A Speckled Trout

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.

Sometimes when I go to therapy it can be very uneventful. I’ve been rehashing the same story since January when I started going and am often bored by the repetitiveness of it. I just want this thing fixed so I can get some semblance of happy and normal back in my life. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.

Someone recently told me that I didn’t deserve what happened to me and I didn’t know what to do with that statement. Nobody deserves to have bad things happen to them and I have never believed I was immune from tragedy. What I deserve or don’t in life isn’t a place I ever visit, either before Mark’s death or after, but it got me thinking and I talked about it in my therapy session. “Well, no,” my therapist said, “you didn’t deserve this.”

We talked a lot about that and it feels to me that in order to believe that I have to get mad at Mark. That feels dangerous. To shake my fists and rail against the person I miss the most, the nerdy science guy who fell for the girl with the wild hair, who misses him so desperately she hasn’t figured out how to function without him. And if I do get really pissed and rage for all that his death has caused me to go through since September, will I stay in a place of anger for the rest of my life? That feels even more dangerous.

What I feel safe getting angry about is Mark not sticking with therapy, for not opening up the can of shame and regret that eventually caused him to end his life. For not digging down so deep that he goes back to the little boy who didn’t understand what was going on around him or could even put a name to it. I heard many of those stories the weekend before he died, things I never heard before. Difficult, emotional stories that seared his memory and obviously made a lasting impact. I could only listen. He was the one who had to do the hard work with a therapist of putting the pieces together to figure out how it affected him his whole adult life, and like many things we all deal with going back decades, he locked it up until the sides bulged and exploded.

Like the anguish he must have been in that morning when he wheeled his bike out of the garage, mine burns with the intensity of two people who thought everything would be okay until it wasn’t. In the letter he left behind he said he was sorry FOR ALL THE PAIN and God knows I am, too. Sorry he felt like this was the only solution, sorry I never heard him get up in the morning, sorry for a life that was so vibrant and full and then over, sorry I failed to see what triggered him until months after he died, sorry I didn’t nag him about therapy, sorry for all I did not see until it was too late.

This last week has been merciless in regret and sadness. Facebook says Mercury is in retrograde which is disruptive and can cause a host of problems. Is that what is causing this inability to find any peace? I’m not sure. I know that I carry Mark’s hurt and tend my own and that is often crushing regardless of where Mercury happens to be. The pain that Mark’s death inflicted on me was never intentional, he wasn’t that kind of person, but it has stayed front and center and it isn’t going anywhere until I deal with it.

How I do that will continue to be a long and uphill road, and the what ifs seem like they will haunt me forever. In less than two months it will be a year since Mark has been gone. At once it seems like yesterday and a lifetime ago when I would be telling him a story and he would push the curls from my face. “God, I love your hair,” he would say to me and we would both smile because we knew we had it made.

It was Mark’s daily habit to check on the many birdfeeders he had around the yard. Some had regular bird seed, some had finch feed, there were sunflower seeds, and nectar for the hummingbird feeders. I’m not sure when this started but it was important to him to make sure the birds feeders were always full, especially in the winter. “They have a hard life out in the cold,” he’d say to me as he headed off to the store to get more seed.

Besides loving to provide food for the birds, he also loved observing them. He could name every bird that came to the yard and whether or not they were male or female. If it was unfamiliar to him he’d sit on the screened porch and comb through his bird book until he was sure of the species and then come in and show me what new bird had come by for a visit. His constant nemesis in this hobby, though, were the squirrels. Over the years he bought many squirrel-proof feeders which lasted about a week before they figured out how their entire family could snack on the food he bought for the birds. “They’re nothing but rats with tails,” he’d say to me, and what started as an annoyance became a full-blown war. We’d be eating dinner and he’d keep an eye on the backyard. If he spotted a squirrel at the feeder he’d jump out of his chair, sometimes knocking it over to run out and scream and flail his arms at them to get away from his birdseed. The velocity of him launching himself out of his chair would give me a near heart attack every time. “I don’t know about the squirrels,” I’d say, “but you scared the hell out of me.”

