A Speckled Trout

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.

Dance, then, wherever you may be, I am the Lord of the dance, said he, and I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be, and I’ll lead you all in the dance, said he.

For as long as Mark and I were together, dancing was a part of our lives. Neither of us were very good at it but it didn’t stop us. We’d slow dance as best we could, and lamely move our clumsy feet to the faster stuff, never really caring how dorky we looked. Years ago when we were at one of Mark’s department Christmas parties and were on the dance floor, his boss danced over to us with his wife and said, “You need to do the prom shuffle.” We looked at him oddly not knowing what that was and he said, “Didn’t you learn that at your high school prom? That’s when you grab each other’s ass and go around in a circle.” Mark thought that was so hilarious that he would use that line over and over.

When the kids were growing up we danced with them too. One night when we were coming home from Costco, we could hear the thump of music from down the street. When we got home, Maggie and a friend had pushed all of the furniture against the wall so they could dance. At a wedding I asked Will where he learned his impressive dance moves because it was apparent they didn’t come from his parents. “In the dorms at college,” he said, and I didn’t know that the housing fee came with an added bonus. Mallory started taking dance when she was in 2nd grade and she would blow us all out of the water with her dancing. We all went to her recitals because watching our own Tiny Dancer representing the Fishers made us proud.

I was pregnant with Maggie while Mark was finishing up grad school when we went to the wedding of his advisor. Out on the dance floor, I vividly remember the conversation. “Mark,” I said, “we’re going to have such a beautiful life. You’re going to be a hotshot professor and babies are coming into our life and I’m so happy right now.” He was too. It was the start of his career, and though filled with uncertainty about where and how it would lead our young family, we were excited for it to begin.

It would lead us out of Illinois and into Maryland where Mark got a post-doctoral position at the National Institutes of Health. Five years later, Mark’s career would bring us to Kansas where he was one of hundreds of applicants for an assistant professor position. During the interview process which lasted two days, his future boss brought him to his house for dinner. His wife owned a catering business and Mark devoured everything she made. “He loves food,” she told her husband. “That’s all you need to know. Hire him.” There were other factors that were considered besides that but he landed the job, we jumped for joy, and danced in the kitchen. Then we moved a U-Haul, two kids, and a turtle across the country. Our time in Kansas was supposed to be a stopping off point to other things. Mark felt that a job on either coast would be far better for his research and he was probably right, but it was where we stayed and made our life.

Four days after Mark’s funeral, was the wedding of my nephew, Doug, and his fiancee in Colorado. In the midst of the tragic end to Mark’s life was this commitment we had made to attend the wedding. Though Mark initially planned on going with us, he had an early class to teach the following day. He would have to leave the wedding early that Sunday night and get to the airport in order to be home in time to teach, so his plan had been to stay back in Kansas while the rest of us went.

There were many discussions about whether the kids and I should go or not. I think everyone assumed we wouldn’t. I thought otherwise. We piled into two cars and drove to Colorado, shaky and shocked to start our very different lives – lives we could not fathom less than two weeks before. It was hard, incredibly hard. There was a river near where we were staying that Mark would have loved, and we were surrounded by nature. It was beautiful and peaceful and stinging with loss all at the same time. If the wedding had been even a month after Mark’s death I’m not sure I could have gone. By then the passing days of regular life had become awful, as night after night he didn’t come home even though I kept waiting for him.

Thirteen months later I am still stunned by Mark’s death. It is an odd thing to be living in a real and surreal environment simultaneously. His bike never has coasted around the corner again, but the black dress pants that he last wore are folded in his closet with the belt still threaded through the loops and his gardening shoes are on the back porch.

At the wedding reception, the kids and I sat together and watched the best man and maid of honor give their speeches, we watched my brother and the bride’s mother give speeches. We watched my nephew dance with his mom, and his beautiful Helen dance with her father. Sometimes we had to look away because it was too painful to witness, but in the end we did what we have always known to do when presented with the chance to celebrate life and love.

