A Speckled Trout

Throughout our marriage, there was nothing more painful for Mark and I to do than to buy a car. We’d shell out thousands of dollars year after year for repairs on cars that needed to be replaced because the alternative was TOO MUCH. We’d think about it, talk about it, complain, ignore, and when the time came would breathe slowly into brown paper sacks and finally take the leap. Most of our cars were Fords as Mark’s dad worked for them for decades which allowed us a Friends & Family discount. You would think that would have made the whole process easier but for us it never really did.

When the kids were younger we had a mini van that started racking up the miles and would cost $800 in repairs every time we took it in. Finally, the doomsday clock on this junker rang too loudly for us to avoid and we knew we had to replace it. At the time hybrids were rather new, and after doing some research we knew we wanted a Ford Escape. Even that took months to decide, but when the van started making another weird noise we resentfully took the day off work and went car shopping. That day happened to be Election Day in 2006, a day full of hope and change as we cast our vote and then drove to the dreaded dealership to sell our bleeding liberal hearts in exchange for a new car.

There weren’t many hybrids available yet but the first place we went to had a silver one that we drove around town while the salesman pointed out the features. Mark loved being able to watch the screen to see when it was using the battery versus the engine – a techy option that he was enamored with while I fell hard for those heated leather seats. When we got back to the dealership, Mark, who believed all shopping was a reconn mission where you get in and out quickly before the enemy even knows you’re there, was ready to close the deal. All of it was happening too fast for me. Were we really going to pay $30K for a car? I pulled Mark aside and said I was teetering on a ledge of panic and we needed to go to lunch and talk this over. That sort of thing with me always drove Mark nuts. If we both agreed that we needed to buy a car, we agreed to a date to buy a car, and they had the car we wanted, what was the hold up? The hold up was always my head that thought the emergency brake was to be used for e.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.n.g.

Over lunch Mark calmed me down, told me we couldn’t keep sinking money into the van, that this car would save us on gas, and that it was past time to get something more reliable. I knew he was right and we went back to the dealer where they encouraged us to take it home for a few hours. We picked up the kids from school, took it on the highway, thought it over some more, and then took it back to the dealership where our salesman said, “I can already tell you’re in love, aren’t you,” which was some kind of over reach because we weren’t exactly car loving people. We all sat down at a table in the showroom where the negotiations started. The first great deal they thought we’d love had a payment that was more than our monthly mortgage and I laughed. The salesman said, “Oh, I thought you wanted a two year loan. You need longer? No problem. Let me run this by my manager,” and off he went. I said to Mark, “You know that’s how they hook you, right? They come out with a ridiculous payment so they keep extending the months until they’ve beaten you down and you agree.” Mark leaned over and whispered, “I think this is the part where we’ve become unwitting participants in a hostage situation,” and I nodded and kept my eye on the exit signs.

Junior Salesman bounced out of the manager’s office again with another deal and I shook my head. “No?” he asked incredulously, “you need something a little less?” Fun Fact: We’re at a Ford dealership trading in a twelve year old mini van that barely got us here. In case it wasn’t obvious we are the Leadership Team of The Less People. He went back again to talk to his manager to get us an even better deal. I looked at Mark and said,”What do you suppose they’re really talking about every time he goes into the manager’s office?” “I’m going to go out on a limb here,” he said, “and say they’re talking about hosing us.”

After a lot of back and forth and an in-person meeting with the concerned manager because we really want to put you in this car we came up with a deal. “Well congratulations, you guys!! This is great and you know what that means,” the salesman said excitedly. We thought it meant that you get the kind of debt that makes you want to puke but he said, “Every time somebody buys a car here they get to ring the Showroom Gong.” The Showroom Gong? Mark leaned over to me and said, “I hate these people and I am not getting up and ringing some fucking gong,” so I got up and rang the gong like a big dork. The salesman said, “Oh you can ring it harder than that,” and I smiled and declined because it turned out that I’d reached my limit with all of these people.

Hours after this marathon started we finally had a car but were we really done? No we weren’t. We needed to talk to someone about undercoating and so a very attractive, British woman had us come into her office. She explained how undercoating works, the benefits of this option, and the price. We were wary and so she said it looked like we were the kind of people who needed a demonstration. She reached into her desk drawer and brought out two rusty, metal pie tins, one with undercoating and one without and was sure we’d be able to tell the difference right away. She knocked on the bottom of one tin and then the other. “Undercoating, no undercoating.” Knock knock knock. “Can you hear the difference?” By then we were like two high-schoolers in the last hour of all-day detention and about to slide out of the chairs and onto the floor. “Actually, I can’t,” I said, “can you do it again?” So she knocked knocked knocked on one pie tin and knocked knocked knocked on the other. “Undercoating, no undercoating.” I listened harder this time and looked at Mark for input but he was lifeless from boredom. “Can you do it one more time?” So she knocked knocked knocked on one pie tin and then knocked knocked knocked on the other and I said, “I’m not hearing it,” and leaned in across her desk. With another knock knock knock on the pie tins, Mark threw his hands in the air and said, “Just give us the undercoating so we can go home.” She smiled and said, “Folks, you won’t regret this decision,” and I thought we probably would but we signed the papers anyways and waited in the showroom to talk to somebody else.

As we were sitting there, Mark looked around and said, “How much do you think this place is worth?” Before I could answer he said, “Millions and millions and millions of dollars. There’s the building and the new cars in the showroom, a lot full of new cars, a lot full of used cars, equipment and tools in the service and body shop. This place is worth millions of dollars, so why do you think they’d spend all this money on this place and then pull out those ratty-ass, rusty pie plates and knock on them? Those things are what you throw away after your grandma dies and you’re cleaning out her house. Wouldn’t you think they could have used something better?” Then he started imitating the women knock knock knocking on one pie tin and knock knock knocking on the other and I started laughing and he started laughing and we could not stop. Our salesman came by to check on us and said, “I wish all of my customers were this happy buying a new car,” which made us laugh even harder. “Oh my god, Mark, we totally fell for the pie tin trick,” I said, “and as if that wasn’t bad enough we just financed it for five years so it probably will end up costing us ten grand,” which was so hilarious to us at that point that we were crying. In the midst of our party of two, we got summoned to the Finance & Insurance Manager’s office. I told Mark I had this one.

