A Speckled Trout

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.

My dad died thirty years ago from a rare form of melanoma that started behind his retina. He had treatment at a hospital in Milwaukee where they removed his eye, planted radioactive isotopes to kill the cancer, put his eye back in, and then waited. The treatment reduced the size of the tumor but did not eliminate it, and eventually he had to have his eye removed and replaced with a glass one. After awhile him having a glass eye became less of a thing, and he’d have to remind you if you were talking to him to sit on his good side so he could see you.

Three years after that surgery, a tiny black dot appeared on his cheek which seemed like No Big Deal. He had it removed and I was with my sisters and our significant others sitting in the bleachers in Wrigley Field on the day he was supposed to find out how the biopsy went. “That spot is too small to mean anything,” we all said, confident that when we got home from the game that good news would be waiting for us. That small spot was big enough to indicate his cancer had returned and he would end up at the University of Chicago for more experimental treatment until the summer of 1990 when he said, “Enough.”

He would die in September, and my mom, who nursed him through all the chemo and all the scans, who changed the gauze on his face where there was a hole where an eye used to be, stood strong and unflinching through it all. But even after all these years if you were to ask her about those days when my dad was so sick, her face would change and she would quietly and remorsefully say, “I should have insisted he go to a better eye doctor from the very beginning. We wasted so much time with that guy who didn’t know anything.”

That is what death does, it takes sadness and turns it into regret, second guessing, and Monday morning quarterbacking. It makes you doubt every single thing you did, as if you were capable of outmaneuvering the Grim Reaper if you weren’t such a bloody idiot. Suicide takes that ball of regret, pumps it full of steroids, hands a boulder back to you and says, “Not so fast, sister, you’ll need to carry this now.” Carry it I have, and it is a rare day when I haven’t gone over that last, long weekend with Mark, the same thoughts swirling in my head like a grief tornado. Why didn’t I stay up all night with him? Why didn’t I wake up before my alarm? Why did I go to work when I was worried about where he was? Why didn’t I call the friend he was going to see that afternoon to say he needs you now?

My therapist reminds me often that this is about control, that I think I could have changed the outcome when it was Mark’s intent that day for me not to hear him leave, for me not to find him. Anyone who knew him, even casually, cannot fathom him ending his life. A zest and curiosity for life exploded out of him, and it ending the way it did stuns me every day. So much so that I still question if all of this really happened or that I am unable to awaken from a horrific dream.

Even when I have taken the blunt force of Mark’s actions, my therapist points out that I only speak of him with love and compassion. And that is true, I do speak of him that way to every one, every time. Mark saved me from a life of mediocrity, he made me question everything, he taught me that the status quo was bullshit, that accumulating wealth was greed and not a legacy, that we had enough all along, that travel was the best education in the world, that life is God and you can see it everywhere if only you paid attention.

Mark kept notes on everything. When I cleaned out his office I found notebook after notebook after notebook. He wrote in the margins of papers, he wrote on business cards, he wrote on resumes, he wrote on scraps of papers, and so it wouldn’t be like him to end his life and not leave a note. It is that note that has broken me in so many ways. There is such defeat and resignation in those words, and I cannot imagine what it was like for him to write them. Many of his thoughts circle back to me, one paragraph ending, “My wife understood my pain.”

There was a moment when we were walking that weekend when I realized that the boy in him had never understood his life. It was so crystal clear to me I can tell you exactly where we were in the park when it happened, and the enormity of that moment still takes my breath away. When the weight of my sadness feels like it is pulling me into the darkest of holes, I always wonder what it must have been like for Mark. To have nobody tell that little boy that he wasn’t imagining anything, that all along what he knew in his gut was the truth, that only he could save himself by talking about all of it and letting light burn its power, that he was worthy of love and forgiveness, that being my husband and the father to Maggie, Will, and Mallory was a gift none of us ever wanted to lose.

Through time and practice I am learning to speak compassionately to myself about Mark’s last days, but the season of grace will take time to bloom. This life of mine turned out so differently than I thought, but in this place, this place where so many days feel pointless, sad, and unending, I am indebted to my husband for what he knew throughout our marriage and made sure I knew on the last day of his life.

That the gift of being human, compassionately and genuinely, is to see the pain of someone else and not run from it.

When our oldest daughter, Maggie, got married, she asked us if we could host a gathering at our house for anyone who needed a place to hang out between the wedding and the reception. Mark and I were happy to oblige. We stocked up on beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers, and then hired one of the Mallory’s friends to stay at the house and set everything up while we were at the church. Most of our family and friends, along with our new son-in-law’s parents and out-of-town family came, and it was a lovely and relaxed time for our two families to get to know each other.