We danced.

For all of my life, I have been directionally challenged. When I was a kid, my dad would take me on the front porch and turn my shoulders this way and that to point out north, south, east, and west. When he was finished he’d turn my shoulders again and say, “Okay, which way are you facing?” Despite all his efforts, I would fail miserably at the quiz. The office I worked at in Chicago was on Michigan Avenue, so when I got lost on my lunch break I knew to head towards the lake and I’d be able to figure it out. I haven’t been able to figure out how to exit the doctor’s office I’ve been going to for ten years. I make the wrong turn every single time, bypassing the lab, and ending up in the day surgery section by mistake.

Thankfully, I married Mark who could read a map, a compass, the sky, and the sun to figure his way over the river and through the woods. He loved looking at an atlas, and many years ago when I got him a new one for his birthday, he spent hours with it on the kitchen table. He’d look at states he’d been to and states he hadn’t, he looked at mountain elevations, big cities, small towns. He counted the lakes in Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin. He studied the atlas.

On our many road trips, he’d pass the atlas to me to figure out where we should go. This was a ridiculous act of faith, but he had the false confidence to believe that I could pull us through. He would tell me when he was about to come to a *panic point*, where a decision had to be made on which way to go. This made me panic and I’d get nervous and flustered. When we drove to Florida and were crossing Missouri into Arkansas, he had one of his Driving Panic Point Attacks and was yelling at me to “TELL ME WHERE THE FUCK I AM SUPPOSED TO GO!!!” I shouted back THAT I WAS TRYING and he looked over at me and said, “You aren’t even on the right state. You’re in Alabama. Give. Me. The. Atlas.” Then he propped it on the steering wheel while driving 80 mph and I said, “You’re going to kill all of us with your multitasking,” and he looked at me and said, “If you could not talk right now that would be really helpful.”

Fun times.

Last summer we were supporting a candidate for the U.S. House in our district. At one of our neighborhood gatherings after Trump had won, I pulled out my liberal soapbox and said that we all had to do more than just vote when it came to democracy. “We’ve got to work for a candidate,” I said, “really work.” The candidate we were backing was in our neighborhood twice, and on the second visit someone working on his campaign asked me if I would want to canvas for him. I didn’t even know what canvassing meant but I knew I wanted nothing to do with it. But all the neighbors were there and I couldn’t refuse the opportunity to work for democracy with their judgey ears listening in.

“It’s no big deal,” she said, “We have targeted homes where both spouses voted democrat so those are the ones where we want to leave information. We give you an app to download and all the addresses and a map are on it. You leave the info, check off the house, and go to the next.”

Easy peasey.

And a week went by and another, and then another and I did nothing. Finally, I asked Mark if he could help me, because whenever I got in over my head I’d drag him into my cesspool of things-I-shouldn’t-have-said-yes-to-but-did-so-now-you-need-to-help-me-figure-this-out. He agreed thinking this was a necessary civic duty as a voter and we started on a Thursday night. Before long it got dark and I couldn’t see anything as we went up and down unlit street after unlit street. “It’s a good thing we’re not an ambulance saving somebody from a heart attack,” I said, “because not only has America lost its mind it no longer believes in putting addresses on its houses.” Mark ignored me, would shout with gusto when he found a house on our list, and run the information onto their doorstep. “Good way to get your steps in,” he said while he whistled from stop to stop.

