A Speckled Trout

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.

“Sometimes we are just the collateral damage in someone elses’s war against themselves.”
-Lauren Eden

A few days after Mark’s death when I was with my sisters, daughters, and niece on a hunt to try to find guest books for the funeral, I got a call. I did not hear my phone ring initially which was a good thing. Since that Tuesday when I had gotten the call from the police department while at work, whenever the phone would ring my heart would stop and my stomach flip. This time it was a call from the county health department wanting me to know the services available for my mental health in case I felt suicidal. It would have been comical if the whole thing wasn’t such a heartbreak. One funeral wasn’t even planned and it seemed to me that they were heading me off at the pass to stop the need for a-buy-one-get-one deal from the church. They left a voicemail, I called back and left a message that I would contact them if need be but I was a bit overwhelmed at the moment.

On the day after Mark’s funeral, when I was on somewhat of a high (if one can even say that after the suicide of their husband) because his farewell was everything I had hoped it would be, the detective who told me what happened that Tuesday afternoon showed up unannounced at my door with a person from the mental health department. He was someone I wished to never lay eyes on again, and all 6’5″ of him filled my living room. He sat on my white couch and introduced a fresh-faced women who proceeded to hand me dozens of brochures on suicide. She was all of about 25, and I wanted to ask her if she really thought that if I was going to kill myself I would stop, say, “Wait a minute, where’s that brochure with the phone number I was supposed to call,” and then rifle through the pile she gave me until all was well again. They chatted awhile, and if there is one thing that you cannot do for a very long time after death lands in your house, it’s small talk. I told them I had to cut things short because I had to go to a physical therapy appointment for back issues that I’d had for months. This opened another conversation about the detective’s own back issues and he asked me if I had ever thought of getting an inversion table because, according to him, those things really work. I smiled, thanked him, and said I’d look into that. Silently I said take yourself and your gun out of my house and don’t come back.

I would later find out that making a welfare check like that is standard procedure after a suicide. Family members so distraught over the loss of a loved one often end their own life, and information about these services has to be passed on to prevent a chain reaction of death.

Many times since last September I have thought about that conversation. How I felt like throwing up when I saw him at the door, how I wanted to blame the messenger, how this was so very wrong on every level.

Mark thought his death was the only viable plan, that we would be so much better off with him out of the picture. I have read a great deal about the suicidal mind, but because he never even came close to that in our years together, it is so difficult for me to imagine him capable of thinking that way. In the dark of night he slipped into his own darkness, unbeknownst to me, and how was that even possible? How could I, who knew him best, be unaware of where his mind had led him? My therapist said Mark did it in the way he did so that I wouldn’t know, so I wouldn’t stop him, so I wouldn’t be the one who found him. In replaying the weekend before over and over, I always imagine myself to be the hero, the one who steps in at the last minute to stop him from doing the unimaginable. In going down that road I also imagine what the aftermath must have been like and I am grateful to have been spared that.

But my gratitude is someone else’s horror and it is something I think about often. The train operator who phoned the police after it happened and the police who responded to the scene, namely the detective I want to hate. Who ever thinks that the outcome of suicide will be part of the job description? And how often in a career does that happen?

On that Tuesday afternoon at the police station, when the story was unfolding before me and I could feel my entire body collapse at the news, I was asked if I had any questions. Did I have any questions? I didn’t even know where to start. I looked up and all that would come out of my mouth was, “Did he, did he, did he……”

Did he what?

I didn’t even know what I was asking. The detective looked at me and said, “He did not suffer, Mrs. Fisher.” How does someone remember to be so kind and gentle when they have become the collateral damage in the aftermath of a war they were called to witness?

Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,
Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

In my years with Mark, even from very early on when we started dating, I would quickly come to learn that he was fascinated with nature, so much so that he moved with a quiet reverence in the outdoor world so as not to disturb any living thing that was nearby. Every road trip we took he was constantly scanning the landscape for hawks, deer, wild turkey, bald eagles. I was his sidekick observer, often only reliable enough to point out an unimpressive herd of slow moving cows. On rare occasions when I’d spot something more impressive I’d shout, “HAWK, MARK!!! HAWK ON THE LEFT,” and then high-five myself for my exuberant Wild Kingdom narration. This amused and frustrated him. For him, being a part of nature, even from the confines of a car, meant stepping into that world quietly, not screaming like you’d won the showcase on The Price Is Right.