When Mark was in graduate school I worked at a bank. My first job there was to take finance deals over the phone from area dealerships. I knew that when a customer financed life insurance through the dealership it was almost always pure profit. It was also an easy sell, unnecessary for most people, and very lucrative for the finance manager so this F & I guy had met his match. He explained the financing details through Ford with a whopping $1000 rebate and then went on to the life insurance. “This is when it gets hard, folks,” he said, “because now we have to talk about if one of you dies and you still have a balance on your loan. What would you do? How would you be able to pay this off with only having one income.” “Oh, it’s not so hard for us,” I said. “We don’t want it.” He looked concerned and said, “Nobody thinks they want it and then the unexpected happens.” Mark shot me a glance. I shot one back saying I got this dude. “Here’s the thing,” I said, “we’ve got life insurance, we have savings, we have investments. We could pay this car off if we had to, and I bet your next trick is to tell us that this is only $1.99 a day and how could we not protect ourselves for the cost of a hot dog at QuikTrip. Am I right?” The F & I guy suddenly didn’t like me and looked to Mark for some mano-to-mano back up. Mark looked at him, shrugged his shoulders and said to me, “Atta girl, let’s get out of this place.”

We took many trips in that Escape and had thousands of conversations, deep ones about life and love and death, and mundane ones about when to stop for gas and where to eat. We saw cows and eagles, hawks, deer, and even a bear cub running in front of us when we were driving out of Glacier. We had a whole life in that car. After Mark died and I became the sole driver, the car took on so much more meaning to me. I could transport myself back to all those road trips and conversations, and many times I thought that at the very least I still had that car where we spent so many hours together.

Last month I took the car in for some routine stuff and was told that the underneath of it (the undercoated underneath) near the rear axles is rusting and to fix it would cost more than the car is worth. I wasn’t expecting that news and it flattened me for many days. Not the car, I thought, not that too.

Yes that, too, and life has knocked on my door to claim something else. If Mark were here he’d say, “It’s just a car, Kath, let it go,” but I’ve had to let a lot go and this one has tipped the Unfairness Scale. Since I got the news about the Escape I’ve looked at a few cars and am test driving one this week. Like every time before, I’d rather be spending my money on something else with someone else, namely a road trip with my husband. But he’s gone and won’t be in the showroom with me to make fun of some lady knock knock knocking on rusty pie tins or cheering me on when I shut down the finance manager.

I’ll find something that will work and for months it will have that new car smell, but it could never compare to the smell of Mark Fisher’s neck, where I loved to bury my face, take a deep breath, and pretend that all of him would last forever.

I got interested in gardening when a friend, who had for years been trying to talk me into it, finally said, “Just try it. You’ll love it, it’s very creative.” I guess those were the magic words because that’s when I fell hard and fast. Since that first tiny garden that Mark dug for me for Mother’s Day years ago, I have made many mistakes and still do. I fall in love with things that won’t work in our zone, that need too much attention, that are planted in the wrong spot, that wither and die in the summer heat. Every year is a new experiment.

This same friend took me out to a place in the boonies called The Flower Farm. It was a real working farm and the husband and wife who owned it knew everything. The husband was always working on the flowers and the wife worked with the customers. You could pick her brain about something and she’d have dozens of ideas to consider. The creative energy of the two of them was inspiring, and every time I came home from there I wanted to be a flower farmer in the worst way.

One time I bought a plant from them called Kiss Me Over The Garden Gate. It is one of those old-fashioned flowers that reseeded everywhere – eventually from the front yard to the back and Mark never cared that it ended up among his tomatoes and peppers. He loved the tall, wispy pink flowers that would bloom at the top. Every year he’d forget what they were called and when I’d tell him he’d say, “Oh yeah, what a great name for a plant.” I also bought an oregano plant from her that was invasive so I pulled it out, but to this day (twenty years later) it keeps coming back and coming back.

After a few years of going to the Flower Farm every spring, they abruptly closed when the husband ended his life. It was a shock to everyone who went there, and his wife could not manage those acres of flowers and herbs on her own so the business was shut down. Or maybe she just didn’t want to do it without him. It felt like undone sympathy to me. I wanted to say goodbye and to thank her for introducing me to so many flowers from a different time, to say I was so sorry about her husband. Her husband’s suicide was only the second time in my life that I knew of that kind of death. The first was the father of one of my classmates in grade school. He owned a pizza place, and because they were Catholic it was the only place my parents ever ordered from on the rare occasions when my mom didn’t cook. After it happened, I overheard my mom say to my dad, “That selfish man,” and that was not what I expected to hear about someone my parents knew well. At twelve years old it was so sad to me that John’s dad was dead, but it was eclipsed by the nature of his death which seemed to me to make everyone mad.

From a distance that kind of death is awful and always should be. From up close it is horrific and I am stunned multiple times a day that Mark died the way he did. I have never been more confused about anything in my life. Some things I have figured out, some I never will. Grief, uncertainty, and regret have become demanding bedfellows. I want to kick them out every night, and sometimes I am successful, but they come back for another round the next night and the next.

I don’t know how the guy who owned the flower farm died. It doesn’t matter. He and his wife created something beautiful and shared it with everyone. All these years later I can close my eyes and see that place, and it makes me long for the time in my life when the sadness will be overshadowed by all that was before the end.