On Saturday afternoon we started up again. I was wearing some skinny jeans, a cute top, and a Maybelline lipstick called Rebel, which in my mind was the perfect outfit for candidate canvassing. We were one town over from ours and it didn’t take long for things to go due south. I was in charge of reading the map on the phone which wasn’t working out so well, my Rebel was smearing, and Mark suddenly got dyslexia. I would say, “Next stop 9419 Aberdeen,” and he would say “Got it. 9491 Aberdeen” and I’d have to check the app again. Was it 9419 or 9491? I’d get so confused and he’d be driving and saying, “9407, 9411, 9415, 9419, 9423….” I’d screech back, “9419, MARK!! It’s 9419!! You passed it.” It went on like this for three hours. It was so hot and humid and we were in and out of the car so much that I could never cool off. My skinny jeans were plastered to my sweaty thighs, I hated this democracy work, and Mark was whistling and getting his steps in and life was just so grand for him. I’d comment on people’s landscaping and front door colors and ask the philosophical question of our times. “Why do you think people need such big houses? Like what do they do in those houses that they need them so big? Do you think a big house makes you happier than a small house? Mark, look but don’t look at that guy mowing his lawn. You can tell he’s got a media room, can’t you? Everything about him says media room. He probably goes to work on Monday and when somebody asks him how his weekend was he says, “Great, me and the wife stayed in and watched movies in our media room.” He probably calls her the wife all the time instead of her name, don’t you think? I bet she’s got a craft room. Have ever seen those, Mark? People build houses that have rooms FOR THEIR CRAFTS.”

Finally Mark said, “What in the hell is wrong with you?” I said everything.

At our halfway point we entered a neighborhood that was nothing but one cul de sac after another. We were in and out of those things forever, dropping off information at one, driving to the next, maybe dropping off two in that one. Our pile of pamphlets never went down. “I have to go home,” I said to Mark. “I cannot do this for another minute.” “Yes you can,” he said, “you’re just bored.” This was true. I had found myself in a suburban tour of half circles of hell with no way out and making up stories about people I had never seen before.

I was slipping away.

The day only got hotter and muggier, and when we’d done nearly all of our houses and I’d told Mark my delicate Irish skin could not take one more minute of this heat, he finally agreed we should call it a day. When we got home I took a shower and then took to my bed with the vapors while Mark mowed the grass. Our candidate didn’t win which I took as a crushing defeat FOR ALL OF MY HARD HALF ASS WORK. Mark said that’s how things go sometimes and he moved on. It took me longer than him to come to terms with it but that day was the perfect example of nearly our entire marriage. A memorable shitstorm that we would tell the kids about, and Mark would imitate me until we were all laughing so hard we were crying.

When Mark died, I called very few people. Sharing the heartbreaking news with the kids was too much and I knew I wasn’t capable of doing that over and over. I called both of my sisters and asked them to tell my mom and brothers, I called Mark’s sister and she offered to tell their mom, I called my boss, and a close friend of both of ours.

The next day I asked two friends if they could let some of the rest of our friends know what had happened. In both cases they asked me what I wanted them to say to people. “The truth,” I said, “just tell them the truth.” I never considered telling anyone that Mark’s death was the result of an accident. He had been biking daily for 17 years so the idea that he accidentally rode his bike onto an oncoming train was inconceivable to anyone who knew him. He was too good at cycling for that to even be a possibility and I knew I was in no position to make up a story and keep it straight.

But being truthful about how he died has not been easy. It has opened doors to continuing questions that have gutted me. Why he ended his life, what triggered him, how could I not know how fragile he had become in such a short amount of time. In the telling of his story, there are painful parts that will never be shared. He trusted me with his anguish and I can’t imagine a reason to betray that trust.

For months after Mark died, I laid awake night after night listening to the sound of trains off in the distance and the thumping of a heart that literally felt like it was cracking. This is how everything turns to black, I thought, and I remembered I had a bottle of sleeping pills in the nightstand. Every night I thought about those sleeping pills until I got so scared that I got up and buried them in a basket on a shelf in the linen closet. If I got to the point of considering swallowing every one of them, I’d have to get out of bed, turn on the hallway light, and dig them out of the basket. By moving them I thought it would buy me enough time to reconsider what I was about to do. Months later when I told a friend she asked, “How could you possibly do that to your kids after what they’ve been through?” I wasn’t thinking of my kids. I was only thinking of being with Mark, and I became agonizingly aware that anyone can teeter on the edge of life and death.

