A Speckled Trout

I feel like girls who drink whiskey have good stories. -Atticus

Recently I told my son that during this never ending pandemic, my choices for TV watching had hit new lows. “Mom,” Will said, “I don’t think this is the time to feel bad about how any of us are getting through this. We’re all making bad choices.” I heartily agreed and the floodgates of my choices suddenly had a signed permission slip from a responsible adult.

I am not much of a Netflix person or binge watcher as that requires commitment and attention, neither of which I currently have. Instead I scroll through regular cable and stop when I reach the bizarre. By accident I found Dr. Pimple Popper which is a misnomer because the people making the trek to see her have something far bigger than pimples. The show does a back story on each patient and how their physical conditions hinder their lives and then cuts to them walking in to see Dr. Pimple Popper. She perkily walks into the exam room and asks, “So what brings you in today?” I’m not sure how it’s possible that she can miss the basketball-sized growth on their forearm and even has to ask why they are there, but she always does. She examines them while they nervously bounce their feet and then the nurses come in with the big gun extracting blades. It is often gross and there is something wrong that this is even entertainment and that I get stopped in my tracks to take a look see. After watching several shows I can tell the difference between a lipoma and a sebaceous cyst, that scar tissue from piercings can do some crazy shit, that some things can be reduced but not eliminated, that crying at the end of the show is a given as these people are so happy once their disfiguring growths are gone.

Botched is a show about plastic surgery gone wrong . That one doesn’t make me cry due to the overwhelming vanity and stupidity of most of the patients. Brazilian butt lifts and Dominican Republic breast implants are an all-around bad idea, inflated lips the size of swollen inner tubes are still a thing, too much surgery on your nose will make your nostrils collapse, there really are women who have dozens of surgeries so they can resemble a Barbie doll. I’ve stumbled on My 600# Life which is incredibly sad to me, especially since the doctor treating these patients is an overweight, cranky loon with a bad toupe. Smothered is about mothers and daughters who are so unhealthily attached to each other that they dress alike and the husband/father is nothing more than a bystander to the bizarre.

By far the most fascinating bad TV hole for me to fall into is Hoarding: Buried Alive. This has been on for years and MADE MARK CRAZY. If he walked in the bedroom when it was on he’d shake his head in disgust and I was never sure if it was directed at me or the hoarders. The kids felt the same way and if I wanted to talk about an episode they’d go running from the room. Almost all of these hoarders have had some kind of trauma that makes them buy and save everything until they are climbing mountains of stuff to get to the fridge which has moldy and rancid food. They have very strained relationships with family members and are in danger of having their homes condemned by the city if they don’t clean things up. A psychologist and professional organizer are brought in to help them first uncover why they can’t get rid of anything and then to help them sort through their stuff to decide what stays and what goes. The psychology part is really interesting to me, the organizing part is a shit show. Once the hoarder agrees to help, a team of people come in and things move really fast, the point being to not have the hoarder agonize over every single thing. It goes well at first and then the hoarder gets overwhelmed and starts screaming, “MY STUFFED BEARS!! YOU CAN’T THROW AWAY ALL THE STUFFED BEARS!!” The psychologist and organizer have to do an intervention and the relatives shake their heads and say, “I told you she was going to be like that.” Then the hoarder screams a bunch of ef bombs at everyone and storms off to chain smoke. In the end, though, things usually get cleaned up, the kids come back to visit, and the hoarder vows to not bring any more crap home.

If you ever talk about a Hoarders show with people, they fall into two camps. The ones who can recite whole episodes, “Did you see the one where they found the dead dog behind the t.v. and they had to stop filming because the woman was so distraught? She totally thought Rusty had run away and turns out he was deader than a doorknob.” Or there are the Marks of the world who recoil in horror when you start talking about a show where people save garbage and look at you and say, “How can you watch something like that?” And I have no idea but he could watch the History Channel for hours until I’d whisper in his ear, “We defeated the Nazis. I thought you knew.”