When the time came for us to head to the reception, Mark and I stayed behind to put the food away and lock up the house. When we got into the car Mark looked at me and said, “I think this is the happiest day of my life.” I smiled and said, “Me too, Mark.” We loved this new son-in-law of ours and this long-awaited day when everyone got to be in the circle of their infectious joy.

There were many happy occasions over the years. The birth of our three beautiful kids, their graduations from high school and college, Easter brunches and packed Christmas parties in our small house, social events and promotions at the med center, quiet dinners with close friends.

I remember all of those things vividly and with crushing fondness, but it is the ordinary days with Mark that I miss the most. The morning routines we both had, him often walking alongside the car while I was backing down the driveway to tell me something he forgot or to kiss me goodbye, the slow weekend days when we drank coffee and figured out our plans, the cold Saturday nights when we stayed in – him watching videos on Youtube, me scrolling the internet. There were our family Sunday dinners when the kids would all be here and he and I would cook together. Mark going to the grocery store beforehand, me folding the laundry. Our regular negotiations over what restaurant to go to to have a bite to eat, usually landing at our standby pizza or Thai restaurant. The walks in the neighborhood after dinner or up to the hardware store. Mark mowing the lawn, me vacuuming. The trips to the garden center where he would load the cart with vegetables to plant and me with flowers. Me saying, “I think we’re spending too much money,” and him saying, “I thought the point was to spend a bunch of money.”

For several summers there was a heron family in our neighborhood. It was at the other end of the block and if you happened to be by there the neighbors would point them out high in the trees. I could barely make the nest out and wasn’t entirely sure what I was seeing, but one day when I was walking home from the park there was one of the infamous herons standing on a car like a giant hood ornament. It was a stunning sight and neither the heron or I dared to move for several minutes. Last summer when I hadn’t heard any news of their return, I asked my neighbor if they were still around. “They came back,” she said, “and then it was awful. A hawk had been circling and had its sights on the nest and eventually dove in for the babies. The heron was screeching, the sound of it was terrible. It went on for the longest time and then she was gone and never came back.”

Like that heron, my nest was left barren of the husband I was not prepared to lose. Before Mark died I tended to think of babies and the elderly as being fragile, but then my husband didn’t make it through a Tuesday and my thinking changed. Alone for the first time in my life, I move forward in fits and starts without a partner or a clue. I am terrified on a daily basis and there have been many times when I wished a hawk would set its sights on me. Instead a life of one is taking shape and I am confident of nothing these days but that I hate every part of it.

But with a glance in the rearview mirror are the decades of coffee, conversations, dinners at home and out, the joy, the worry, the laughter, the tears, and the litany of mundane chores, and oh how I wish I’d known that it was those ordinary days that were the holy communion of my life.

For as long as I can remember, the month of February has been a challenge for me to power through. The excitement of a new year has subsided, the resolutions I may have made have been shelved, and a pile of tax forms sit in a folder on the dining room table begging for attention. Add to that it is one day after another of gray and cold and dismal.

All the days of last year are so foggy to me. Was last February worse than January or was the whole first year one miserable day after another? Did I come home from work, climb into bed to warm up, and then fall sound asleep? Did I wake up confused by the dark and think I had to get dinner ready before Mark got home only to remember he wasn’t coming home? Did I suddenly start crying on a routine drive home from the grocery store?

On a daily basis I am stunned by the harshness of grief. How it slams into you without any warning, how ambivalent it is if you’ve had an okay day and think maybe things are getting better, how little it matters that you’ve had a few days in the Florida sun and think light might be yours to have again. Grief is the boss that can never be pleased no matter how hard you work.

Most nights before I go to sleep, I stare at my favorite photo of Mark, the one we laminated with a Carl Sagan quote on the back that was handed out at his funeral. I trace his face with my finger and stare at the man I loved my whole adult life, so alive in front of that fountain in Portugal. Ten months after that photo was taken he would be dead, I would be heartbroken, our kids would be devastated, and everything in my life would change.

On the bad nights I stare at that photo, trace Mark’s face with my finger and ask the husband who smiles back at me, “Did I love you enough?” There is no purpose to this and he isn’t here to answer, but doesn’t somebody who knows they are loved stay? Don’t they fix the broken parts and keep on living? Like most of my life since last September it is another question without an answer to add to the list.

Mark was an avid bird watcher and always made sure our feeders were full, especially in the winter. I was with him so many times when he loaded bags of bird feed into our cart. Now I can’t remember what he bought so I stand in the aisle at the hardware store and stare at all the choices and then give up. Bird seed doesn’t seem like an especially hard thing to figure out and yet it is.

One morning last week the alarm went off and I laid in bed trying to muster the energy to get up. I hadn’t slept well the night before, and the truth is I’d prefer to stay in bed most days. Thankfully I have a job to go to and sleeping daylight away isn’t an option. As I laid there in silent negotiations with the clock for a few more minutes, I heard the chirping of a single bird outside the window.