One day he came up with the idea to grease the pole the squirrels had to climb to get to the feeder. He grabbed some Crisco out of the cabinet, took it outside, and slathered it on the pole. “Hee, hee, hee,” he chuckled, “let’s see how they get into my feeder now.” This lasted a few days until the squirrels got Paw Pole Grabbers at the Squirrel Store and were right back in his feeder taunting him. “Those son of a bitches,” Mark would mutter.

Finally he got a squirrel trap and started baiting them. He’d cackle at them when they landed in squirrel jail and would load the trap into the car and let them go in the park a few blocks away. “You know,” I’d tell him, “they’re back in the yard before you even pull into the driveway. I can tell by their markings. You know how you can tell birds apart that way? That’s how I identify squirrels.” There was absolutely no truth in this. I just wanted to mess with him. He told me I was full of crap but after that conversation he started dropping them off at a park five miles away.

When the gardening bug hit Mark, the squirrel population doubled. They loved his tomatoes, so tasty. His trapping took on a new urgency so he bought another one and was jailing them and releasing them nearly daily. He started counting his trapped squirrels and would tell the neighbors. “Guess how many I’ve gotten so far? 47!!! 47 furry rats are no longer in this neighborhood and you are welcome.” I’d sigh and roll my eyes and wonder if he was tallying his catch on the garage walls. It was like living with the Rain Man.

Sometimes his trapping would be a problem for me. Squirrels in cages have high amounts of anxiety and would run back and forth in the cage frantically. If they got trapped in the morning they wouldn’t get released until he got home from work and probably died from adrenaline overload shortly after they got sprung. One time two little girls knocked on the door. They had seen a squirrel in the trap as they were walking by and were highly distressed. I told them that the squirrel was fine and he’d be going to a new home in, oh, about fourish hours. This didn’t satisfy them and they stared at me with their sad eyes until I went out and let it go. “You can’t trap your squirrels in the side yard,” I told Mark. “I can’t deal with distraught, little girls knocking on our door as they’re walking by.” He considered this for a bit and said, “Did you tell them that they are furry rats? That I’m actually doing a service for this entire neighborhood in getting rid of them?” “No,” I said, “they’re little girls. I didn’t want to ruin their happy, little world with your rat ramblings.”

One day I was at work and had to go into a staff meeting. I was expecting a call from a doctor’s office so I took my phone in with me and twenty minutes later it rang. I ducked out of the meeting and into the hallway. It wasn’t the doctor’s office on the phone but Mark.

M: Hey, Kath, yeah, so just wondering something. Is your car in the parking garage where you usually park?
K: Yes, why? What’s up?
M: Funny thing. Kind of crazy, actually. I took a shower and shaved and kept thinking there was something I was forgetting to do. I rode to work and I kept thinking and thinking the whole way. So I get to my office and then it hits me. I trapped a squirrel and put it in the back of your car and forgot to let it go before you left for work.
K: Are you…
M:
K: Are you….
M:
K: Are you telling me that I drove to work this morning with a fucking squirrel in the back of the car? Are you really telling me that?
M: Yes. Yes, I am.
K: Why? Why would you do that?
M: Maybe you didn’t hear me. I said I forgot.
K: Who forgets a live animal in the back of a car?
M: Me.
K:
M: It’s kind of funny don’t you think?
K:
M:
K:
M: Are you there?
K: Yes.
M: You’re not saying much. What’s wrong?
K: Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I was driving around this morning with a fucking squirrel in the car. Maybe it’s got me a little wigged out.
M: I’m surprised you didn’t hear it.
K: I heard a rattle but I thought something was wrong with the car.
M: Nooooooooo. That was the squirrel. Probably had a nice nap and then woke up and was like hey I’ve gotten kidnapped and now she’s taking me across the state line.
K:
M: Then he probably sent signals to the posse that he’s a victim in a squirrel felony.
K:
M: You’re not saying anything again. You aren’t mad are you?
K: Nooooooooo. Why would I be mad?
M: Good, good. Okay, I’m going to ride over on my bike and let it go.
K: I swear to god, Mark, if the car smells like squirrel pee I’m going to be so pissed at you.
M: Calm down, Curly. #1. You and I both know you don’t have any idea what squirrel pee smells like. #2. I’m about to fix this whole situation. #3. You’re acting squirrely.
K:
M: I made a squirrel joke.
K: I heard.
M: You’re supposed to laugh.
K: Just do me a favor. Don’t let the thing go by the dorms, okay? Just be as inconspicuous as you can be.
M: Roger that. I’ll be as inconspicuous as a guy in spandex can be carrying a squirrel jail.