As if I needed it, I was inundated with reminders that September is Suicide Awareness and Prevention month. After weeks of raging at this much needed public service announcement, I wondered why it was pissing me off so much. Why wouldn’t I want everyone to be aware of the aftermath of suicide? Why wouldn’t I want to know the signs to watch for? Why wouldn’t I want every family to be spared from what mine wasn’t?

Over the years if the subject of suicide ever came up, Mark would joke that he could never kill himself. “I love me too much,” he would say and we would all laugh because the thought of it was absurd. But over the course of just a few days, he would spiral into a hell of shame that led to him ending his life. I would have done anything to prevent that from happening.

Anything.

I daily ask myself what I should have done differently, for forgiveness for failing him, for the clock of September 4th to be rewound. And more recently, I have begun to ask myself if I am the only person on this earth who is more interested in having a conversation about how my husband lived rather than how he died.

In the course of his career, if Mark had a paper published in a big journal or had a cool discovery in the lab, he would hang it on the fridge with a magnet like the kids did when they aced a test. The things that he was proud of last summer are still on the fridge this summer.

Scattered around here now are many photos of Mark. The one I took of him in Portugal, the one when we went to the meteor crater in Arizona, the one Maggie took of him holding Mabel on a lunch date just a few short weeks before he died and she had to go back to her teaching job. At every turn are pieces of Mark’s life that I pass by many times a day. I have stared at these photos endlessly and always sigh and think the same thing.

Oh Mark.

When did it all go so wrong? When we had Sunday dinner with the kids did you memorize everything about them because you knew it was the last time you would share a meal with them? Or did you get on your bike to clear your head that morning and end up at the train tracks without even planning it? Did you sleep at all that night? Did you ever so quietly come into the bedroom early in the morning to get your biking clothes? When you headed down the driveway and onto the street did you take one look back at the house we loved and excitedly bought together? The house I was sleeping in?

The one year anniversary of Mark’s death was this week. I went to work the day before and was useless from start to finish. At the end of the day, I cried as soon as I walked out of my building and cried when I walked into my therapist’s office. On the drive there I thought about that awful afternoon once again and wondered how I got to the police station. I remember getting the phone call from them and I remember emailing my boss that I was leaving. I don’t remember driving there, parking the car, getting out of it, or walking inside. I remember everything after that.

How is it possible that such a life changing event is so vivid and so foggy at the same time? How is it that a year has passed since then and there are weeks on end that I have no memory of? How is it that everything feels like it happened yesterday except the last time I heard Mark’s laugh? How is it that I lived with him for 35 years but have to watch videos to remember that laugh?

One of the things Mark was most proud of was being the first lab in the world to make a 2D image of an anthrax pore. He hung the copy of it on the fridge, showed all of us the image on his computer many times, and entered it as an auction item in the Science 2 Art exhibit to raise funds for STEM programs in high school. At the art opening, they played a video of each scientist explaining what their art represented. Mark was last and when it was over I said to him, “Oh my god, Mark, you were the closer.” He looked at me and asked, “What does that even mean?” “What it means,” I said, “is that they save the strongest storyteller to be the finisher. To be the closer is a big deal.” Later when he would talk about it with other people he’d say, “Yeah, it was pretty cool. Not that big of a deal except, you know, I was the closer. You know what that means, right?”

In order to make this unbearable week less so for his two grieving PhD. students, I had the idea to have some kind of sciencey sugar cookies made for them and delivered to the med center. My daughter one-upped that and had the brilliance to ask our local bakery if they could make cookies that resemble the anthrax pore. She sent them the image and they said they could and I picked them up Thursday. When they opened the box to show me I gasped, put my hand to my heart and said, “Oh you guys, you have no idea.”

