. While there is plenty I find interesting, too, I never seemed to be able to retain anything with the ease he did.

Mark wasn’t so great at remembering other things like parent-teacher conferences, signing up for health insurance during open enrollment until the very last day, dinner plans, or significant dates. For that he relied on me. The day after he died when a close friend came to the house, he told us that he and Mark had made plans to meet for lunch. Mark never showed up. They rescheduled. Mark never showed up. Finally, on the third try Mark remembered to meet him. His mom would often say that he lacked common sense but that wasn’t the case at all. His mind was in constant motion with plans and experiments and papers and grants. He was the juggler of many professional demands, I kept track of the rest.

One time we got invited to a dinner party at the home of Mark’s boss. There was a big meeting in town and Mark said there were some heavy hitters in the science world that would be there. We assumed that other people in the department would also be attending but when we got there it was only us and a table full of people we didn’t know. Mark could handle that kind of stuff with ease. Me? Not so much. I was mostly a stay-at-home mom at the time which was the kiss of death to any conversation with a bunch of scientists, but over the years I learned to hold my own even if it was pretty shaky. After dinner, the conversation of the table turned to wine and our dinner companions knew their years, their barrels, their oakiness, their grapes. I was amazed at all the information these passionate wine drinkers had, and said, “So how do you know all this? Do you google it?”

There is a faux pas and then there is a FAUX PAS. Everybody stopped talking and looked at me. Turns out it’s rather insulting to ask a table full of people who do research for a living if their vast knowledge comes from Google. Mark leaned over and whispered, “Thanks for ruining my career.” I recovered quickly and said, “I mean, of course, you couldn’t possibly learn all this from a basic internet search. I was kidding. Ha. Ha. Ha.” Then I asked some dopey questions about grapes in an effort to pull my husband’s career out of the flaming dumpster that I set ablaze. All the way home, Mark imitated me. “Do you goooooooogle it?,” he kept saying and we laughed until we cried that two box-o-wine hacks like us got an invite to such a classy party. “The good thing about wine coming out of a cardboard box,” I said to him, “is that you never have to worry about it being too oaky.”

I recently read that when you lose a spouse it’s like burning a library down. That is true and it often feels debilitating to not have Mark here to rely on for so many things. I am winging life, and it feels as awkward as my attempt at dinner party conversation with a bunch of people out of my league. I forget things, I overthink things, I sleep too much or not at all, I buy too many clothes to fill the gaping hole where my husband used to be, I cry, I rage, I’m hopeful, I’m depressed, I walk around this house like it’s some kind of labyrinth in hopes that the last time I circle, Mark will be there to tell me again that he married up, that I’ll always be his girl. My grief job requires me to untangle myself from a lifetime of us so that I can move forward, and most days I have a bad attitude about it.

As for Spain, I asked Mark so many times where we went that I put it in my notes on my phone. We went to Costa Brava, and like the day he ended his life, I remember everything about it. Ever since then my memories are in a constant battle to be acknowledged, so much so that I am always confused as to whether I am dancing with the angels or dancing with the devil. The only thing that is certain is that it’s impossible to learn the steps.

There is a popular book that has been around for several years called The Body Keeps The Score. It is about the complexity of traumatic experiences and how the body physically reacts to the stress. I had heard about it long before Mark died and thought it sounded interesting until I had to live with it.

Three years ago last week, Mark and I were in Portugal. He had been invited to an international conference to give a talk, and because he’d been there before and was close friends with another scientist, he also gave a talk at the University of Lisbon. Mark had traveled extensively in his career, and Portugal was his second favorite place, only slightly behind Greece. Mark wanted me to go with him on all his work trips which were normally 2-3 days, but I had a job, and though part-time, I didn’t want to take advantage of my boss by asking off too much.

But Portugal? I’d shamelessly beg for time off to go there.

Mark was bursting with happiness the second we arrived in Lisbon, it was as if the city was a gift he couldn’t wait for me to unwrap. With its cobblestone streets and century old buildings, it was stunning in history and beauty. Mark quickly figured out the subway system and every day we jumped on a train to some new adventure. We’d walk for miles and return to our hotel late, wake up and eat a big breakfast in the morning, and then figure out what we felt like seeing and doing. Sometimes Mark could hang out with me all day, sometimes for a few hours, other days only for dinner, but I figured my way around the neighborhood where our hotel was, and would wander off by myself when he was busy.