I walked back into the meeting and my boss asked me if everything was okay. “Actually, no,” I said. “There’s a squirrel in my car.” This statement made a big thud in the room and everyone looked at me until my boss asked, “Why is there a squirrel in your car?”

“Because I am married to the Rain Man.”

A few weeks ago I was telling my therapist about something that was in the works that was causing me some distress. It has been my lifelong habit to worry and what if most problems, events, or decisions. Never did I what if my husband dying by suicide, and if you can’t predict that someone you’ve known for forty years was capable of that you should probably throw that worthless stash of what ifs off a cliff. Even so…..

“Is your worry because you feel like you’ll have to wear a mask too long?”, she asked me. That was absolutely it. The mask is my daily grief accessory, the one I wear to show the world that I am rising from the ashes of Mark’s death, the one that people see and tell me that I look great and seem to be doing just fine. Once inside the house, though, it gets flung off as quickly as a pair of too tight shoes.

After Mark’s death the outpouring of love and support was overwhelming. I was in shock and would stay in shock for months and months, but these days as that has slowly worn off I often feel at my lowest point. All around me life goes on as it always does, but I am stuck on that September day when my whole life went up in flames and I couldn’t see through the smoke to know who was actually living and who was dead. I was told that it was Mark who was dead, but how come it felt like I was too?

Since then I have checked all the boxes of recommended things to do when a traumatic death occurs, even doing meditation at night so I can sleep more than a few hours. But the morning light delivers the same sad as regularly as the alarm clock, and so I put the mask on when I walk out the door so that I don’t scare everyone with my dazed look of loss.

Before Mark’s death, my image of healing seemed much like the yellow brick road. Just follow it, do what you’re supposed to, and you’ll get to the Wizard who can grant your most fervent wish. But real healing shows up as a desperately needed tourniquet and I.V. that gets administered many times a day, and just as often gets yanked out unexpectedly by a song, a conversation, a sunset. It’s sailing through the morning believing that you’re doing okay, that just maybe you’re going to be happy again one day, and then you’re in your car and you turn the radio on and it’s Science Friday. You pull over because you’ve heard your husband talk about the very thing you are listening to and dig your phone out of your purse to text him and stare at the last thing you sent. Are you okay? Please call me. I’m so worried about you.

It’s the 4th of July and the floodgates of every happy memory of that day burst open from the backyard picnics at your parent’s house when you were dating, to vacations, to the neighborhood cookouts with your three kids. You never expected that this day would make you so sad, but the flags, and parades, and sparklers would intersect with the ten month mark of when your husband died and you are flattened by it. Friends are expecting you at their cookout but you are fighting against a riptide of grief, the power of which is scaring you until you remember that you have to swim perpendicular to the shore or it will carry you away. In over your head, you know that pulling yourself out of this will be entirely dependent on you, and arriving at a cookout with a salad and a smile will be one of many unnoticed acts of bravery in this new and complicated life.