I was recently talking to someone in the latter camp whose face gave away her thoughts on being buried alive by plastic bags of VHS tapes, but then she told me a story that catapulted Hoarders to a whole new level. She is a nurse that treats patients for wound care which is a special level of grossness. She and her coworker were called into a patient’s room who had irritation and itching under her breasts that would not go away. It also smelled bad so clearly something was getting infected that needed treatment. The patient was overweight and trying to get her to a position to where they could get her comfortable to even look at the problem took an enormous effort on both their part. When they finally did and one of them was holding her breasts up, the other said she thought she saw fur. “What??!!!,” I shrieked. “Wait,” Wound Care Nurse said, “I haven’t gotten to the best part.” So she looked at her teammate and was motioning ixnay on the furay in front of the patient and they kept working in tandem until finally they could get a good enough look to see what was causing this irritation.

A dead cat. There was a dead cat under this women’s ta-tas.

I had so many questions. How did she not know there was a dead cat under her breasts? How did the cat…….? Where did the cat….? How in the world? She had no answers as their job was to find and treat the infection, a social worker would deal with the obvious problem that animals dying under a laden bosom needed to be addressed.

Once I heard that story, ranked in the top five of best stories, I felt that if there is ever an end to this pandemic and we can start eating out with friends again, that we should raise a glass of whiskey and tell our outrageous tales from 2020. Any other year nobody would ever believe them, but in the Year of the Covid it all seems plausible. In the meantime, barely-coping-pandemic people, watch your shitty shows, eat badly, order useless crap from the internet, apologize to no one for your awful choices, and by all means check under your breasts. There might be story gold under them there hills.

I grew up in a suburb of Chicago, twenty miles south of the Windy City. The town was settled in the 1800s by Dutch immigrants and at the time of my youth was still referred to as “The Onion Capital of the World.” I’m not sure if that little town qualified for the title but I do know that every summer the smell of green onions permeated the air.

Back in those days the town was still predominately Dutch and they owned the furniture store, the bakery, the grocery store, and nearly all the banks. Every few miles was a Dutch church where attendance was required twice on Sundays which seemed excessive to me and my siblings who couldn’t hold our attention for an hour at the Catholic church. My mom mostly didn’t care for the Dutch. She said they were cheap and could clutch a dollar bill tighter than anyone. On Sundays when we would swim at the neighbor’s pool, my mom would sip an afternoon beer looking two doors down at the bored Dutch family drinking lemonade and say, “You kids should be grateful you’re not Dutch. Those poor kids can’t even bounce a ball on Sundays.”

In those days everyone knew the nationality of everybody else and sweeping generalizations were made in regards to that. It was also everyone’s business to know what church you went to and where your kids went to school. The Catholic kids were raised to believe that the kids who went to public school were pagans and would probably burn in hell at death. The public school kids thought the Catholic kids were part of a cult who dressed the same way for eight years in order to identify each other. In the neighborhood we would play together but it didn’t go smoothly, what with them being pagan devil spawns and all.

Years into living in our neighborhood, a new family moved in down the street. They were not Dutch but Polish and Catholic so that was good. I didn’t know much about the Polish but Mom said they were good housekeepers as evidenced by the Gra***inskis who washed their windows inside and out every few months. Shirley Gra***inski was a large women who wasn’t afraid to stand her ground against anyone and had a voice that could be heard for miles when she called her kids home for dinner. You really didn’t want to mess with Shirley and she seemed to live in a near constant state of friction. If her husband had an opinion on Shirley’s state of mind he didn’t say much. Even he seemed afraid of her.

Shirley didn’t like her next door neighbors who happened to be Dutch and one day there was a confrontation that sent her over the edge. She paid my mom a visit to tell her that she was so mad at them that she filled a paper sack full of dog shit, lit it on fire, and left it on their front porch. Mom told us the story at dinner and Dad was appalled. Mom, on the other hand, was a little harder to read. I think deep down she admired this solution because she thought the Dutch had it coming for all sorts of reasons.

That incident was the first of many dog shit fires in the neighborhood. Mom would roll her eyes and say, “Everybody knows it was Shirley. That’s her calling card.” When I reached adulthood and had neighbors of my own I often thought about these conflicts. Did Shirley get mad and say, “Kids, here’s a brown sack. I need you to find me some fresh dog turds and don’t come home until you do.” Did they come home with less than fresh ones where she would open the bag, examine them and say, “These won’t work. Try down the street where the bulldogs live.” Did she ever sit with her anger and think maybe this whole fire thing is over the top? Did she ever approach the neighbor to try to work it out? Was she in the throws of a raging menopause?