Mark’s friend, Claudio, insisted on giving us a tour one night and he drove us to see castles, a monastery built in the 1500s, a custard tart shop that had been around since the 1800s, historical places of conflict, the burial grounds of poets. There is nothing better than seeing a city through the eyes of someone who is immensely proud of his homeland. When we were done touring, Claudio took us to a restaurant, where over tapas Mark would meet his graduate students and launch into professor mode for details on the work they were doing. Two days later we would leave that beautiful city to head back home, unpack from that trip, work a few days, then pack the car and drive to Illinois to celebrate Thanksgiving.

Mark loved Thanksgiving and being around my big family, but for the first time the Fishers would be minus one as our youngest daughter who lived in LA wasn’t able to get off work to join us. As a couple, Mark and I spent more holidays and special occasions without family than with, and though we managed to survive just fine, I wanted Mallory with us. During the eight hour car ride I texted her a few times to see how her plans were shaping up for the next day and if she needed any recipes. She’d cheerfully respond back each time, and though it wasn’t like having her with us, she seemed good with her plans and I stopped worrying. We arrived at my sister and brother-in-law’s’ house, had dinner and were sitting around talking with them and my mom when my other sister walked in the door with her girls.

We all got up to hug them and behind my sister and her daughter was not her other daughter but Mallory. It took a few seconds for all of us to register what was going on but when it did we screamed and cried and laughed, and Mark and I grabbed that kid and squeezed the daylights out of her. Unbeknownst to us, my sister had called Mallory weeks before and somehow she managed to swap some shifts to get a few days off. Ann and her husband arranged the flight and paid for it, and while I was texting Mal in the car in Iowa, she was hanging out with her cousins in Wrigleyville. I was so grateful to my sister and her husband, and would find out later that when my brother-in-law came the next day for dinner, Mark went up to him with tears in his eyes and thanked him many times over for bringing our daughter to us for the holiday.

Over these past two weeks, my body has diligently kept a scorecard on these memories. It remembers how good it used to be until trauma rewired it to the point that everything often feels like fight or flight. In the midst of this scorekeeping, though, are the tiniest fireflies of light blinking on and off, on and off. The beauty of a centuries old church in Europe, the taste of milk and coffee at the hotel breakfast buffet every morning, falling asleep on my husband’s shoulder in the airport because we went non-stop for five days straight, and the joy that Wednesday night when our Mallie Bee unexpectedly walked in the door.

Around the world this year loss has so much devastated company, while in the dark night sky souls quietly blink on and off and on and off. From the ground we hope our prayers reach high enough for them to know that despite the aching emptiness and pain, we are grateful that for the shortest of moments they belonged here with us.

Happy Thanksgiving.

When I was a little girl my best friend lived across the street. She would often invite me to spend the night and I’d pack a small bag with my pajamas and toothbrush and proudly walk over with my mom for my overnight adventure. At some point during the night, I’d get homesick and start to cry and Nancy’s dad would wrap me up in a blanket and carry me home to my mom who would be waiting for me by the back door. This happened over and over, and I don’t know why my mom or Nancy’s dad just didn’t give up, but we all kept trying and after many attempts I was finally able to sleep there all night.

Such was the early start of someone who preferred home to most other places. When Mark and I were first married we lived in a basement apartment in Champaign, Illinois, and we would find out within days that there was a massive roach problem. During that time Mark developed a deep and long-lasting hatred for the smell of RAID because I used it so much that he said he could smell it from the parking lot. It got so bad that we had to put baggies over our toothbrushes because the roaches would sit on top of them and eat the dried toothpaste. Six months of that and with both of us teetering on some kind of breakdown, we were able to get out of our lease and move to less creepy digs. I never considered that crappy apartment with its constant parade of cucaraches a home, but Mark? Mark was home.

From there we lived in three different townhouses in three different states before we found our one and only house. I’ve always loved this house and told Mark that often. He loved other things more and wasn’t nearly as enthusiastic as me. Nevertheless, he would proudly show it and the yard off and say, “It’s all Kath. She’s the one who’s made everything look so great.” Now without him here, I don’t even know what to call it. It’s no longer “our house” and saying “my house” sticks in my throat and burns with loss. It doesn’t feel so much like a home but more like a bed and breakfast with phantom hosts.