For all of Mark’s enthrallment with woods and river banks, mine was in the sky. I could stare at the stars for hours. It isn’t likely to see more than a few stars in our neighborhood, but if there was a chance for a dazzling, sparkly show Mark would find it for me. Once sitting on the patio of a restaurant nearby, as the sun set the stars blinked on. “Oh Mark, the stars,” I said, batting my green eyes at him like he was the Sexiest Man Alive, “Look at all the stars.” He smiled and said, “I thought this would be a good spot for you to get your star fix.” A few years ago on a road trip back from Montana, we stayed a night with our son-in-law’s parents who live in the Black Hills of South Dakota. After dark we went in their backyard and the sky was lit with stars. I couldn’t believe the spectacular beauty of it and asked incredulously, “This is what you get to see? Every night?”

When we were in Vermont for a conference Mark was attending, on the drive back to the inn where we were staying I said, “It’s so pitch black out here I bet you can really see the stars.” Mark immediately pulled over, we jumped out of the car, and were wowed by thousands of stars. We stood next to each other, my arm looped through Mark’s, my head on his shoulder, and never spoke. There was nothing to say in the vastness of that night sky, and I have thought of that sweet, dark night a thousand times. A night when two people were so confident in their love of each other in an endless universe that words weren’t necessary.

When my granddaughter comes to spend the night we always go outside to look at the moon. We might see a star here and there and Mabel says the same thing her mom and dad have said to her since Mark died, “Boompa is in the stars now.” “He is,” I say back to her, “and hasn’t he been gone too long?” She will usually tell me that we need to go up to the stars and bring him back home, as if it’s only a matter of finding a big enough ladder, and I say oh honey if only that could be. We will look up quietly, because like her grandfather, she is learning that in the silence is when heaven and nature sings.

A few weeks ago when she stayed over, we went out to see the moon and I asked her if she’d looked at the stars in the sky when she’d recently been to her grandparent’s house in South Dakota. She said she had and I said, “Can you believe how many of them you can see when you’re there?” We talked about Mark being among them like we always do, and instead of saying we should go up there and get him, she turned to me and said, “Maybe Boompa likes being with the stars.”

In that conversation between me and a three year old, I realized that I’ve been waging a battle against the only place Mark felt safe and at home when not beside me. A quiet dwelling in a universe far bigger than we can imagine here, a shimmering, reverent nightlight in my often dark world, and the place my husband knew I’d look for him every night since he’s been gone.

When you’re deep in the well of grief and just trying to survive, something comes along weeks and months later called secondary losses. These are the unexpected ripples from a death that can come in all forms. It can be financial security, confidence, intimacy, the loss of a once active social life, future plans and dreams, loss of memories, loss of traditions, and loss of purpose.

By far the most unpredictable thing about secondary losses is the people you lose. In my case there have been entire chunks of family and friends who have disappeared with little to no contact after Mark’s funeral. Despite ongoing weekly therapy, there is nothing that could have prepared me for the pain caused by people I never imagined would vanish. Mark left his goodbye via a letter, and what I wouldn’t give to have looked in those pools of blue-green eyes of his at the end to tell him that making a life with him was my greatest joy. To say please don’t leave me. To say I promise you this will get better. To say that you are loved by more people than you can fathom. To say that your shame has had a grip on you for so long and with the right help you can let it go. To say thank you. To then lose people who have been in mine and Mark’s lives for decades without a farewell seems like a cruel blow on top of a death I will never understand.

As unpredictable as the losses so are the gains.

There have been so many people who showed up for me when I was at my worst, when I could not eat, talk, or sleep. They showed up at my door in the cold of winter with soup. They left gifts on my porch to cheer me up, they invited me over for a glass of wine and then got up to get Kleenex when we both started crying. They raked my leaves, cleaned my gutters, spread mulch, replaced a ceiling fan, fixed my dishwasher, shoveled my driveway. They asked me over for dinner, they bought and planted a tree in the backyard in memory of Mark, they meet me once a month for breakfast and happy hour. They have been the Red Cross of my personal crisis.