One year later, Mark’s death still continues to rock my world on such a daily basis that I am unsure of everything. For months on end it was a disappointment for the alarm clock to go off and find myself still alive. That isn’t so much the case lately, but I can’t tell if I really am content to be on this side of life or if I’ve grown accustomed to the disappointment.

Every day since then another page is torn from the calendar and flutters away. I have spent every one of those days weathering the crashing waves of grief while reminding myself that there are many people in Mark’s orbit that mourn his loss too. Their loss isn’t as devastating as mine, but regardless of that I know they look to me in hope for signs of healing. Sometimes I can rise to the occasion and sometimes I can’t. All I’m certain of now is that when the time comes for my journey to end, I’ll sigh and take a long last look at one of those photos of my husband and tell him what I tell myself every day.

Oh Mark.

We did the best we could didn’t we?

The universe is in your bones, the stars in your soul; it’s never really the end.
-David Jones

Mark and I had always agreed that when we died we wanted to be cremated. What to do after that was never discussed because even though we frequently said, “You can’t get out of here alive,” it turns out we never actually believed it. In those conversations about the inevitable, I knew I always wanted to be the one that went first. Life without Mark seemed like it would be so boring (and it is), and I thought that if I went first he’d have his work to pour himself into whereas I’d struggle to fill my days with any sort of meaning.

After the funeral was over and Mark’s ashes came home with me, I had no idea of how, when, and where to spread them. Or should I spread them? Maybe they should stay in the house with me? As time went on it became more obvious that keeping them wasn’t a good idea. The downstairs bedroom became the catchall for everything from the funeral and his office, and on top of the bed sat the box with his ashes; a constant, daily reminder that dust was all that was left. I couldn’t look at them any more and so I put them in my closet where they stayed a constant, daily reminder but one that didn’t seem to jolt me so much.

Two years ago Mark and I went to Los Angeles to visit our youngest daughter who had moved there to pursue a dance career. On our bucket list was to cross another national park off and go to Yosemite. Like everything we did in our lives, we planned none of it ahead of time. The idea was that we would drive up there, see the park, get a room for the three of us for the night, go back to the park for a few more hours the next day and then drive back to Los Angeles. Before we had a chance to consider that there was an outbreak of wild fires in Yosemite that was making the news, and so we decided to postpone it until our next visit. Because of our disappointment of not being able to go there, I mentioned to the kids that maybe that was the place that we should spread Mark’s ashes. While I probably would have mulled that over for too long never committing to anything, one of those kids has been a school teacher for years and knows how to hit the accelerator and get people moving.

We decided that getting out of our environment during the week of Father’s Day and Mark’s birthday seemed like the best time to go. For weeks prior I had terrible anxiety about the whole idea. I questioned whether or not it was the right decision, if it was something that I wouldn’t be able to go through with, if not being able to see his remains in a box in the closet would tip the scale for me from barely coping to insanity. But plans were made, flights and an AirBnB were booked, and a time frame established to pick up the youngest Fisher. We landed in LA and headed north for a shaky family adventure.

As soon as we got one look at that stunning park I knew it was the right thing to do. Mark would have loved it, and though the absence of him broke me many times over, we all very much felt him right alongside of us. I hoped that meant he was giving his stamp of approval for this idea. We left his ashes along the biggest trees, and on the forest floor between two saplings. We left them in small creeks and roaring rivers, and I knew if he was there he would have disappeared to walk along the bank only to come back and say, “You won’t believe the size of the fish in here, Kath.” It was along one of those rivers that I bent down and scooped some of that cold, clear water in my hand and drank it, hoping it would baptize all of us with some peace. We cried at every place we left him and then would silently walk away, all lost in our thoughts that vacillated like the river between calm and roaring, and was it only the roaring that Mark heard that early Tuesday morning?