Last week I had to go to the med center for a dermatology appointment. The fact that I could get in after calling two days earlier was some kind of miracle and I was feeling pretty good about taking care of something that I’d neglected for two years. That didn’t last long as the campus came into view and I started crying before I made it to the parking garage. On prior late afternoon appointments I’d have, I would call Mark when I was done to see if he could meet me for coffee. He always had some fire to put out and would say he wished he could but that he was too busy. I’d be disappointed and say, “Or we could grab an early dinner and you could get those chicken wings you love, but if you’re too busy that’s okay. Maybe another time.” He’d tell me to hold on, that maybe he could hurry and finish things up, that he’d meet me at the back of his building in twenty minutes. I’d park by the loading dock and wait for him and he’d come running out the back door, get in the car, kiss me, and tell me what a great idea I had. All the while I’d congratulate myself for using the ace-in-my-pocket-chicken-wings that he’d fall for every time.

At my appointment the nurse kept looking at me and said that I looked really familiar to him. I said he probably had me mixed up with someone else but I wondered if maybe he was on one of the buses that came from the med center for Mark’s funeral. “Maybe you saw me in a church two years ago,” I wanted to say. “When I stood in front of a couple hundred people and talked about the life of my husband and my voice had only the slightest crack at the end. How I told stories of how funny and passionate he was, how I begged everyone to remember how he lived rather than how he died, how I asked them to tell our kids stories about their dad because they were looking at me in the front row and all I really wanted to say to them was that I was so goddamn sorry that I wasn’t able to keep him here for them.” But instead of saying all that I shoved a fingernail into the palm of my hand to keep from crying as he kept looking at me and saying, “I swear I’ve met you.”

That afternoon I got three pre-cancerous spots frozen off the side of my face. A different nurse said I got the award for strongest patient of the day because I never flinched. “People always flinch,” he said. “You were perfectly still and a dozen shots of liquid nitrogen to the face just about makes everyone jump off the table.”

“I’ve been through worse,” I said. Then I walked to the parking garage, paid my parking fee, and drove away from Mark’s other home without him running out of his building towards me, without him getting in the car and tilting my head to take a long look at what they did, without him saying, “I’m glad you took care of that so you’ll be around to keep bribing me with chicken wings.”

Ever since Mark died, I rarely go to the grocery store that is five minutes from my house. In the beginning there were too many people I would run into who were worried about me and I didn’t want to start crying about my life over 10# bags of potatoes. In contrast, there were also people I’d run into that knew me well, who worked extra hard at avoiding me, and could never say a simple, “I’m sorry about your husband.” Sometimes it was uncomfortable and hurtful, other times it angered me, but ultimately it was something that was fixable if I chose to shop further away and that is what I’ve done ever since.

Recently some friends were telling me about someone we knew whose husband died. He’d been ill for awhile and because our only connection were kids that were the same age, I had no idea because I hadn’t seen her in years. Whenever I hear that someone has lost their partner it pains me greatly. I know how hard it is, and whether expected or not, the death of a spouse upends every part of one’s life.

Last week I ran into this woman at a clothing store. She didn’t recall who I was and I told her that my oldest and her son were in the same grade together in elementary school. She had a blank look on her face so I told her my name and my daughter’s name and she said, “Oh yes, now I remember.” I understood as I know that utter confusion about basic stuff after your husband dies, sometimes I still have it. As a precursor to acknowledging the changes in her life, I said that I saw that her house had sold because I drive past it in the way to work. She looked at me and said, “No, actually we’re in the same house we’ve always been in.” I apologized and said I thought she lived on such-and-such a street and she told me where she lived and I wondered how I didn’t know that because I thought she lived in the same house for years.

All the while we were talking I kept telling myself, “Just say you’re sorry about her husband. You can’t keep talking about this dumb stuff and not acknowledge that her husband died.” But for the life of me I could not get the words out of my mouth and I thought about those times in the grocery store when people I knew avoided me so they wouldn’t have to say anything. I often labeled them as cowards and to my disappointment I was behaving the exact same way. We talked about the cost of housing in our area, and as she was talking I noticed she was wearing her wedding ring like I had for nearly a year after Mark died. I achingly remembered how hard that was to take off.

She then started talking about her and her husband walking in their neighborhood. Walking in your neighborhood? I know I was off my rocker for a long time after Mark died but I never thought about walking my dead husband around the neighborhood. And while she was talking I was trying to visualize getting the urn off the mantel and saying, “Time for our daily walk, honey!!!”, then tucking it under my arm and chatting up the fall colors to a jar of ashes.