Often when I am down, I want to ask the others why they left. Why when my life collapsed did they flee? Other times I not only want to burn those bridges behind me, I want to toss grenades over my shoulder and implode everything.

Grief isn’t only sad, devastating, confusing, and lonely, it is often quite ragey.

On a Saturday afternoon a few weeks after Mark died, an old friend of his from grad school called me. Mark would run into Tom every so often at meetings and they had seen each other in February of last year. They loved to make each other laugh and easily fell into the most outrageous behavior when they were together. When I answered Tom said, “I wanted to call you sooner but I was too chicken.” I laughed and said, “Well, Tom, I adore you for saying that because it’s the most honest thing anyone has said to me in the last three weeks.”

For those who have knocked on my door and said, “This is for you because I don’t know what to say or do to make any of this better,” I profoundly admire their bravery. One of those unexpected knocks came a few weeks ago on Thanksgiving weekend. A friend of my oldest daughter that she met in 1st grade had something to deliver. It was from a Secret Santa who wished to remain anonymous but wanted me to know that, “You are seen in this community, you are loved by this community, and what you are writing is making a difference.” Inside a holiday shopping bag were 25 wrapped presents for every day in December until Christmas.

Like all of the unanticipated gifts that have been delivered, it made me cry. Who did this? Who knew what I needed when even I didn’t? Who went out and bought these things and then spent hours wrapping them and numbering them for me to open every day?

It is my nature to want to get to the bottom of such a mystery, to figure it out for my own curiosity, but like the many unknowns on the day Mark died, there are some things that I will never learn. I have chosen to not pry into this and accept it as the anonymous gift of love as it was intended. Every day when I open another gift I am moved that someone sees my pain and wanted to do something to diminish it.

The loss of Mark has shattered my heart and patching it back together again is a job that will last me a lifetime. In these last 15 months, I have discovered that there are angels among us who swoop in delivering love in every form imaginable, and as I daily straddle what I had and what is before me I cry in gratitude, longing, and fear.

But I do not cry alone and that has made all the difference.

I get asked often if I am getting better. Sometimes it’s asked less as a question and more an assumption. So you’re getting better, right? I don’t know what the answer is most of the time, but I can verify that the second year of grief does not magically make things better. Unlike last year there is no shock to soften the blow, no belief that all of this was a mistake and Mark will come back home. Rather, there is the ongoing emptiness where there used to be passion, laughter, and long conversations, an ever-present sinkhole that sucked up a life and a marriage.

If you asked me what my days were like at this time last year I would mostly not know. It is a blur. I’d cry both going and coming home from my job, but could rally while I was there to get my work done. It was a relief to have something else to think about but it took an enormous amount of energy to do that. Nobody tells you that grief feels like you’re carrying a 100# backpack all day long. You feel it the moment you open your eyes every morning and beg the gods to take some of the weight off of you. They hear you and your gift for surviving the first year is a trade-in for a 90# backpack.

During the cold and gray days of last winter, I would come home and lay on the couch with my coat on for hours. The house would get dark, and after awhile and a lot of inner dialogue about how I had to do something, I’d get up, take my coat off, feed the cats, clean up the kitchen, take care of bills, watch the news. Before long I’d be ready to go upstairs but I’d stand at the bottom of that staircase for the longest time. It felt like I was being asked to climb Mt. Everest. I’d put my hand on the banister and rest my head on top and tell myself that I could do it. I could go up those stairs. I’d slowly take each one until I reached the top where I could crawl into bed and cry until I fell asleep. The next night and the next and the next it would be the same thing, the same pep talk. You can do it. Just climb up the stairs and you get to go to bed.

Several months ago my brother and sister-in-law called me. I don’t know what we were talking about but I made some joke about my very effed up life and my brother said, “Kath, I’m so goddamn proud of you. Even after all of this you can find something to laugh about.” It made me want to weep because it was the first time somebody noticed how hard I was trying.