Spring is coming, I thought, and wasn’t it my husband who taught me that if you want to wake up to the sounds of life after a long season of darkness you have to keep the feeders full?

“One thing I’ll tell you about Kath. She’s like a teapot. She simmers for a long time but when she blows watch out.”
-my dad to Mark on the occasion of our wedding

During Mark’s last few months of grad school, he was finishing up experiments and writing his dissertation while I was newly pregnant. He’d write fiendishly, edit, write some more, edit some more, and overall freak out that he wasn’t going to pass. Mark always took his work and his future seriously, and the pressure of getting his dissertation perfect was all that was on his mind.

Since I was early into my pregnancy I had other things on my mind. I was the main wage earner and working at a bank processing mortgage loans. The loan officer I worked for was young, gung-ho and cranking out customers and loans in record time so he could could go to the head of the class. Every mortgage he approved caused a massive amount of paperwork for me to complete via the old-fashioned way of typing, but like clockwork every morning I’d get the dry heaves between 10-10:30. I’d go into the bathroom stall, close the door, sit on the floor with my head over the toilet and spend twenty minutes dry heaving with occasional full on barfing. Mr. Loan Officer lacked empathy for my situation and one time knocked on the door of the ladies room to ask me if I was almost done. When I got back to my desk he said that I should count my daily dry heaving time in the bathroom as my morning break. So I was spending my days with an average white guy in the 80s who answered to nobody for bad behavior, and my nights with my husband who suffered no debilitating side affects of a baby on the way.

As the time came closer for Mark to present his dissertation, he started staying at home to practice his talk. I’d like to think I was supportive, and maybe I was, but I was more jealous that I had to go into work every day and prop up the Ron Popeil of mortgage loans while Mark merely had to panic and freak out about our future with a baby on the way. During one of those days, I drove home for lunch, made a sandwich, and bitched incessantly about my job while Mark nodded and made notes in the margins of his talk with red pen. It was non-eventful as only one of us was having a conversation. When it was time for me to head back to work, I stood at the kitchen counter where a frozen pot roast was thawing and asked Mark, “About 3:00 can you put this in the oven at 350?” And Mark, pen in mouth and without looking up said, “No.” And that was the moment I flipped my shit about the men in my whole miserable, dry heaving life. I screamed, “NOOOO??? Are you kidding me? I’m pregnant and going back to work for that idiot again and you can’t even turn the oven on and stick this stupid roast in the oven?!!! Really? You really can’t even do that?” Mark was suddenly and violently startled out of the world of cytochrome p450 with no time to react as I flung that frozen pot roast in his direction and stormed out of the house.

I fumed all the way back to work, imagining myself as the victim of a love gone horribly wrong, not by another woman, but a pot roast. I fantasized that it would make a best-selling novel, the cover a portrait of me and my pregnant belly with a single tear sliding down my cheek. But by the time I reached the employee parking lot at the bank, I began to reimagine what my actions might have done. What if I hit him in the head and killed him? What if I hit him in the head and he ended up semi-comatose the rest of his life? I’d probably get arrested for attempted murder. Worse yet, what if I didn’t get arrested and had to keep working at the bank? I started to get a little worried, then I got real worried so I decided to call the house. When I reached my desk I picked up the phone and dialed our home number. When Mark answered, I thought *whewwwww did I ever dodge a bullet there.* Since he could walk because he got up and answered the phone, and he could talk because he said “hello”, he clearly suffered no brain trauma so I launched into another epic bitch session about the pot roast and slammed the phone down. That afternoon at break I told my bank friends the grievous crime Mark had committed, and since they shared in my work and male bitterness they tsk tsked him. “Oh, he had that coming,” they all said and I basked in the glow of my righteousness.

That night when I got home from work there was the smell of pot roast cooking, mashed potatoes being made, the table set with candles, and my husband apologizing for saying “no” when he realized he should have enthusiastically sayed “YES”. He was forgiven because I knew he didn’t mean it, and he seemed slightly terrified which made me sorry for flinging that frozen hunk of meat at his head.

A few weeks later, we were arguing about something else while standing in the kitchen, and Mark picked up a thawing pound of ground beef and slammed it to the floor saying, “I’m just trying to pass grad school so I can get a job and you’re bitching at me about everything.” Simultaneously we both looked at the package of ground beef on the floor and came to the same conclusion. We were so broke we couldn’t even afford to throw a box of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, let alone meat every time we were mad at each other.

Mark would finish writing his dissertation and defend his work before his committee and pass with flying colors. It was a huge accomplishment and I was so proud of him. My broke college student husband was now a doctor. He was proud of himself, too, and in the months that ticked by he would keep working in the lab until Maggie was born and we started a new life in Maryland.