I didn’t get to go first like I wanted to, and his life didn’t end with the peace and love that he lived most of his days, but we finished the job that none of us wanted. We delivered Mark to his final destination to join the drumbeat of life that he was insatiably curious about, and every night we go to sleep under the same moon which will have to do for now.

The other day I was watching my daughter’s two kiddos and my granddaughter started talking about the vacation all of us took in June. I asked her if she liked that, liked that all of us took a trip together, and she said, “Yes, but next time we have to pick up Boompa and bring him with us.” I told her that would be wonderful but that I’m not sure where he is. She said that he is in the United States and we need to find him and bring him with us.

When my daughter came home from the visitation of a teacher friend’s beloved mother-in-law to pick up the kids, she said that as soon as she saw her friend’s husband she lost it and sighed at how little support she was to him. “That was honest,” I told her. “You know what it’s like to stand and greet people who mourn your loss but could never understand what it was like to be the child of your dad. They try but the void is too massive to begin to explain.” She said that she always thinks of Mark not being here which I think all of us have in common. He couldn’t have possibly died as the finality of that word is too much.

He simply is not here.

I cannot move his shoes, his ballcaps are on the railing post upstairs, his coats in the closet, his phone on the buffet, his keys by the front door, his bikes in the garage. He’s not here but he can’t be dead so I leave everything where it was in case he decides there isn’t right for him. There is a basket of unwritten thank you cards for supporting us after his death but should those finally get written and sent? What if he wants to be back here? Wouldn’t that be confusing? And if that were to happen should I reimburse everyone for all the food and flowers that flooded the house?

I open his closet and all his sport coats hang by color – something I did because I like to organize. The linen blazer that he wore to a retirement party we went to last summer and a wedding the summer before. The one that he would put on and I’d say, “Dang, Mark Fisher, you look goooood in that.” How can I possibly fold that up and put in a bag to donate? Would somebody at a thrift store know he wore that for me because I always told him he looked hot in it?

Should I leave the toothpaste he bought in the dollar aisle at the grocery store? The one that made me wonder if it passed any kind of inspection? Because if he came back I could fling open the hallway closet and say here’s your toothpaste. I saved it because I know how much you prided yourself on saving more money than I ever did at the grocery store. That I still buy peaches and let them go bad because every summer he rated them and if they were so juicy he had to eat them over the kitchen sink he’d say “buy more of this kind” and I do but can’t bring myself to eat a single one. That I buy the yogurt he liked and when he would finish spooning it out he’d run his finger along the inside to get every last bit. That if he came back I’d say, “Mark, even though I thought that was gross I do it now too. So I can get every last bit.”

That his summer bike clothes and his winter bike clothes are all where he left them and I don’t look at them because I especially liked when he wore the blue shorts and shirt. That when he’d come home sweaty, unfasten his helmet, and take off his glasses the bluey-green pools that were his eyes would pop against the blue shirt. That I sleep on his side of the bed now with my back to the other side so I don’t have to look at the emptiness.

I have often heard that the veil between here and there is razor thin. Is it the ones who haven’t lost it all that say that because to me it feels like a chasm far too wide to reach him? Since Mark died, the kids and I end most conversations with an “I love you”, something that was not a habit before. Now it comes out with ease because if this is the day you go there then by God you are going to go knowing you are loved.

The funny thing is that even now when we know that is possible because we are living it, we are audaciously hopeful enough to believe that it is inconceivable that those of us left to carry Mark’s story will not be here tomorrow. And maybe that’s a blinking flashlight from there saying I see you, I’ll always love you with my banged up heart and soul, and I’ve saved you a seat beside me when your work is done.

Mark and I were married on July 30th, 1983. The following month Mark would be back at the University of Illinois for his second year of graduate school, this time with a wife. I was leaving a full-time job in Chicago processing employee medical claims for a large utility company. I was about to be unemployed, uninsured, moving two hours away to a small college town, and marrying a student who received a monthly stipend of $600 for teaching undergraduate classes.