I think my mom thought Shirley went too far when one day she left a flaming sack of shit on Ed’s porch because he called her a fat, dumb Polack. I don’t know why he called her that especially since his own wife was Polish, but back in those days name calling was as normal as the smell of onions all summer long. “Everyone knows Ed would give you the shirt off his back,” Mom said which to her was reason enough for him not to deal with flaming dog crap.

All these years later I know now what it feels like to be Shirley. When people have looked at me and in a down low voice asked if I had reached the “anger” stage of grief, I looked at them in disbelief. Anger? Me? Why would I be angry? And I wasn’t in the first year because I was in shock, and when year #2 rolled around I still wasn’t angry. I was in a rage, a burn-it-down-to-the-ground rage. Small talk made me want to hurl dishes against a brick wall, the question of “So what are you doing this weekend” made me want to sarcastically say, “Crying then sobbing then back to crying. How about you?” I simmered at Facebook posts about my wonderful husband even though in the before I had done the same thing. Couples walking in the park made me want to chuck my shoes at them. I raged at people who had treated Mark badly, people who never apologized for the hurt they inflicted on him.

I wanted to go Shirley on the world and light it all on fire because anger feels productive. Sadness is another day sitting in the mud of grief unable to move, it is going nowhere again and again and again. Along the way I have learned that people are okay with grief making you sad so long as you stay in the right lane where the traffic moves really slow. Wanting to cross lanes where things moves faster with love, companionship, vacations, and sweet dinners on lighted patios is for couples and you’re not one of them any more.

Then the world got a crash course in grief when a pandemic hit and missing your people put everyone in a collective state of longing and sadness. No dinners with family or meeting friends for happy hour, no grandkids popping by for a visit, no hug for the friend going through heartache, no trip to assisted living to visit your elderly parent. Masks, social distancing, and connecting via Zoom became the new normal. I can’t even count the times since Mark died that I have been told that I will need to find a new normal. How do you explain that the old normal was lovely and uniquely yours? How do you set fire to a phrase you hate?

You don’t.

You mourn all the normal that got snatched from your hands and that you miss so terribly you physically ache. You set it on fire with white hot rage and the heat of it singes your eyebrows with an intensity that terrifies you. When it clears you hope it provides the light for a sign pointing somewhere. It’s not what you wanted but the charred remains around you are no place to plant anything. You take a deep breath and a step and tell yourself that you will be okay even though you don’t believe a word of it.

Or you keep setting brown paper bags of dog shit on fire and make sure everyone around you knows you’re angry. It’s either forward or madness.

For as long as my curly-headed brain can remember, I have loved to vacuum. Back in the day I remember cleaning half the bedroom I shared with my sister, moving the bed and dresser and sucking up the cobwebs and dust and feeling instant gratification. Her side was messy, mine was pristine, and while most girls that age had a crush on the Monkees, I had one with them and the vacuum cleaner.

That relationship got even more meaningful when Mark and I had kids. Smashed Cheerios and pretzels on the floor? No problem. Let me vacuum it up and calm my frazzled nerves with the sound of a motor sucking up another mess. Kids fighting every single day of summer break over who gets to sit in the front seat on the way to the pool? Let me run the vacuum and drown out their daily argument. When one of my Hoovers needed new bags I went to a locally owned small appliance store and saw a Miele – a German engineered Mercedes Benz of vacuum cleaners. I asked for the details on it and when the salesman said, “You can’t find a better vacuum cleaner on the market,” I pulled out the Visa card and bought it on the spot. That Visa card already had a rolling balance every month and there was a big difference between the cost of six bags versus a new expensive vacuum cleaner, but the minute I got it home, plugged it in, and ran it over the hardwood floors I knew I’d made the right decision. A few years ago Mark kept telling me it smelled bad and asked me if I’d vacuumed up barf with it. “Vacuum barf? Who would do something like that,” I asked him. “I think you might,” he said. I hadn’t (that I was aware of) and I think he was jealous of my Miele because I always gazed at it like a beloved old boyfriend.

My ongoing preoccupation to vacuum made Mark nuts from the beginning. On my first married birthday, Mark got me some tiny diamond earrings. A few months later he came home to find me sifting through the vacuum cleaner bag to try to find one of them that I had accidentally sucked up. I never did find it and he never let me forget that those diamond earrings were $90 which in our broke and destitute days was more like $1000. On Sunday afternoons when I wanted to “tidy up a bit” and the vacuum was on then off then on then off, he said, “I know you’re anal retentive but I just want to watch the game. That’s all. Let me watch the Bears game in peace and then you can run that thing all you want.” He had a point and so I’d vacuum on Saturdays so the house was nice and quiet on Sundays when he would scream profanities at the t.v.