I was still processing mortgages, my bank friends had a shower for me, we put a crib together in our rented townhouse, and I anxiously waited for this new baby to make me a mother. Meanwhile, Mark started pontificating about everything. He told me in detail how the coffeemaker and microwave worked, how everything I made on the stove would cook faster if I’d just put a lid on the pot, that a drop of beer might turn our developing baby into the Hunchback of Notre Dame, that the tar he inhaled when he roofed would probably give him cancer one day, that professor jobs were hard to come by. I listened to most of it until one day the combination of heat and the growing baby in me that had run out of room made me reach my breaking point.

“Will you just stop,” I said. “You keep preaching to me about stuff I don’t even care about. You follow me everywhere like the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz who finally got a brain. I can’t take it anymore. Ever since you got this degree you’ve become a know-it-all asshole.”

Without missing a beat, Mark nodded and said, “I see your point but just so you know it’s Dr. Asshole,” and in the summer of 1983 let it be known that hands down he won Fight Club.

During the five years Mark and I lived in Maryland, we became more keenly aware and interested in the history of the Civil War. Brutal battles had been waged on the ground beneath our feet, and for a history buff like Mark, it was an opportunity to explore these places. Mark was especially interested in the Battle of Antietam – the single bloodiest day of the Civil War.

Antietam was less than an hour away, and so on a Sunday afternoon we loaded a very new baby into the car and drove there. Much of it I don’t recall except for standing in a field named Sunken Road. Two rows of wood rail fencing delineated the North from the South, an expanse no wider than the distance from my driveway to my next door neighbor’s, and it was shocking to imagine that a hail of bullets and cannonballs were fired in such close proximity. It was unfathomable that anyone could survive that, and while we like to think of wars being fought by men, boys as young as middle school were also sent from home to join the fight, often to lose their lives. On that hot, summer day, Mark and I would have the same reaction to what we were seeing. As the wind blew against the manicured blades of grass and dandelions sprang from that bloody earth, we both knew we were standing on hallowed ground. Our drive home was somber and quiet.

Before we left Maryland for a new job opportunity for Mark, we took a trip to Gettysburg, and that time we would load two kids into the car and drive to Pennsylvania. While also incredibly moving for its historical significance, it lacked the feel of Antietam. Tourist shops lined the town streets where you could get a dish towel with the Gettysburg address on it and a shot glass with Abraham Lincoln’s profile. Disappointed by what we’d seen, Mark would say on that drive home, “Why’d they have to go and bastardize the place?” It was hard to comprehend how two historical places where war was waged for the same thing could evoke such different reactions.

The struggle I have had ever since Mark’s death is for a meaningful life that I do not know how to remake. The person who gave me the confidence to do most anything is no longer here, and during my other times of doubt Mark would cock his head, smile, and say, “Oh Kath, I wish you could see in yourself what I see in you.”

Shakespeare wrote, “Everyone can master a grief but he who has it,” and those words certainly ring true with me. I am always bewildered that someone with an intact marriage and a very living spouse seems to know what I need to catapult me out of this grief. Advice to “just focus on the happy times” makes me flinch. There is a reel in my head of a 40 year relationship with a man that I deeply loved that has played non-stop since last September. There are thousands of happy times in that highlight reel but sadness touches every part of it now. The movie lacks half the participants to share in the highs and lows, and if there are any coming attractions somebody forgot to queue them up for me to watch.

Moreover, being told “don’t forget you have those great kids and grandkids,” makes me want to simultaneously burst into rage and laughter. Throughout my lifetime countless women have passed through my days, and I am positive I have never known a single one that has forgotten the children they carried, birthed, adopted, and raised, or those children’s children that made her a grandmother. How could I forget them when I fell in love before I even met them? And how is it possible for them to be responsible for my peace since their dad died when they are struggling with the same thing for themselves?

Everyone in my life desperately wants me to be happy and I am thankful that I am loved enough for that to be the case. They would like to look in my eyes and not see the pools of my sadness reflected back at them. If only they could see the times that I can still laugh at the dumbest stuff like Mark and I always did, that those kids and grandkids of mine and Mark’s do give me moments of joy, that the sound of my husband’s name makes my heart flutter with gratitude, that the point of this journey is to lead me to a destination of Whole not Happy, that they may think they know how fleeting and tenuous this life is but it is a very different thing to live that truth, that I reached it before them but they, too, will find themselves there one day.

For now grief is ever present in my life and I long for the day when it requires much less of my heart and head. In order to get to that place, I need to feel every part of what I had that tragically slipped through my fingers, and that is a painful place to be. Grief also demands not to be rushed and I have reluctantly come to terms with that.

But when the day does come that my eyes dance with renewed hope, and flowers grow where there used to be barren ground, I will still wish for the same thing that I wish for now. That what can be seen in my eyes is the entirety of Mark’s life and death, and that you know it is and will always be my hallowed ground.