Mark was a summer kind of guy and in my second year without him I endure these long, lonely days by going outside to dig, split, plant, weed, and water. And every day I look for what’s invasive so it doesn’t take over what is trying to grow and haunt my nights.

One of the funnest days I ever had with Mark was when I strong-armed him into going on a garden tour with me. It wasn’t his jam but we had free tickets and it seemed like a great way to spend a few hours on a beautiful Saturday afternoon even if he didn’t think so. House #1 with a huge vegetable garden and wandering chickens reeled Mark in, and I threw up my hands and said, “Do I have the best ideas or what?” We drove all over Kansas City to see the houses, talked to the owners, wandered the property, took a million photos, tried to figure out how we could make some of those ideas work in our yard (and how to win the lottery to pay for it), and filled our creative tanks to full.

We would go on the same garden tour again two years later. It was lovely and fun to look at so many great gardens but it did not compare to the magic of that first year. Maybe it was because our interests were so varied and did not often intersect, but on that day our gardening stars aligned, we were on the same page, and that kind of thing can’t be replicated.

This yard of ours is big and has been hard for me to manage on my own since Mark died. The spring days are labor intensive when everything is choked with weeds and leaves. Last week I spent hours cleaning out a bed in the backyard, then it rained and two days later it looked like I hadn’t done a thing. I think about hiring somebody to do some of this stuff but then change my mind. Isn’t this how you stay healthy? Isn’t this good for your physical and emotional well-being to be outside and moving? I get frustrated and think about dousing the weeds with chemicals because that would be so much easier but Mark was adamantly opposed to that because of runoff. Instead he would spend hours digging up weeds by hand. I don’t know how he did that year after year but I do know that I care about not poisoning what’s beneath my feet.

Last month I had the porch rescreened. The job cost double what I thought and took twice as long because so much rotting wood had to be replaced, but it was Mark’s favorite place to be on a Saturday afternoon so I took a deep breath and wrote the check. He would go out there and bring a paper that needed to be reviewed or tests to grade, and the combination of hot summer air and exhaustion from early morning biking and mowing the lawn would usually result in him falling asleep. I’d look at him and think, “Why do you work so hard all the time? Why do you only stop when you are so exhausted you cannot move another step?” Then he died and I found out you can’t outrun demons if you dare to slow down.

When the porch was getting a rehab and I would stand outside talking to the repair guy about another problem he found, we were always stepping around the mud that was behind the porch. Two downspouts dumped into that area, the sod that was laid wouldn’t grow and reseeding it a year later didn’t help either. Every night I’d go look at it and then walk around the yard to see what I could move or split to fill it in. Finally, I grabbed a shovel and edged out a bed. It was so easy it fooled me into thinking the rest would be a piece of cake. It wasn’t. Every time I dug I’d hit rock and then have to stop and try to pry it out of the mud. It was hard, it pissed me off, it made me want to cry, it made me want to give up. Some days I’d be out there for fifteen minutes and other days for hours. It was an ugly, futile mess that no longer became a bed but an example of my life which made me even more determined to turn it into something better.

After a lot of work I did end up doing that and since it’s been done I like to go out there and admire my work. Is this my rebirth, I wonder. Healing from Mark’s death has required digging so deep I think it will break me at best or kill me at worst, so that seems like a stretch for a small garden bed. Instead I say to myself, “You know what you are, Kathy Fisher? You are a badass,” and some days that seems like the best plan for moving forward.

When Mark was alive we had a pretty active social life. We both had our own jobs and relationships there, we had combined friends as a couple, and individual friends through our own interests. We also liked to go out often, just the two of us, for dinner or a movie. Many of those friends have stayed around since Mark’s death and included me in their gatherings. In the beginning, it felt like people needed to see me, to see that I was okay. I was so numb at the time that going to those events was easier than the ones that came later when the shock had worn off. For those I would make an appearance but before long could feel the wheels coming off, and so I’d say quick goodbyes and then sprint to the car afterwards where I could sob without dozens of pitying eyes looking at me.

How different from our before life when we would walk into a party and be greeted with, “The Fishers are here!!” Mark was far more comfortable in those social situations than I ever was. I’d always want him to walk in first and he’d say something funny and everyone would laugh and I preferred at parties to stick pretty close to him. Sometimes I’d even say on the way there, “Please don’t abandon me,” which now sounds like foreshadowing.

The best part of any party, wedding, work event…. we went to was the ride home where we would gossip about everything. The food, the couples, who showed up, the ones who didn’t, who clearly looked like they’d rather be anywhere else. Nothing and nobody was off limits as we dragged on it all. One time we went to the summer party of a guy Mark knew via his career and couldn’t stand. I asked him why we were going, if it was something he felt he had to go to for appearance sake and he said, “No, he makes $300K a year and does nothing. Totally worthless, can’t believe he keeps his job. I just want to go to his house and eat as much food as possible until I leave there looking like Jabba the Hutt.” “Oh,” I said, “so we’re going as revenge guests. Got it.” It did not disappoint. The host had a high opinion of himself with a devoted herd of groupies that followed him from room to room. When we wandered into his office where he was holding a presser about the Green Bay Packers, Mark said, “I hate the Packers,” and walked out. I told Mark that was a little over the top and he said, “I said nothing untrue. I hate the Packers.” All the way home he railed about “that son of a bitch.” Not to be left out, I said, “Did you notice all those rabbits around the house? They were everywhere. Who does a whole house in rabbit?”

When the med center was rolling in money, there were parties all the time. Big, expensive parties with hundreds of people at hotels all dressed up, speeches and bands and plenty of food and drinks. There was also his annual department party that included the whole family. We never missed a single year of that party, dragging the kids to it every December where they’d be told how much they had grown and asked the same questions as the year before and the year before that. As they got older they hated it, and one by one they peeled off from their Dad’s work commitment until it was just Mark and I going by ourselves. The department provided food and drinks and then everyone signed up for an appetizer, a side dish, or dessert. The same people bitched every year about how other departments had far nicer parties than the lame Biochemistry Department did, so some of those dishes were heavily seasoned with bitter.

