A Speckled Trout

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.

Since Mark’s death, family, friends, and frequently the curious, want to know how I am doing. In the beginning I was so shocked and overwhelmed I couldn’t even put words together to answer the question. In the weeks and months that followed, there were big and small things to tend to that never occur to you when you have a vibrant, living spouse beside you. Most of the time I couldn’t begin to tell you how I was doing.

People who care about me and Mark desperately want me to be okay. I’d be the first in line for a heaping dose of that, but it will be a long time before I am okay. I still have entire days when I think this has all been a terrible mistake, and that with a change of mind Mark can fix this situation and by dinnertime his biker legs would round the corner as he coasted for home. I know that isn’t true but the mind does strange things in the midst of trauma. There are chunks of time that I cannot recall. I remember parts of the funeral, the holidays being hard, and January and February being horrible, but I can’t recall many details about any single day during that time. The only thing I consistently remember every morning when the alarm goes off is that Mark is not here.

What I learned at a very young age by watching my mother and grandmother, both of whom had their share of heartache, is that when life has knocked you flat you open up your compact, look yourself in the mirror, and dust your cheeks with an abundance of stoicism before you walk out the door. They showed me that nobody wants to see you wearing your overwhelming sadness like a cloak, so if you happen to run into me in the grocery store or meet me for coffee I will probably seem fine. The outside, though, doesn’t match the inside, and so you don’t see me sitting in my driveway resting my head on the steering wheel, trying to talk myself into getting out of the car and going into the house.

In these months since Mark died, I tend to get observed a lot. I’m not entirely sure why but I think I am an unnerving reminder that on a regular Tuesday afternoon a close-knit family can have their lives blown to kingdom come. I am proof that all bets are off in the best-laid plans department, and that leading a good life somehow makes us immune to who is here one day and gone the next. I have often walked into gatherings with my unsteady courage, only to feel a room full of eyes on me and the hushed whisper of “how is she doing?” Rather than make me feel cared for or supported, it makes me want to run for the nearest exit, as this new life of mine is so much more complex than any observation can determine.

The people most frequently asked how I am doing are the kids. All of us uniquely and fiercely loved Mark, and for them I wish they were asked what they liked to do with their dad, what lesson did he teach them that stands out, what was the happiest day they ever spent with him, what makes their days just a little bit easier. To me it seems like they are often treated as eyewitnesses to a horrible wreck and are being asked for details when they have their own gaping wounds. I wish I could shield them from some of the shrapnel from Mark’s death and lay to rest the question they get asked most often.

How is she?

She is sad, she is lonely, she is afraid, she is bewildered.

She is exhausted.

She misses him every waking minute of the day.

She loves them.

She is trying.

She is here.

Mark Fisher was an invested kind of guy. When he was in he was ALL in, so when Donald Trump surprisingly got elected to president he’d plop himself in front of the tv every night after work and watch hours of cable news. He’d yell back and give the finger to some of the interviewed guests and generally go nuts about the state of the country. I was right there along with him, but I’d get side-tracked and scroll on my phone, put things in my shopping cart, google anti-aging creams that popped up in my Facebook feed, and comment on posts with haha or heart emojis. After months and months of those news filled nights, I decided I’d watch an hour each day and then go upstairs and watch something else or read. Mark would come up later and often said the same thing, “They’re getting close, Kath, won’t be long and he’ll be out of there.” He said this so often to me that I finally told him, “Just come and get me when it’s a sure thing and I’ll pop the cork on some champagne.”

Since Mark died it is hard for me to watch the news at all. Being outraged isn’t as entertaining without him and I don’t need anything else to make me depressed, so I read a lot of news sites but watch far less than before. My attention span has been greatly affected by grief so I don’t get involved in anything more than very mindless stuff, often HGTV and the DIY Channel.

It was during the cold and dreary nights of early spring when I climbed into bed and stumbled upon the magic of QVC. There’s no plot line or need to pay close attention, and with a purchase on easy pay you’ve got yourself life-changing products for twenty bucks a month times infinity. This is way cheaper than therapy, and so I settled in for shopping via television. As someone who has sold a lot of useless crap in my life, I found it fascinating that the host and seller could talk about a tshirt for thirty solid minutes.