Meanwhile, the Cap’n of the Neuron Firing Squad started pulling alarms and was screaming, “ABORT!!! ABORT!!!” and I was telling him to STOP YELLING AT ME because I needed to concentrate on the timing of my expression of condolences and he was saying, “NO!!! NO!!! NO!!! YOU. NEED. TO. SHUT. YOUR. MOUTH.” While these two conversations were happening simultaneously (which happens all day every day), I took a long look at this woman again and realized she wasn’t at all who I thought she was. Not only that, we had never been friendly towards each other and that was confirmed when she commented on a shirt and said she would never wear something like that and I had just bought it.

While the unsaid often hangs awkwardly in the air like an unmoving cloud, what hangs even more awkwardly is when you’re about to offer to have coffee with the wrong person to talk about dead husbands when hers is very much alive. Thanks to Covid, I was wearing a mask that hid the shock on my face as I narrowly escaped barreling headfirst into a hot mess of my own making.

And that shirt I bought? Of course she wouldn’t have gotten it. It had cougar widow vibe written all over it.

In the aftermath of Mark’s death, every single day felt like I was lugging around a trunk of sadness like a first class passenger on the Titanic. Instead of being able to pass it off to a steward like a wealthy heiress, I had to carry it wherever I went. It was heavy, cumbersome, and impossible not to notice. It filled every room I entered and the size of it sucked the air out of everything.

Despite that there were many people who were able to walk around that trunk like it wasn’t even there. They would tell me that they knew things would get better, that I was so strong, that at least I had those grandchildren of mine, that thank goodness I had a job to go to, that I was young enough and vibrant enough to find another husband, that time would heal this because when their grandma died time healed them. A teller at my bank told me her husband died and that Jesus was her husband now and he could be mine, too, if I only asked him. I wondered how the sex part of the Jesus-is-my-husband worked and would have brought that up if only I didn’t feel like running out of there screaming.

In all of those instances I wanted to ask, “But can’t you see my sorrow? Can’t you see that big trunk with so much love and humor, the three beautiful kids, the adventures, the silliness and the profound, the talks over coffee and dinner, the celebrations of birthdays, anniversaries, the jumping for joy when the NIH approved a grant? Do you not see that all of that is weighted in sadness and I never get to put it down? That I’m so tired and it’s so heavy and it’s right there in front of you and you keep pretending it’s not. That if you could just pick up the handle on the side and help me carry it for just a minute it would be so much more helpful than trying to Dr. Phil me out of this grief.”

Six years ago when Mark and I went to Montana we stopped in Missoula on the way to Glacier National Park. We had just eaten breakfast and were walking to a bookstore when I noticed the wing of a butterfly on the sidewalk. I reacted like I’d won the lottery. That kind of stuff always confused the hell out of Mark, my excitement over such a dumb discovery. “Can you believe this,” I said to him. “That all these people have walked by this butterfly wing and not seen it? That it’s still intact?” I carefully picked it up, wrapped it in a Kleenex and put it in my purse. It felt like an omen to me and when I got home I put it in the tiniest frame. I loved looking at that thing, the colors, the perfectness of it, that it was on the sidewalk waiting to be acknowledged by the right person.

Two years later we would take a road trip to drive our youngest back to California and Mark wanted to stop at a meteor crater in Arizona. We spent quite awhile looking at it and then he and Mallory climbed some rickety steps to an observation deck. I didn’t trust those steps and went into the gift shop. I had never been much of a rock person until I set foot in there and suddenly wanted them all. I was balancing a few in my hand and trying to decide what I wanted when I dropped one. It broke in half and the sound made everyone stop and look at me. The person working there said it was fine and that I didn’t need to pay for it but I thought I did. It felt like the two halves of Mark and me that I could make whole with some glue, but I wondered if maybe that wasn’t an omen too, that brokenness might be my future. Seven months later Mark would be dead and broken has defined my life since then.

These days the trunk of sorrow has been reduced to a large suitcase. It’s less heavy and not so cumbersome, but there are many, many times I still ram my leg into it and it hurts as much as those early days. The sadness stays tightly rolled inside and will always be there but it doesn’t coat as much as it used to. Now when someone notices my suitcase, when they say Mark’s name or tell me a story about him, when I can trust that they won’t tell me to look on the bright side or advise me how to live my life, I will zip open one of the side pockets, carefully unwrap my treasures and say, “But look at these broken things I saved. Aren’t they beautiful?”

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 Absolutely none 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.