After an extended happy hour the jockeying for a table would begin. There was a distinct pecking order to that. Students in the back, faculty with big egos in the front, the rest of you losers fend for yourself. Mark and I always sat in the back with one of his colleagues and his wife where we could watch the show.

It was at one of those parties a few years ago that I got up to check out the dessert table. Before long one of the professors in the department stood beside me and asked me what I thought looked good. “That cake looks pretty fantastic,” I said, “but nobody has cut into it yet so maybe I’ll pass on that.” He put his hand on my lower back, bent down, and in his very heavy accent said, “Shall we deflower this cake together, Mrs. Fisher?” And I could feel my head nod up and down while my eyes screamed, “Holy shit.”

I went back to the table with a piece of the Non-Virgin Cake and told those guys what had happened. Mark and Joe were laughing so hard they were crying and decided they needed a piece of that deflowered cake too. As they walked away from the table, Joe’s wife leaned over to me and said, “I’ve heard he’s so virile you can get pregnant just standing next to him so you might want to get yourself a pregnancy test in a few weeks,” and there was never another ride home from a party that ever compared to that one.

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
-John Muir

Four years before Mark died he had stopped drinking. Over the years he had been drinking too much and it slowly started having an effect on all of us, and what an eye-opener to think you know the signs of alcohol abuse versus the reality of it in your home. Mark was never a daily drinker, he did not get drunk at parties or work events, he did not hide liquor, nor did he become abusive or a jerk when he drank too much. On the weekends, what started as relaxing with a beer became another and then another, followed by a couple of glasses of wine with dinner, and it took a long time for either of us to realize that he was a binge drinker.

Why Mark stopped drinking has always been his story to tell, but once he did everyone wanted an explanation from me. They wanted to know if he was okay, why he stopped drinking, was he an alcoholic, was he in treatment. It was such an odd thing to me that if this same guy had said he was getting up before dawn every day to go to the gym he would have been applauded, but stopping drinking in our alcohol obsessed society? People felt entitled to know about that decision. I got asked over and over and after awhile, I started saying, “He’s right there, you should probably ask him yourself,” because it felt disloyal for me to answer questions about something that was personal to him.

But it was a scary time for us. We didn’t know how any of this new lifestyle was going to go, Mark was afraid and I was afraid for him. He started seeing a counselor and went to a few AA meetings that he found terrifying and he never drank again. The most painful question to me after his death was, “So did he start drinking again? Is that why he killed himself?” He did not, and of all the things he accomplished in his life, not drinking had the most profound effect on everything. The work he had done for decades was taking off and he was in the best physical shape of his life. Once he stopped medicating himself with alcohol, the twinkle came back in his eye, and nothing he did made me prouder because I saw what hard work it is to choose not to drink.

Right after he decided to stop drinking we went to Montana for a meeting he had been scheduled to attend for an infectious disease conference. We packed the car and headed out west, full of uncertainty about the future. No glass of wine with dinner, no happy hour beer with colleagues, a remaking of habits into uncharted waters.

Many times over that trip Mark seemed fragile and I was so worried about him. He seemed jumpy, nervous, and lacking confidence which are words that I would have never used to describe him before. For three days on the road we talked about everything, and every day I told him that since we were in Montana I wanted to go to Glacier National Park. For a guy who loved nature, he wasn’t very agreeable to the idea. I think he wanted to go to this meeting, get it over with, and try to change his life within the four walls of our home. But I was in love with Montana and wanted to see more of it so I convinced him that after his conference was over that driving four hours north was a good idea.

We first drove to Missoula where we ate breakfast at a hipster restaurant based on the advice of a passerby. We wandered the town, bought some books at the local bookstore, and decided that maybe we should move to Missoula one day. From there we drove north through the Bitterroot Valley, stopped at Flatfish Lake where Mark announced that on the next trip back we’d stay there, bought ten pounds of Rainier cherries for a steal from a farmer on the side of the road, and found a very overpriced motel room for the night.

The next day we ate breakfast in Whitefish and then drove to Glacier. From the moment we entered, it was like the pressure of our current situation immediately deflated. We both were relaxed and excited and couldn’t believe our eyes. We stopped so many times to jump out of the car and wander off the road to a creek, a lake bed, a stunning view. One time we were so wowed by what was in front of us that when we were walking back to the car Mark told me to look up and behind us was even more spectacular. We compared photos on our phone and I said that when we got back home I wanted to plant ferns in my garden because the forest floor was carpeted in them. We made our way up Logan Pass to the Going To The Sun Road, which for a girl who is terrified of heights was no easy thing. There was snow on one side of the road and the daintiest flowers on the other and I couldn’t believe anything could grow that high up. We stood on the gravel alongside the road and stared for the longest time, and it was in that moment that I knew Mark was going to be okay. What had started as a tourist stop for us was, by far, the most healing thing we could have done.

We talked often about that trip, how shaky it started and how it put a bandaid on so much that was hurting in both of us, how one day we’d go back and stay for a week. Sometimes I wish that the weekend before Mark died, we would have gotten in the car and drove until we found a spot to land, a spot that would put a bigger bandaid on everything that hurt in him.

A friend asked me recently how I am faring in this quarantine life and the answer is not good. I started off with projects around the house and have accomplished many of them but am losing my mojo. I want my husband back, I want my old life back, I want the guy who could make me laugh until I cried back, I want the guy who introduced me to the woods, the creeks, and the rivers back, the guy who could make me stuff down my fear of heights for a view I will never forget. I want to have had this time with Mark to sleep in, to make dinner together, to walk to the grocery store, to watch movies, to pick his brain about this virus, to flirt all morning, have sex in the middle of the day, and a lazy nap afterwards because a monotonous stay-at-home order calls for all of that.