Last Saturday, I was getting ready to leave the house and left my phone upstairs. I went up and got it, came back down and then remembered something else upstairs. When I came back down the second time, it occurred to me that I had run up and down those stairs twice without even thinking about it.

So I’m getting better, right?

Some days, yes, but Mark’s death shocks me every single day and I think it will for the rest of my life. I survived the first year without him but am faced with the daunting challenge of remaking my life with no idea where to begin. Mark could tell me, he’d be the one who would list off all the things he thought I was good at, prop me up, and send me back into the arena. Without him I have lost my confidence, my bearings, and my passion, but on a cold Saturday in the waning days of fall I ran up the stairs twice, and sometimes I am goddamn proud of me too.

When our oldest daughter was in third grade and her teacher knew her dad was a scientist, she asked Maggie to find out from him what the definition of matter was and report back to the class. That night after dinner with pencil and paper in hand she posed the question. Mark lived for this kind of stuff and launched into a science lesson that went far over the head of a nine year old. Maggie, in utter frustration, laid her head on the table and said, “Why couldn’t I have a dad that painted houses for a living?”

When Mark and I went house shopping for the one and only home we’d ever have, we were all over the map on what we wanted and where. He loved a house we looked at that was far south of Kansas City, a house that had a kitchen on the second floor overlooking the living room. I said that the idea of hauling groceries up to a second floor kitchen seemed stupid, let alone keeping a toddler from tumbling down the stairs while I was making dinner. Mark said I was being negative. We looked at another house that had gold flocked wallpaper everywhere. I said that stripping all that wallpaper sounded like a nightmare. Mark said he’d help. I said no thanks. He said I wasn’t seeing the possibilities, and when we went in the backyard and saw an above ground pool covered in green algae he said I might be right about that one.

Every Sunday I’d get the newspaper and look at the open houses. I found a four bedroom house in an area we hadn’t looked at before, and we put the two kids we had at the time into their car seats and drove over to have a look. It was a cape cod built in the 1940s, and the street was lined with trees in their fall glory. From the outside the house had its issues. It was painted an unflattering pale pink and had a deck on the front of the house that made no sense. Inside, though, it was well maintained, and as we made our way through the first floor I was deciding bedrooms in my head. In the hallway of the 2nd floor, I turned to Mark and said, “I love this house. This is the house. This is the one I think we should buy.” He loved it, too, and by December we were moving our family in.

The house had an old-fashioned charm about it that I felt in my bones. It had a lilac bush like my grandma had, a forsythia that bloomed every April, and peonies that burst open every May. We would meet a previous owner who lived in the house for many years with their three kids, and were so happy to know that a family of five occupied the house once again. One Saturday when I was in the middle of having the kitchen torn apart because I was painting the cabinets, a guy stopped by and asked if he could take some pictures. He had lived in the house years before and so I brought him through the inside and peppered him with questions about some odd things I couldn’t figure out. I always felt honored to be an occupant of this house and the keeper of new memories. If these walls could talk, I’d often think, what stories would they tell?

Since Mark died, these walls hold a flood of tears that if unleashed would seep through the drywall and spill onto the floor. Did another spouse lose the most important person in their life and then wander around this house as if a stranger? Did they look at the pumpkins on the front porch and a carpet of orange in the yard and have the most bittersweet memories of their husband burying their kids in the leaves and all of them howling with laughter? Did the clock stop for them one day and after that nothing seemed to mean very much?

In Maggie’s homework assignment, Mark simplified matter and told her it is the stuff that makes up the universe – atoms, protons, molecules. “The stuff all around us,” he said, “most of it you can see but some of it you can’t like the air we breathe.”

When I think about these decades old conversations, I wonder why they bubble to the top of so many entangled memories and emotions in this last year. It’s as if they are fighting for space in my head to be remembered so they can teach me an old lesson in a new way. All those years ago when I sat at the dining room table and listened as Mark was describing matter, maybe he was telling me that one day when I am alone in this house that we loved and raised our family in, that he will be close by. That with every breath I take and every one I exhale he won’t be as far away as I sometimes think.

That he will still be here.

Alive in the unseen.