Over the years I think Mark came to appreciate (or resigned himself to) walking into a house that wasn’t constantly upended by the mess of life, a place where you could breathe and dump your worries and problems and relax from the stress on the other side of the door. But even when it was back to just the two of us and the house didn’t get very dirty, I’d still regularly roll out my Miele. From the kitchen Mark would yell over the sound of the vacuum, “WHY DON’T YOU JUST GO WIPE YOUR ASS AND YOU’LL FEEL BETTER,” and I’d yell back, “MY NEXT HUSBAND IS GOING TO RESPECT ME,” and he’d say, “GOOD LUCK WITH THAT.”

Two days after Mark died the kids and I went to the Cremation Society to make arrangements. It was surreal. Somebody that sounded like me was answering questions and keeping remarkably calm but I don’t know who she was. I never met her before. We were ushered into an office where the business part of Mark’s body had to be discussed and then we were invited to look at urns. Like a herd of deer in headlights, the kids and I walked around trying to find one that would be Mark’s final resting place.

I hated them all. I thought they were ugly, I thought they were expensive, and I mostly thought what are we even doing in this place. Finally I said to the kids, “I’m not being cheap. I’m really not but I cannot spend money on something I hate and that Dad would hate even more. I can’t put him in one of these.” I think there was a collective sigh of relief between us all. Mark wasn’t an urn kind of guy and I wasn’t about to make him one at death.

When the cremation guy came out to find out what we chose, I said we’d stick to the plain box and figure out something else. He wondered if maybe we’d like small individual urns and I thought that would be a good idea so we all grudgingly picked out a small urn. Then he asked me if I wanted them sealed. I said no because how was Mark supposed to come back to us if his ashes were sealed in an urn?

“Hmmm,” he said. “That might be a bit of a problem then.” He grabbed the urn and showed us how the top easily came off. Off then on he lifted the top and I was so confused about what the problem was. “As you can see,” he said, “the top of the urn doesn’t seal so what could happen is that if it were to get knocked over the ashes might spill onto the floor and there have been occasions where people have vacuumed up their beloved’s ashes.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or be horrified. I did know that me and my Miele could totally do something like that and then I’d have to put the vacuum cleaner bag under plexiglass with a sign that says Here Lies Mark Fisher. May He Rest In Peace With The Dead Spiders And Cat Hair And May Perpetual Light Shine Upon All Of Them. I ordered the urns and had them sealed, and on the way out the door the cremation guy tried to upsell us some necklaces with Mark’s ashes so we could wear him around our neck. I declined and when we collapsed into the car to drive home Will said, “Well, that was fucked up,” which was the most apt description of everything.

Later on I got each of our small urns and tenderly handed the kids their individual container of heartache. I kept mine on the nightstand until a few months ago when I decided that it didn’t represent Mark’s life at all and I didn’t want to look at it every night. Maggie broached the subject one day with me and said, “I think I’m not going to keep my urn. I think I’d like to open it and spread the ashes around the oak tree Dad and I grew from an acorn.” I said that was fine with me and she didn’t need to feel guilty about it.

Last summer we spread most of Mark’s ashes in Yosemite. This summer I’m going to pry open that stupid little urn and walk the same creek Mark did two days before he died. The creek close by the house that made him smile when he came home and talked about it. That as he picked stickerballs off his pants I looked at him and thought there you are. You’re still there and I’m still here and we will be okay. You will be okay. And then he died and I wondered if that adventure was his farewell to what he loved most about being outside.

I don’t know. I just know that Mark never lived a contained life so I’m going to let those ashes join the mud and the water and the minnows and see what springs to life when set free.

Maybe it will be me.

Many years ago there was a book called The Secret. There was a lot of hype about it and whenever the author would appear on talk shows she would dance around the premise of the book and never reveal the secret. If you wanted to know the secret you had to buy the book, and if someone you knew read the book it was apparently a secret to keep it a secret. When the buzz died down and the secret wasn’t so heavily guarded, I learned that it was about the law of attraction and how you can use that to change your money, relationships, health, and happiness. That really didn’t seem like such a big secret and I felt as let down as Ralphie in A Christmas Story after decoding his Little Orphan Annie ring.