When I was watching one night last week the featured item was floral jeans. A vertical cascade of flowers went down the side of one leg and after the host went on and on about the stretch and comfort of these jeans she said, “It’s like wearing an oil painting.” Wearing an oil painting? I looked at the cat and asked, “Who actually wears an oil painting other than for a Halloween costume?” The cat didn’t seem to want to get involved in this and jumped off the bed and disappeared as a customer was calling in – Betty from Pittsburgh. As a novice QVCer, I thought taking customer calls would be an absolute crapshoot. In the art of the retail deal, you don’t want customers chatting it up to the masses about a product unless you are absolutely sure what they are going to say. I needn’t have worried. Betty proudly stated, “I can’t say enough good things about these jeans. I have 75 pairs.” 75 PAIRS?? What kind of person buys 75 pairs of jeans that are a walking da Vinci? I had to turn it off. Not only did I feel sorry for Betty from Pittsburgh with her 75 pantsy oil paintings, I wondered what kind of person I was becoming by watching this kind of stuff for entertainment.

A few days went by and I climbed into bed and again turned on QVC. That night’s guest designer was Isaac Mizrahi who puts the E in entertaining. I had a feeling the old ladies at home sipping their chardonnay can’t get enough of this guy. The host said that for the first time in YEARS, Isaac’s line was featuring a cardigan. Years? A fashion designer of mass produced clothing has not featured a cardigan in years? I called fake news on Isaac. The sweaters were floral and came in six different colorways. Shawn, the host, said it sure was hard to pick a favorite and Isaac, who was dressed in head-to-toe black, said spring is for color and how could you ever decide with such an array of beauty. After twenty minutes of describing the scalloped neck and functional buttons, Nan from Florida called in. “Hi, darling Nan, tell me which one is your favorite,” Isaac asked and Nan said they all were. She bought four yesterday and was getting the other two tonight. Isaac said, “Oh my, you can’t go wrong with that,” and I thought that both Nan and Isaac could use a lesson in fashion overkill.

I imagined Nan was laying in bed with her phone and shaking the hair of ten cats off her Visa card, racking up her bill with too many of one thing and her nightly pretend friends. This started to hit too close to home so I turned the tv off and picked up my book on grief where it said that after the death of a loved one a person could have difficulty in concentration that may last months or years. Seeing as how that is the current state of my life, I closed my eyes and hit the rewind button on my memories when my husband was here, outraged, and joyfully dancing to the news of indictments. If only he were the Value-Of-The-Day I’d add him to my cart and easy pay him to the front porch, and those long and quiet nights of watching shopping would be something the brokenhearted did and not me.

As a Mother’s Day gift many years ago, I asked Mark to build me a space in the backyard for a small garden. He got railroad ties and plotted it out and hauled dirt home and shoveled and shoveled. It was my first attempt at gardening and I had more misses than hits, but I kept at it and learned along the way. Over many years and a lot of sweat equity, we landscaped the front of the house and the architect who drew our plans made space for a long garden along the front walk. “Don’t you want to see your garden whenever you go in and out of the house,” she asked. I didn’t really know what I wanted but we went along with her idea and it was perfect.

I would hang out in my garden all the time, digging, planting, weeding, and mulching. Often Mark would be right over my shoulder questioning what I was doing until I told him that maybe he needed to start his own garden and leave mine alone, and with that suggestion he was off to the races. He turned my first garden into a raspberry patch followed by one planting bed after another. At the first sign of spring he’d go to Lowe’s and get more wood and build more boxes and haul more dirt and he was in garden heaven. As ideas go, Mark had thousands. His garden became an offshoot of his science brain and everything he planted was a grand experiment. He grew pumpkins one year with a bumper crop that yielded over sixty, tomatoes, peppers, beans, onions, sweet potatoes, lettuce, rhubarb, kale. I asked him to plant some asparagus and he did and daily checked for those baby stalks to birth themselves through the dirt. We would later find out that it takes 2-3 years for asparagus to start producing, but in his Green Acres it never took. Undeterred, he kept digging and planting and would come in with bushel baskets of produce. His problem, though, was that he was terrible at maintenance. Over the last few years, all the grass in back was killed off, the beds were falling apart because the wood had started to rot, and it was more weeds than farm. I was on him all the time about making it look better and regardless of any argument we had I ended it by saying, “And that goddamn backyard….”