I can’t have any of those things and so every day I think about wandering off into the woods where I could scream and the canopy of trees would say, “You keep screaming. Look how tall and sturdy we are, we can withstand your pain.” I think about finding a creek and watching the tadpoles dart around while the hawks overhead circle in hopes of finding their next meal. I think about my boots getting caked with mud and sweat trickling down my back. I think about wandering a path that spills into a clearing where the pain and the trauma and the loss gets disbursed by the wind. I think about nature cleansing me like it did before so that I am brave enough to move forward in my life.

Anything less would diminish all that came before it, and I already know that would be a loss I could not carry.

Usually when I write something, I plan it out in my head for days or weeks or however long it takes me to figure out what I want to say. There are times when I am surprised by how a thought takes on a life of its own once I start writing and goes in a completely different direction than I had planned. But for this one, the story of Mark and his sister and their relationship, there has not been a single clear path to writing it no matter how many times I roll it around in my head.

I thought about writing of their connection to each other through ice skating, Mark as a hockey player, Vicki as a figure skater. How Mark started in figure skating (which was always a hilarious visual to me), and how he could do jumps and turns because his sister taught him. How he played hockey in high school and then at Purdue University where he was Rookie of the Year in his freshman year. How when we were dating we would go ice skating and he’d bolt around the rink a dozen times, and once he got that out of his system he’d come behind me wobbling on his skates, grabbing me by the waist and pretending that we were both going down. How he was as at home on hockey skates as he was on a bike. How Vicki made a career of figure skating, in private lessons and as the first person in the country to bring synchronized skating to the collegiate level at Miami of Ohio University. How the team won fifteen national titles, qualified for international competition eight times, and how she was twice named Synchronized Skating Coach of the Year. How both her and Mark in different ways changed the lives of thousands of college students in the course of their careers. How the year we went to Ohio for Thanksgiving, Vicki and her husband opened the rink so we could all skate and she gave Will lessons by having him push a paint bucket around on the ice.

I thought of writing about them being in the foxhole of childhood together with their stories of laughter, ice rinks, summers in Michigan, and much that did not see the light of day. How my presence in Mark’s life steadied those waters but the ones needed to steady Vicki were not good choices. That up until Mark’s end he flourished while his sister spent the last few years floundering.

How Vicki came to see us two summers ago, and when I picked her up from the airport I almost didn’t recognize her. How she seemed so frail that I called Mark at work and told him ahead of time to prepare him to see his very athletic sister in declining health. How when we went to bed that night I said, “We might need to think about the possibility of Vicki coming to live with us at some point.” How when he said, “I was thinking the same thing,” you could feel the weight of his sadness in the dark. That the following morning, Mark sat at the dining room table and dove into work because that was his fall back when he couldn’t face hard things, and that night I said to him, “Please don’t do this, Vicki needs you,” so the next morning he took her on a tour of his lab and out to breakfast and told me when they came back that they had a good talk.

That her coming to live with us never happened because a few months later I had to call her and tell her that Mark had died and she kept saying, “no, no, no,” and I had to repeat it three times because she could not grasp what she was hearing. How for the entirety of Mark’s funeral and reception afterwards she never stopped shaking. That she never recovered from his death.

How Mark was so gentle with her, how even though he was only two years older than her he always called her “kiddo”, how he felt it was his duty to protect her even when he was hundreds of miles away. That his inability to do so would eat away at him more than he ever let anyone know, including me. How Vicki’s self esteem was so damaged that she built a wall that only allowed Mark and a few others in.

Ten days ago, Vicki died quietly in her apartment from a heart that gave out. It felt like I was reliving Mark’s death all over again, and talking to my niece, my mother-in-law, and my kids felt like we had been collectively dropped into another bad dream. Once again it was too much, too sad, too confusing. Vicki’s difficult life ended in a whisper, without sirens, interference, or another trip to the hospital, and while there is some peace in that it does not diminish the loss.

Years ago I put an old, small photo on the bathroom shelf of Mark and Vicki when their family had taken one of their annual summer trips to Michigan. Over and over I’d see the photo face down and I’d stand it back up. Sometimes the frame would get cracks in it and I would glue it back together. I couldn’t understand how it kept getting knocked over until I had a conversation with Mark one day. That afternoon I replaced the photo with one of just him and Vicki and when he came out of the bathroom he said, “I know why you did that. Thank you.”

On the day Vicki died, I took the photo off the shelf and looked at it closely. After all those years of it being there, it was the first time I noticed how tightly their little hands were holding onto each other. I knew what it was like for Mark’s hand to grab yours. He reached for mine thousands of times in the years we were together, and most nights before we fell asleep. It made me feel confident of my place in his life and the world, it made me believe I deserved nothing less, and it is the reason that I know I will be okay.

Maybe the only thing that needs to be written is that when I heard the news of Vicki’s death, I prayed that Mark’s hand was there to grab hers and protect her on her final journey out of this world. That the comfort they always found in each other was ever present, and that she was showered in love when her brother introduced her to the other side.

For many years, my Grandma Dora lived with my parents for half the year. She’d spend spring and summer months with us and head back to Arizona where she lived with my aunt during the winter. My room was next to where my grandma slept, and every night she would sit in her chair saying the rosary before she went to bed. After she was done praying, she would pour herself a glass of whiskey. “It helps me sleep,” she would say without explanation or apology. If you passed by during Whiskey Time she would offer you a glass and tell you to stay and visit a few minutes. “Tell me about your day,” she would say, taking my hand in hers and patting it gently the whole time I talked. I’d tell her about my job and my cute boyfriend, where in the city I went for lunch, how the trains were packed coming home. Like most grandmas, there was no part of it she found uninteresting. She’d never stop holding my hand while I was talking, her soft, old hands with knuckles that seemed larger than they should be for such a small person, and the thinnest layer of skin covering them. Hands that had seen a lot of hard work and hard loss over the years.