Death has a magical tendency to immediately elevate someone to sainthood and that has certainly been the case with Mark. He was far from it and he’d be the first one to admit it. His suicide and what led up to it is so layered and complicated that I could spend the rest of my life trying to figure out that fateful choice and still not completely understand what was going through his mind at that point. While I know he thought he was doing me and the kids a favor by removing himself from our lives, it was anything but and the circumstances of his death will reverberate with each of us forever. On the many nights I don’t sleep, I often imagine him walking in the door where I would either fall to my knees in gratitude or scream at him that after forty years he owed me a goodbye. I have read enough about the mindset of someone wanting to end their life to know that in order for them to go through with it there is an emotional detachment that occurs. Because Mark was such a passionate person whose love I never doubted, it is beyond my ability to understand how that happened.

Likewise, our marriage was most assuredly not a union of saints. We argued often about big things and dumb things. One time we argued all the way home from a party, and a few blocks from our house I got so pissed at Mark that at a red light I opened the door and told him I would walk the rest of the way home. He said that was fine by him and when he didn’t come back for me I was even more pissed. The next morning neither one of us could figure out what that epic fight was even about. When we were visiting New York and had walked miles and miles, I told Mark I needed to stop someplace and eat. He said I couldn’t be hungry because we’d just eaten three hours ago. I sarcastically asked him how he could possibly know how hungry I was. We went back and forth on the sidewalk, and if it were anywhere but New York, people might have been curious to know why this couple was airing their dirty laundry out in public. I walked across the street and found a place to eat and ordered lunch. Mark came in a few minutes later and asked if I was okay. I said I wasn’t and all that walking was making my foot throb from a broken bone I had a few months earlier. He said I should have said something, I said he should have known, he sarcastically asked me how he was supposed to know my foot hurt. You could say we frequently had a failure to communicate.

There were bigger cracks between us, too, things that I sometimes thought couldn’t be repaired. Times when both of us wanted to throw up our hands and say, “This isn’t what I signed up for.” A friend said she admired that we could have such intense disagreements and somehow always be able to figure it out. I was surprised by that statement and she said, “You do know that some couples never argue, right? They simmer and resent and swallow all the hurt down until they retreat into apathy or explode in divorce,” and that seemed far unhealthier to me than arguing. Even in the midst of our most trying times, even when he made me crazy, Mark Fisher was my favorite person on earth. He was the first person I wanted to tell the good news and the bad news to, the one who shared my outlook, empathy, and humor on life, the one who challenged my thinking and pushed the limits of my experiences, the one who always believed me to be a writer first and everything else second. The repeated difficulty of his death is trying to make sense of being abandoned by the person I least thought would leave me. In the firestorm of those complex feelings, why does it seem as though death suddenly anointed Mark to the status of being a saint?

It didn’t.

I never bought into The Secret because it seemed too self-serving, but there are some things that are only revealed when events out of your control take a machete to what you hold dear. Since Mark died there isn’t a day that passes that I don’t know how achingly fragile we all are. In the blink of an eye I had to learn how to dance with life and loss, and in trying to learn those complicated steps I remind myself to tend to the love lest my garden flowers in bitterness.

• 

In the history of the Fisher family, I tended to make self-improvement proclamations for the betterment of all like I was The King of the Forest. Because Mark was busy with his career and had bigger fish to fry, he gave me enough chain to cause me to believe I was being taken seriously but not enough to think I had any control over the ragamuffins under this roof.

I’d throw down gauntlets like:

• There will be a mandatory meeting at 6:00 p.m. to discuss the division of labor in this household.
• I will no longer be doing laundry for this family and by this family I mean you people.
• Remember when we got the dog and everybody said they’d take turns walking him? You have now forced me to schedule you for a shift.
• Our vacation is in danger of being cancelled for insubordination.
• If you keep leaving dirty dishes in your bedroom we will have a roach infestation and the county health department will shut this house down and we will have to live in the car.

Behind the scenes I think Mark gathered his frightened little fishes around and said, “If this is anything like your Mom’s affirmations to eat better and exercise more it should last three days tops and then we’re back to being as good as gold. Just toe the line for a few days and don’t worry about going on vacation. It may be without Mom but we’re going.”