It is rather fitting that Mark was born on June 21st, the summer solstice and longest day of the year. For as long as I knew him he never wasted a minute of daylight. I’m sure that started when he was a little boy, maybe even earlier. When our kids were babies and nothing would calm them down, I’d take them outside and tell them to listen to the birds talking to them, the leaves in the trees blowing, the drum of the cicadas. Since they are 50% their dad, it would do the trick and they would be ever so attentive to the outdoor sounds. It works now, too, for the newest grandbaby who will stop crying in seconds if you take him outside.

These days I have found that being outside is about the only thing that gives me some peace. I am on a constant tilt-a-whirl of thoughts of Mark’s life and death, which does nothing but cause me to spin my wheels and go nowhere. When I walk out the door the spinning ceases, as if I am the crying baby that needs the sound of birds and leaves to calm my head and heart. Even so, I still turn my head whenever I hear the sound of a cyclist riding by (a constant occurrence in this neighborhood), hoping that one of them will round the corner at 7:00 like the old days and my handsome husband would say, “Sorry I’m late. I was ready to leave and forgot I needed to send an email, then I ran into somebody on the way out, then I cycled home with this guy I met a few times and he’s kind of a slow rider.”

Once when my sister was here and I had hung up the phone with Mark she asked me when he was going to be home so we would know when to start dinner. “He says he’ll be home in an hour,” I told her, ” but if you double that and add twenty minutes you’ll be close to when he’ll actually be home.” She didn’t believe me but my estimations were usually spot on. The guy was easily sidetracked.

I always worried about Mark riding home on his bike. Sometimes he would go to a dinner meeting or stay late into the night because a paper or grant was due. I never liked when he did that but he told me it was safer then because there were fewer cars on the road at that hour. He had a light on the front and back of his bike, a light reflecting jacket, and a light on his helmet. He never took chances with motorists as he had a few close calls.

After Mark died a retired colleague and friend of his was riding past our house and stopped by to talk to me. “When I heard the news,” he said, “I knew it wasn’t an accident. Mark was far too careful a rider for something like that to happen.” Oddly, that gave me a great deal of comfort. To know that the thousands of days he rode back and forth to work and early on Saturday mornings with his biking friends, that he was careful. That he knew I worried about him, that he knew he was supposed to return home to me.

That’s not what happened on the last day Mark set off on his bike and it casts a long shadow over all the other days. I pray the searing burn of this wound will lessen, but in this first summer without him he feels so far away and the hours of sunlight too long.

One of the many heartbreaks of losing Mark in the way I did is that through therapy I feel like I know him better now than I did all those years we were together. Most of what I knew about him in the before was how he was not how he thought. On the weekend before he died, I suggested to him that he might be depressed because I had heard that men tend to manifest depression more as anger than sadness. He wanted to know where I heard that. The truth was it was on an Oprah show years ago, but I figured Mark would likely discount that as not legitimate so I said that I read it somewhere and couldn’t remember the source. He bent over, hands on his knees and said, “Oh my god, Kath, that’s it. Sometimes when I’m riding to work I’m so pissed off and I can’t even figure out why because the day hasn’t even started.” I don’t remember what transpired when we got home, but I would bet he immediately looked it up on the internet because if anything was revealing to Mark he quickly went down the rabbit hole of research.

I would find out months after his death that another sign of depression is the tendency to be a workaholic. Mark was a hustler, and in the highly competitive field of scientific research he never allowed himself to coast or rest on his latest achievements. He thrived on the chase for discoveries and results, and was so intellectually curious that the field suited him perfectly. He never knew how to rest, though, and it was the source of many arguments between us. His computer went with us on vacations, on trips to Chicago for Thanksgiving, on Sunday afternoons on the dining room table. A previous boss told me that he was one of the few faculty in the department that regularly came into work on the weekend. It would rarely be for the entire day and sometimes I’d guilt him into staying home, but overall the guy didn’t know how to not work. At times even his daily bike ride back and forth to the med center, regardless of the wind, pouring rain, or snow, seemed less like exercise and more like a punishing commitment he made to himself written in stone.