My grandma died when she was 97. Up until the end she read the paper every day, had her rosary beads and whiskey beside her every night, and despite a spine that had been crumbling for years from wear and bad bones, rarely complained. While she was at my mom and dad’s house she got a chest cold that turned into pneumonia. I was married then and living two hours away, and when I got the call that she was in the hospital I did not believe that she would die. She had spent a lifetime outrunning so much, but then her clock ran out and we stood around the funeral home and told each other we were grateful for her long life. We were but when we went back to our regular lives we couldn’t figure out how it was possible for the world to keep rotating without her in it.

My mom is now 92. She broke her pelvis a couple of years ago when she fell taking care of a neighbor’s dog, and since then her life has been a challenge that seems unfair for someone, who like her mother, had already seen her share of heartache. She was fatherless at the age of four when her dad dropped dead of a heart attack, she was raised with boarders in the house because it was the only thing my grandma knew to do to keep food on the table for her girls, she buried three children, two of whom were full-term and stillborn, and became a widow when my dad died of a rare cancer when she was 62. For her to lose her fiercely fought independence to move into assisted living months after that fall was a blow that none of her kids wanted, but it was no longer safe for her to live on her own.

My siblings have carried the weight of my mom’s care. I am too far away for daily input and my own hands are full with the weight of Mark’s death. At one point, I asked to be taken off our family group text because I couldn’t handle hearing about her not having a good week, her confusion about what day it was, her frustration of searching for a word that she could not find. You could have easily substituted her name with mine and it would describe me in the months after Mark died.

Last winter and this one, my mom went to Florida for a few months to spend time with two of my siblings who both have second homes there. I went down there for a few days last year, five months after Mark died. I felt broken and pressured to act like I was functioning well in regular life. I smiled, tried to follow conversations, picked up seashells along the beach, sat by the pool, had a martini. I know this because there are photos and yet I don’t know any of it.

My mom has never been one to talk about her losses, to tell you how it felt to have so many hard things happen to her. When I was pregnant the first time, I asked her about her stillborn deliveries. I wanted to know if she felt something or had any warning beforehand. In the one and only time she ever spoke of it to me, she said, “Nobody knew why those babies went full-term and came out dead. Nobody. They wanted to do an autopsy but I worked at the hospital. I’d seen autopsies and I wouldn’t let anybody touch those beautiful baby girls. To me they were perfect and that’s how I wanted them to stay.” I was overcome with sadness for her and the things her generation of women had to stuff down, the unbearable losses that they were never allowed to talk about.

This year was better when I went to Florida. I had many moments of wanting to hide in a closet and cry, but had warily grown accustomed to my role as the leading character in a foreign film that happened to be my real life. One afternoon my mom came into my room and watched me sort clothes to do some laundry before flying home the next day. We talked about nothing important and then she asked, “How are you doing?” It wasn’t a regular how are you doing but how are you doing with your life, the one I can see you struggling with because I am your mother and have known you since before you were born.

“Mom,” I said as I climbed onto the bed, “I’m so tired.”

“I know, Kath, I know,” she said, and the worn hands of her life and loss, the same ones my grandma had, patted my back, said nothing more and everything at once.

Mark’s fortune and burden in life was being married to a creative person. He usually liked the end product but the road to my getting through one of my benders was steep and scattered with the remains of paint, masking tape, dirt, fabric, stain, glue sticks, thread, and a lot of wacky ideas. I knew that the strain of my creativity often drove him bat shit crazy. I knew this because it drove me bat shit crazy.

I’ve changed the paint color of every room in this house so many times I’ve lost count. When I recently looked at an old photo of me and Mark and the background was a dark yellow I had two thoughts – what a great picture and that was not one of my best color choices. I painstakingly painted a white picket fence on the walls of my daughter’s bedroom. I measured, penciled it in, edged it out with a tiny paintbrush, painted each picket, and repeated the process around the entire room. Two years later I thought it looked amateur and painted over it. I once decided that our small kitchen was suddenly going to be an eat-in kitchen and dragged in a table. As five of us were crammed around it, Mark started eating off everyone’s plate. We all looked at him like he was crazy and I asked him what he was doing. “Oh my bad,” he said, “with this Dreamhouse Barbie table you’re forcing us to sit at I couldn’t tell which plate was mine.” I had him and Will dig wine bottles (“Not the big ones, you guys!!”) out of the glass recyling bin at the shopping center so I could turn them upside down and bury them halfway to create a border around a brick patio. I have dyed clothes that weren’t the right color (and then really weren’t the right color) and spray painted everything. Whenever I was down in the basement, spraying away without a mask or a window open, Mark would yell at me that I was killing a couple million brain cells.

I swapped out the pillows on the couch depending on the season or boredom and would get mad when Mark didn’t even notice. I rearranged the furniture all the time and then would say to him, “Don’t you think this works so much better?” He didn’t because HE DID NOT CARE. One time I rearranged the furniture while he was out of town. I heard him come in late at night, run into something, and say, “Son of a bitch.” I pretended I was sleeping when he came to bed and faked like I just woke up when he crawled in next to me. “I’m so glad you’re home,” I sleepily said. He said, “If you could leave a light on for me the next time you move the couch in a different place that would be really helpful,” and showed me the bruise on his leg the next day.

What drove Mark crazier than anything was me bringing home old shit from the side of the road, an estate sale, or Craigslist. It almost always involved him in some way as I may have a good eye but not the upper body strength to deliver the goods. I’d always start the conversation the same way. “So I found this really cool thing that I think would work great in here……..” Mark would ask what we needed it for which was his way of putting the brakes on my creative mojo. I was never deterred.