This marriage started on a wing and most likely the desperate prayers by my parents who in private conversations must have been beside themselves with worry about how this daughter and new husband were ever going to make it. To add another layer, this daughter’s soon-to-be husband was not a Catholic, which in their eyes was the equivalent to marrying a pagan who worshiped stars and made brews of tree bark in the forest while howling at the moon. The final straw was the wish of their gypsy, middle offspring for a smaller wedding than her siblings had with no band, no event space, no frills. A simple ceremony in church followed by a party in the backyard under a big tent. My dad said, “Well that’s a fine idea but you can’t count on the weather to cooperate,” and I said, “That’s okay, Dad, I’m not worried.” I didn’t need to worry. He had that part under control, and if anyone said to me that the whole idea of me marrying my broke boyfriend with a party in the backyard at the end of July would lead to his early death a few years later I wouldn’t argue with them. Everything I was about to do was the opposite of how he lived his life.

I also wanted a simple, tea-length dress but my mom was not on board with that idea and I knew I was pushing my luck. Maybe she felt it wasn’t pure enough for church, and it didn’t seem appropriate to tell her while shopping for white wedding gowns that that was no longer in question. We settled on something that covered everything but my face and hands and I looked like a virgin Shiite Catholic. While I was getting fancied up in the dress I didn’t like nearly as much as my mom did, I would later learn that my dad would spend the entire day looking at the sky, looking at the outdoor thermometer, looking at the barometric pressure, and looking at my mom and saying, “For God’s sake, I knew this was a bad idea.” She in her wisdom (or maybe in resignation over this entire wedding mutiny) said, “Well, whatever you do don’t say anything to Kathy.”

I wouldn’t have cared if he had. I was too excited to marry my student husband and start our new, poor life together. I stood at the back of the non air-conditioned church with sweat trickling down my dress and slipped my hand around Dad’s arm. “Are you ready?” he asked me. I nodded and he said, “Then let’s do this with class, Kath,” and I walked up the aisle with my favorite man in the world until Mark Fisher showed up at my door five years earlier and replaced him.

I remember my dad’s smile during the reception afterwards, how relaxed he was, how he and my mom and everyone else seemed to be enjoying this day. It would set the tone for the decades to follow. To know that the people who have cheered you on since you were born were now cheering for your love.

The wedding was the start of Mark and I doing things our way. Sometimes they worked, sometimes they blew up in our face. We rarely planned anything. In the early years of our marriage this would frustrate me with Mark, but he loathed planning and scheduling on his free time as his work life was ruled by class schedules and deadlines. He much preferred when he was with me and the kids to let life surprise and unfold before him.

Last year we went out to dinner and toasted to #35, and there was no reason to think that we wouldn’t be celebrating many more anniversaries together. Things were going well, we were back in rhythm as a couple who could finally spend more time together, we loved to travel and had our wish list of places we wanted to see. Knowing Mark as long as I did, I believe his death was not planned or thought about until the early morning hours of September 4th, when lack of sleep and new and old things began swirling that would take him quickly to a very dark place. In thinking about those moments he had alone with his demons, I wonder why he didn’t come to me for help, pour his worries on me, ask me to sit beside him until the sun came up. I have to constantly remind myself that when someone reaches the point of ending their life, stopping the pain is the only option.

I would have wished for Mark’s death to be surrounded by me and our kids, the people who knew him best, who loved him passionately. To have walked him to the passageway between here and there and whispered thank you for every minute of it, even the hard stuff. I didn’t have that chance and so I live in gratitude for the beautiful life we created and mourn what was left undone, unsaid, and unplanned.

After our wedding reception was over and everyone had left, the hot, humid skies that had been threatening all day opened up and poured down, as if the first day of our married life was baptized with fire and rain. We would spend 35 years together, years that went by in a blink, and the only regrets were for the times we failed each other in the grace and forgiveness that is required both here and there.