I told my therapist that I had seen Mark knocked on his ass more times than I could count. Grants not funded, the lab running on the fumes of dwindling funds, students who opted to work in other labs, a rotating student who broke a piece of equipment that was a $5000 repair, publications submitted that got turned down, a $15,000 pay cut when we were a few short years away from sending our oldest to college, employees that weren’t working out and had to be let go. The list of setbacks were many but he’d give himself a few days to be in the dumps and then he’d get right back up. “How come,” I asked, “could he do that over and over and not this time?”

“Because those times he could use his intellect to figure things out. This time,” she said, “it was emotional and he had nothing in his toolbox to deal with it.”

Since Mark’s death I have had to shore up my own toolbox to deal with something I was ill-prepared for. Besides going to therapy I also take something for anxiety. All day every day it felt like my chest was in the grips of a vice. I couldn’t decide if I should go to the emergency room or just wait for a heart attack to strike me dead. When I finally went to the doctor she asked me if I worried about things out of my control. “My whole life,” I said, surprised that that was even a thing. I thought everybody worried about everything. She gave me a low dose antidepressant with instructions to come back in a month. On my return visit I was asked by a med student how I was doing and I said fine while tears ran down my cheeks. “It’s just a bad week. I’m really much better,” I said unconvincingly. He asked me how I was eating. I wasn’t. He asked me how I was sleeping. I wasn’t. He asked me if I thought about suicide. “No, but it would be okay with me if I didn’t wake up in the morning,” I said. He left the room and I could hear him in the hallway giving my doctor the rundown of our conversation. She came in and said the dose needed to be upped. I knew I was too fragile to argue.

Mark would have found all of this fascinating. The connection to his work habits and emotional health, my worry and what would turn out to be anxiety, the mind-body connection. Five years ago he quit drinking, he read a lot about sleep and the affects on cognitive health, he was active and very fit. The thing he didn’t take care of was his mental health and that would have tragic results. Unlocking the boxes of hurt and shame he left me along with my own is the hardest work I have ever done. When I come home from therapy I often lay on the couch for hours.

But I go every week because I think I owe it to him, to me, and to our kids. To unburden all of us from fear and remorse, to learn to let go of the trauma that whispers to me that I didn’t do enough, that whispered to him that he was unworthy of the life he had been given.

To set that wounded soul of his free, so from the other side the only thing he knows for sure is that he was loved.

Many years ago I had my first date with a kidney stone when I was minding my own business and got a stabbing pain in my upper back. Within minutes I was bent over in agony. I didn’t know at the time what it was but it was bad and I told Mark I needed to go to the emergency room. For a guy who worked at a medical center, he wasn’t inclined to use it much and thought we should take a wait and see approach. I told him that wasn’t possible, he didn’t argue, and I threw up in a plastic bag all the way there.

Once we got there it was determined fairly early that it was a kidney stone, and, yes, they are as bad as you’ve heard. Because the med center is a teaching hospital, students wander in and out and do the same thing and ask the same questions that the ones before did, there is a doctor with an actual degree but still training, and after what seems like forever a real doctor makes an appearance. I was in there for hours and they took me for a scan to confirm the diagnosis and by that point I didn’t care because I’d already had a shot of morphine. We waited to hear the results of the scan and to finally be discharged when another doctor came in and said that there was indeed a stone and I also had a mass on my kidney. A mass? Mark and I both looked at him in shock as he went on and on about my “mass.” He and Mark had a very technical conversation about kidneys while I zoned out in the hospital bed and I was sent home with meds and the recommendation that I see a urologist stat.

We drove home in silence and I went right to bed to sleep off the morphine. After a few hours Mark came to check on me and crawled into bed. “What if this is really a mass,” he asked me. “What if this is bad?” Even in my groggy state I was worried about the same thing as the word mass flashed over and over in my head. “While you were sleeping I was outside and all I kept thinking is this whole place is you. The garden, the landscaping you wanted so bad, getting the house repainted, making everything look better. Everywhere I look is you and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do if you’re not here.” After a worrying couple of weeks, I finally got in to see a urologist and my mass turned out to be a cyst which was a far better diagnosis and Mark and I breathed a big sigh of relief.