A few years ago I told Mark that the couch in the living room needed to go. It was too big and SO TUSCAN LOOKING. He didn’t even know what SO TUSCAN LOOKING meant so those sorts of conversations had to take place over the span of months. I had to introduce the idea, bring it up casually but not too much, I had to sigh a lot when I had to push the couch to vacuum underneath it (which I only did when he was around) and then complain that it was bad for my bum shoulder. I had to wear him down but not let him know I was wearing him down.

My plan was to slipcover whatever couch we got so it did not need to be new. The slipcovers were going to cost a bunch of money which was Phase B of the plan that I hadn’t introduced Mark to yet. I’d search every day on Craigslist and show him when I’d come across a possibility. He’d nod, go back to his computer, and then I’d say, “But I don’t know, it might be too whimpy looking.” Since he didn’t know what the point of any of this was, he’d say, “Whatever you think,” which was the equivalent of telling The Elves in Charge of My Overthinking to start pulling the fire alarm every ten minutes.

Finally I found something I liked that was the right size and I arranged to look at it on a Saturday morning. I told Mark the plan and he said he had a rewrite on a paper that had to be sent off on Monday morning so the weekend would not work. “Maybe next weekend,” he said. I said, “Do you not understand how Craigslist works? You don’t tell people next weekend because a hundred other people are wanting to buy the same thing. This isn’t a furniture purchase, Mark, this is a contest and we are going to win.” Then I swore that I only needed one hour of his time and so he agreed.

We drove out to the house and the couch was practically new so I said, “Done deal, now let’s get this in the back of our car and take it home.” Mr. Craig looked out the window, Mark looked out the window, even Mrs. Craig looked out the window. They all agreed that the couch wouldn’t fit in our compact SUV and there I stood, stranded on the Island of No Bueno. Mark asked if the legs came off. The conclusion was that they likely didn’t and he said we should pass on the couch because of that. I said, “Nope, I’ve been looking for a couch for months. This one fits, I’ve measured, and we need to buy it.” Then I came up with the idea to go to Home Depot (“Mark, it’s not even out of our way!!”), rent one of their trucks for ONE HOUR, and then he could go to work. This was not at all what Mark wanted to hear but he said he’d give up another hour and so we drove there. “I’ll handle it,” I said and went to the desk to rent the truck where they asked me for my insurance information. I tore my purse apart looking for it, ran out to the car looking for it, and tried to find my policy number online with no luck. By this point Mark really needed to get going so I called Mr. & Mrs. Craig to say that we would pick up the couch the next day.

That Sunday morning we went to Home Depot to get the truck and pick up the couch. On the way home, Mark said, “I hope we can figure out how to get the legs off this couch,” and I thought oh dear god here he goes again with the damn legs on this couch but kept my mouth shut because I had been teetering on the edge with the mister all weekend. We got the couch off the truck, me going backwards through the front door and then the oddest thing happened.

It did not fit.

That’s when Mark’s rage meter hit Defcon 5 which caused me to babble like a moron. “I swear I measured, Mark. Wait, let me show you the measurements. I wrote them down. They’re in my purse. It’s in the car. Why don’t you get my purse out of the car and there’s a little piece of paper in there folded in the part where I keep my lipstick. Not the front zipper part where I keep my floss and ibuprofen but the back zipper part. You’ll see, it’s right there,” and I was nodding and smiling and sweating and he just kept looking at me. Finally he said, “This is why I asked about the legs coming off. Because if the legs came off we could unscrew them and this wouldn’t have been any problem. And I looked at him and said, “Oh, I get it now. You should have said that from the beginning. I probably would have understood it better.”

He did not look at me. He told me to MOVE. He told me he was going to shove it and make it through the doorway. I said let me help you shove it and he said that if I said one more word that Craigslist couch was going to be shoved so far up my … and I scooted out of the way and Mark pushed and shoved and got it through. I jumped up and down and said I loved him and I was sorry and I’d never put him through that again and neither one of us believed it. Before he left to go to work, I looked him in the eye said, “I want you to know that I really appreciate you and everything you did this weekend to get this couch home and it’s going to look fantastic when it’s done. So whatever fantasy you have, whatever, I’m game. You think about that while you’re doing your little sciency work and get back to me tonight.”

That night he said to me that he actually had a fantasy that he’d been thinking of for a long time. I told him to be explicit so I could get a visual. “Okay,” he said, “close your eyes. It’s a Saturday, we’re both wearing jeans, you’re wearing that black leather jacket I like, we go out to lunch and we’re flirting the whole time because something great is about to happen. We even get dessert. We share it and everyone around us can feel the sexual tension, the server, even people at other tables. We leave the restaurant, I rest my hand on the back of your neck and can feel the heat coming off of you, we walk down the street. I guide you to a store, and hold the door open for you to walk through. It smells good in there and you look at me and say, oh Mark, I’ve always liked this store. How did you know?”

My eyes popped open. “Oh my god, Mark, are we having sex in the store?” I ask him. “In the middle of the day? In a store? I don’t think it’s legal to do that.”

“Wait,” he said. “Close your eyes, I haven’t gotten to the best part.”

“We go in there, a salesperson asks if we need help. I say we do and we buy a couch. We buy a couch and pay a delivery fee. A few weeks later they come in our house carrying the couch. They put it where we tell them. They leave. We sit on the couch.”

“Oh geez, Mark,” I said, “that’s not a fantasy. That’s what normal people do.”

“Yes, yes it is,” Mark said. “That’s my fantasy, to go out and buy something like normal people do.”

A month before Mark died we did exactly that. Went out to lunch, shared dessert, walked down the street, and went into a store and bought a sectional. It came in dozens of color choices and I looked at every single one. Mark had biked in the summer heat that morning so between that and pretending to gave a fat rat’s ass about fabric choices (plus all that pulsing sexual tension), he fell asleep on the floor model.

I thought about asking him on the way home if he ever imagined his life with someone else, someone normal and not creative but I knew the answer.