I’d issue decrees in our marriage too. Helpful tips for Mark to be a better husband in which he’d nod and say, “Good idea,” and shove a spoonful of Wheaties in his mouth while working on his computer. I’d say, “You’re not even listening to me,” and then he’d repeat verbatim what I said so that always backfired. If Oprah had a particularly interesting show I’d wait until we were in bed and say, “So I was watching Oprah today and there was a marriage expert on and he said……..” After a few years of that Mark rolled over one night and said, “I can’t with the Oprah stuff. I just can’t any more.”

Many years ago one of his colleagues was separated and going through a painful divorce and we invited him for Thanksgiving. I was disappointed that we couldn’t spend the holiday with family, and, Mark, who decided he would be in charge of the turkey was doing it all wrong in my opinion. I was so mad at him that I left with the dog and walked for an hour but as soon as I got home we started arguing again. Finally he said, “What is wrong with you? Why are you being such a bitch?” I screamed, “I’M PREGNANT and everything makes me want to puke especially the smell of this turkey.” Admittedly, the delivery of my breaking news flash was not the best (or even close) and he stared at me and said, “You’re pregnant?? What? Really? You’re really pregnant? That’s crazy and good, really good,” and it was because it always took us a long time to get pregnant and this was a wonderful surprise. We hugged and cried it out, I asked him to quit opening the oven door so much because the smell was making me gag, he said he’d try but that he happened to be a masterbaster and who wants a dry turkey, and the dinner went off without a hitch except for Mark who would smile and lean over to me every few minutes and say, “You’re really pregnant?”

A year later when this colleague’s life had settled down he wanted to have a party to thank everyone who helped him out during his rough patch and Mark and I were invited. He had gotten a hot tub which were very new at the time, and the invite was explicit in including that we should come with towels. When Mark told me I said, “Oh we can’t do the hot tub. We’ll have to leave before that happens.” Mark wanted to know why and I said, “Because, Mark, people go in hot tubs naked and I am not going to do that in front of your work friends. I just had my third baby and besides that it’s just wrong to not be wearing clothes at a party.” We went to the party and before long the hot tub talk started which was my clue to get Mark to leave. He was disappointed as he wanted to experience this new trend while I thought I was doing him and his chances at tenure a massive favor.

On Monday, Mark came home from work and said, “I have to tell you about the rest of the party and who turned out to be the biggest idiot.” Oh this is going to be good, I thought, and said, “Wait while I pour myself a glass of wine,” because I needed to savor this naked gossip and get comfy while hearing the deets. “So,” Mark said, “I go into work and everyone who went to the party wants to know why we left early because it was so much fun and I tell them that you were uncomfortable about the hot tub. They said it was great because the water was hot and it was really cold outside and it was the perfect night for it. I tell them that you didn’t want to be naked with everyone and they say NAKED?? We weren’t naked. We were wearing bathing suits so I say BATHING SUITS??? Kath told me you do hot tubs in the buff and they said well you can but you wouldn’t do that in front of a bunch of people. You’d wear a bathing suit. So you want to know who was the biggest idiot that night? You. It was you.”

I looked at him in disbelief. “You wear a bathing suit? I never heard of that. I read a People magazine article about Hugh Hefner and it sure looked like there was nakedness in that hot tub.” “HUGH HEFNER???!!!” Mark yelled. “Hugh Hefner from Playboy? We live in fucking Kansas. Didn’t you think it might be a bit different here from the Playboy mansion?” I obviously did not and then started laughing hysterically and said, “Oh my god, Mark, we should have stayed and when everyone was in the hot tub with their bathing suits on we could have paraded out naked and acted like it was all cool. Wouldn’t that have been so funny? Like we didn’t get the memo?” Mark looked at me and said, “Sure, Kath, real funny, funny like a clown.”

A few days before Mark died we were sitting at the dining room table eating dinner. The back of our house faces our neighbor’s screened in porch and I noticed them sitting out there. These neighbors are gay and have since moved, and we were crazy about them. They talked to Mark over the fence all the time, and when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of legalizing gay marriage we were so happy for them we left a bottle of wine and a note for them on their porch. As we were eating dinner I said to Mark, “They always look like they’re having a serious conversation, don’t they? Sometimes I wonder if they might be breaking up.” “I don’t think so,” Mark said, “I think they’re just talking.” He kept eating and I said, “We should have more serious conversations and talk about our feelings.” Mark shoved a forkful of salad in his mouth and asked, “Haven’t we been doing that all weekend?” “Well, yeah,” I said, “but really serious and digging deep. You know, like lesbians do.” He looked at me and said, “If we’re not lesbians how are we supposed to communicate like them?” I let out a sigh and said, “We could try,” and by we I meant him.