Early on a Saturday morning two years ago I had another kidney stone. I waited for Mark to get home from bike riding with his buddies, he changed and we drove to the med center, me throwing up in a plastic bag the whole way there. The ER was quiet at that time of the day so I got put in a room pretty quickly. I was in a shaking, fetal curl of misery on the bed and peppered with questions about my pain. Why did I think it was a kidney stone? How could I be sure? What happened the last time I came in? How long ago since I came to the ER? What did I get for the pain? What prescription meds do I take on a regular basis? I realized that they thought I was shopping for pain killers and were going to take their sweet time giving them to me. This went on for a long time and at that point the only thing they’d done for me was start an IV. When they left the room I pulled Mark down next to me and said, “Why aren’t they doing anything? Why aren’t they helping me?” He threw himself on top of me to stop me from shaking and said, “Look at me. They’re going to give you something and you’re going to be okay.” It would be awhile longer before they ordered a shot of morphine and when they did the nurse only gave me half. When asked by the doctor why she said, “I’ve found that a half usually works,” and he said well clearly it isn’t and you need to give her the entire dose. Finally, I got some relief for the pain.

Like the house and yard were the epicenter of me for Mark, the med center was mine for him. Because of my own job I didn’t visit him often but if I did he’d be leaning over the 2nd floor railing and saying “Hey, darlin,” when I got there. Since he died I have only been back to clean out his office but I do drive by there often. In the before days I’d text him if I were close by to see if he could meet me for lunch, but in these after days I don’t even turn my head in the direction of the building he worked in every day.

This week his two graduate students were doing a presentation on his career at the department spring retreat and invited me. I supplied some photos for them to use and said I’d do my best to make it but could make no promises. Outside of my own kids I have worried about their emotional well-being the most, and have done what I could to support them and their grief. Tough as I thought it was going to be, I also know that it helps me to see and talk to them. The three of us share a connection to Mark that I hope never goes away.

My anxiety about the day, though, was off the charts and I wondered why I was putting myself through that. To go to that building that was so much of Mark’s identity but he is nowhere to be found is like a stab to my heart, but I think if there were anything he would want me to do professionally in his absence it would be to be supportive of Alex and Pierce until their graduation.

I slipped into the back of the room before they started, and they tagged team putting on a presentation of his career that was mixed with his humor and brilliance. He would have loved it. It was hard and wonderful to watch and I was glad I came, for them and me. The retreat broke for lunch after that and I carried my shaky legs out into the hallway where I was met with a few “hey how are you doing” by his colleagues, a congratulatory hug to his students, and a short conversation with his former boss about an award that will be named in his honor. Mostly, though, there was a filing out of one after another who dared not make eye contact with me, the widow who is too hard to see, the one who carries the weight of this pain.

He loved you, I wanted to say to them. He talked about you all the time and now you can’t even look at me? Do you know how much guts it took for me to even walk in this building? That if you looked at me you would see him because I carry him everywhere I go? How can you walk past me pretending not to see me me when I have known you for years?

As if it couldn’t have gotten any shittier, when leaving the building I had to walk past all of them while they took the annual faculty photo, the first one in twenty seven years that he wasn’t in. When I got to the parking garage I forgot where I parked the car which only added to my aggravation, and when I finally found it I got inside, locked the door, and sobbed in a combination of sadness, anger, and relief. I had to go back to work so I blew through a dozen Kleenex, took some deep breaths, started the car, and remembered that time in the emergency room when there was no attempt to help me through the pain until it was confirmed that it was legit.

In all these months there has not been a single colleague of his who has been able to look at me, call, text, or email to simply say, “I miss him too, Kath. A lot.” It makes me think he has been forgotten and that is an unbearable pain to carry, because this time around there is no Mark to throw himself on top of me and tell me it’s going to be okay.