He would have hated it.

A few years ago, before my daughter and her husband were married, I asked them if they wanted to have Sunday dinner at the house with us. It wasn’t a ploy to get them to spend more time with me and Mark, but rather that they were both working full-time, Maggie hadn’t honed her cooking skills yet, and I felt sorry for Nate who didn’t seem to me to be getting enough to eat. At the time, Will was in college, Mallory was still home, and both of them would join in on our dinners as their schedules allowed.

It was never supposed to be a regular thing, but the next Sunday came along and I asked them again, and the one after that and the one after that. Because Mark and I were usually home most of the day, we started making better meals, he’d cook on the grill, I’d experiment with new side dishes, we’d get some beer and wine, and there was always something for dessert. We nearly always worked together on these meals, fighting (literally) side-by-side for counter space in our teeny kitchen.

I knew that Mark and I liked cooking together, we liked having the kids together one day a week, we liked getting caught up with them, and them with each other. We did not know that the kids looked forward to it as much we did until we had to cancel a couple weeks in a row because of other commitments. When we told them we could hear the disappointment in their voices, and from then on we made it a priority to be together for Sunday dinner.

It did not always go smoothly. Siblings know how to push each other’s buttons and at times arguments would erupt. Sometimes they’d get a more attractive offer and ditch us at the last minute. After a few tumultuous weeks that were more bad than good, I told Mark I was sending all of them an email. I told them that their dad and I were happy to continue making Sunday dinner but that they weren’t going to be arguing at the table any more, that if they couldn’t make it they should let me know before noon so I could plan accordingly, that phones were not allowed at the table until after we were done eating, and that they should pitch in to clean up the kitchen. When I read the email to Mark he said, “You’re going to piss them off and they won’t come any more.” I said that I was reminding them how to act around our dinner table because they’d forgotten. Things were much better after that, and like clockwork, we had dinner together every Sunday.

On the last Sunday we were all together, Mark and I needed to get out of the house and away from the emotions of that weekend, and so we made dinner and took it to our daughter’s house. My son-in-law was at one end of the table, Mark at the other. Our son told a hilarious story that had us all laughing, and I remember looking at Mark, seeing him smile and believing that he was going to be okay. I never thought that it would be the last time he would be with us for dinner.

When Mark’s funeral was over and we’d gotten back from a family wedding in Colorado, my daughter asked me about Sunday dinners. “It’s okay if you don’t want to do them any more, Mom,” she said, “we’d all understand.” “Dad loved them,” I said, “he loved having all of you here, he loved watching you together, and I love having you here. Our Sunday dinners will go on.” They started a few weeks later and they were painful for all of us in so many ways, but none more than Mark’s empty seat at the table.

In the early months of counseling, my therapist repeatedly told me that the grip of grief will loosen its hold on me. When and how she could not say, but she promised me it would happen, and there has never been a promise I have counted on more in my life than that one. I daily doubted her words, but lately it doesn’t feel like I’m wearing a straight jacket, it feels like I can breathe, that I am not daily flattened and exhausted by the what ifs.

Sunday dinners are on hiatus while we all are home bound, but will start again when life gets back to normal. On our best Sundays, our Mallie Bee will be with us from California, I will plan and grocery shop and try something new, and then pour myself a glass of wine before the kids and grandkids come through the door.

We’ll catch up on work and current events and tell each other funny stories. Mabel will be bribed into eating, Walter will throw most of his food on the floor, and the tender rhythm of life will go on as it always does.

On a Saturday afternoon last spring, my son came over to help me clean out the garage. It was something that desperately needed to be done and one of those chores where Mark and I were never on the same page. I always thought we should empty out the entire garage, sweep it, and organize it. Mark would hang a few things up, throw a few things away, then announce his signature line, “Good from far and far from good. Am I right, Kath, or what?” I’d get mad at him and say we hadn’t done anything, he said I was too anal retentive, and the garage remained a craptastic mess.

My son cleans and organizes like me, thorough and ruthless, so we were a good team for this project. It was so humid that day that sweat kept dripping off our foreheads and burning our eyes, but we kept at it, filled a garbage can, and then my car with things we could donate. When everything was cleaned out, and the floor swept of dead leaves and a whole lot of mouse droppings, Will said, “Here’s your problem, Mom, this is why you have mice,” and at the back of the garage where the floor and foundation met you could see a gap where daylight was coming in. Will went to the hardware store and got spray foam, filled in the crack, and we put what we were keeping back into the garage, gently hanging Mark’s bikes on the side walls.

In the last few months I have been thinking of replacing our bed and nightstands. I can’t keep walking into our room and see the place where we both ended our days without a stab to my heart, and one night last week before I went to bed I’d been looking again. I came up with a few options, put my computer away, fell asleep, and started dreaming. In the dream the new bed and nightstands had arrived, and I was vacuuming, cleaning the room, and putting the new bedding on. When it came time to put the lamps on the nightstands and finish everything up, I couldn’t find them. I looked in the other bedrooms and ran down to the basement but the lamps were nowhere to be found. I yelled to Mark asking him if he knew where the lamps were. “Maybe they’re in the closet, ” he yelled back, and I dug through every closet in every room and still couldn’t find them. “Mark,” I said, “it’s so dark in here. This isn’t going to work, there isn’t any light.” He didn’t answer and I was irritated and felt like I’d wasted a bunch of money.

But then Mark called me from the front door to come outside for a minute. Usually that meant there was a bird he wanted me to see, but instead he waved at me from the driveway to follow him, then lifted the garage door and walked towards the back. He crouched down and told me to do the same, and when I did he put his arm around my shoulder. In the space that Will had filled with foam was the tiniest crack of light coming through and Mark said, “Don’t you get it, Kath? It’s the foundation. You have to look at the foundation in order to see the light.” I gasped and smiled, and when I turned my head to look at him he was gone.