A few days later the unimaginable happened and these dear friends came to the house, distraught like everyone else. The kids were here and we all cried when they walked in the door because they have always felt like family when our own family has always been so far away and were scrambling to get to us. They wanted to know what happened, they told me Mark seemed very off on that Sunday when they’d seen him outside, they were so very sorry for me and the kids. In the course of talking about that weekend I told them about the conversation between me and Mark and how I thought they always seemed to have such deep and meaningful conversations that we should emulate as a couple. They looked so puzzled when I said that and finally K. asked, “Am I bent forward with my head down?” “Yes,” I said, “exactly like that, like you’re intently listening.” She laughed and said, “Whenever we sit out on the back porch we play cards.”

A few months before Mark died, I got a bone density test. I’d had one before and the results weren’t stellar since thin, crumbling bones is the card that was dealt to the women in my family. I had been avoiding another scan for too long until my doctor insisted on it and the results were borderline osteoporosis. This raised all the flags and I was written a prescription for a bone building med. Because I dabble in drama, I immediately spiraled into despair as I pictured myself as the female version of Quasimodo who was going to spend her golden years looking at filthy floors because she was unable to lift her head.

Mark did more than dabble in facts and immediately got on the case. Part of his job was to facilitate med student discussion groups where a topic was assigned and the students were supposed to find research on it and advise a protocol. He assigned his group osteoporosis and told them his wife was pretty close to having it so he needed some good published papers to reference. After that he came home and told me that based on the research of the med students and a discussion with his friend, Joe, I should take the prescription. I presented my own research that showed that the drugs could cause necrosis of the jaw and how did he think I’d look without a jaw. Mark asked, “How long did it take you to find the one case where someone’s jaw died,” and with the confidence of an acclaimed Google Researcher I said, “Long enough to make me not want to roll that dice.”

I kept on doing my own fact finding and all of it said that exercise and supplements was the best way to build bone. On my breaks at work I’d do a couple of loops around the campus, I only took the stairs in my building, up and down three flights several times a day, and then I’d walk after dinner every night to get my 10,000 steps. Though he never said it, I think Mark looked at walking as being kind of lame for a manly man like him who started and ended every day in a spandex outfit, and so he’d say, “Have a good walk,” and keep watching cable news and screaming at the t.v about Trump. But one day he came home and told me about some research he’d read that showed walking to be great exercise for cognitive health and he started joining me after dinner. I loved those walks as we talked about everything under the sun for a quick 30-40 minutes around the park and through the neighborhood. It made it go by so fast and it didn’t seem like exercise but our own little staff meeting every night.

On the weekend before Mark died the one thing we kept doing throughout was walking. Our walks were longer and a bit slower than usual, there were some heartbreaking revelations that made us both stop and look at each other, there was understanding mixed with utter confusion about things I did not know, there was quiet and unspoken love. One night I checked my Fitbit to see how close I was and if we needed to walk further or head for home and Mark said to me, “Don’t you love it when you hit it and the fireworks go off?” Mark never lost his boyish wonder at those kinds of simple things and I miss that so much.

After Mark died, I took my Fitbit off and put it in a drawer. I’d walk to clear my head and look for my husband who must have lost his way on his bike and needed to find me so I could show him the way back home. Achieving 10,000 steps in a day and the density of my shitty bones were the least of my problems.

A few weeks ago I opened the drawer, took my Fitbit out and charged it. I strapped it on my wrist, put my gym shoes on, and headed out the door. Since then I’ve worn it daily and have only reached my goal once which isn’t so important to me at least for now. I look back at Mark’s last summer here and and wonder if meeting my goal every day was something I was doing for myself or to give Mark a reason to be proud of me. It’s one of those dumb insecurities I have now that circle round and round when I know we were always proud of each other and said so often.

I walk now in search of a new life I never wanted and try to find some pride in the way I am doing it. Some days I can see it and some days not, but in every single one of those steps is the prayer that I will have fireworks again in my life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank God above that I have the most outrageous friends.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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