Last spring was the first time he couldn’t work in the yard at all because he was writing a grant with a June deadline and every weekend was devoted to that. Even the raspberry bushes felt the neglect and barely produced, and I sometimes wonder if that was a harbinger of things to come. Despite my critical eye on his garden, it was the place he decompressed and that spring he was on a hamster wheel of working, traveling, and trying to meet deadlines.

This spring I wanted to get the backyard under control and looking better for whenever I decide to sell the house. Many people offered to help but I decided to hire a landscaping friend to clean it out, cut the beds, and lay some sod. It has been a big and expensive job and is not even close to being done but, hopefully, by summer it will start coming together. Like the front yard, it will take years and sweat for it to grow and fill in.

When I told people what my plan was for the backyard the response was universally the same. “That’s such a great idea, now you can make it your own.” That is true, but if I could trade that for my husband and his jacked up version of farming I’d do it in a heartbeat. I couldn’t watch when things were getting cleared out, trees were getting cut down, and planter boxes emptied. This is what I told him I wanted all along and yet it was breaking my heart to see it go away. In the last few months my connections to all the people he knew seem to be withering on the tendrils of loss, and to me this felt like yet another place where he was being erased. I tried to prop myself up with garden plans and ideas but my hurting heart wasn’t finding much solace in looking at plants by myself.

I decided to focus on my garden in the front and so I dug up some things from the community garden and split some other things and between that and a lot of rain it’s looking lush and green. It’s always a guessing game of what’s going to break through and make a cameo appearance for another season, and so I was keeping an eye on a plant in the corner because I had no idea what it was and hadn’t marked it.

Every day I checked on its progress and it would be nearly two weeks before I realized what had rooted in my garden. I bent down and stared at these stalks in disbelief, wondering how it was even possible, while on the other side of the veil between here and there, my boyfriend winked and said, “I got you, girl.”

Update: It turns out that what I thought was asparagus is really false indigo. It’s a good thing I didn’t cook it :/ It has now been renamed false asparagus.

Many times over recent years, Mark and I talked about death. He was convinced that we would live well into our nineties in sound physical and cognitive health. Since both of our fathers died at the age of 64 of cancer, I wasn’t so certain of the guarantee of years. He brought up the subject of our longevity often, and I would always redirect the conversation to the need for us to put our adult pants on and get a will and medical directive. Mark had biked for years with a group of guys every Saturday morning and it seemed to me that half of them were attorneys.

“Just ask one of them for an appointment,” I’d say to him. “We can do it first thing in the morning before we go to work and get this taken care of once and for all.” Mark finally agreed and talked to one of his lawyer friends who said he’d give us the “biker rate”, then he never did another thing about it. Besides considering the financial aspect in our regular death talks, we’d also ponder the possibility of finding someone else when either of us were no longer on this earth. That part tended not to gain much traction, not because we were opposed to it, but rather looking at a very alive spouse and saying, “Sure, I can see myself with somebody else when you’ve kicked the bucket,” didn’t seem right. To picture Mark happily remarried was like a knife in my back and I’m sure he felt likewise.

Then the unimaginable happened without warning and since September I’ve been swimming in a riptide of loss and loneliness, frantically paddling and not only going nowhere but terrified I’ll be swept out to sea if I give myself a second to rest. Every aspect of my life changed dramatically that day and everything I thought I had in the future with Mark was wiped clean. I told my therapist that whenever I try to visualize the years ahead it is a complete blank. She assures me that in time I will carve it out and make it my own but she has far more faith in the process than I do. I’ve spent every single day trying to keep my head above water, too drained to imagine anything but heartache.

On a still, dark, and cold Sunday morning I woke up at four o’clock, and as those early wake ups tend to go, I started thinking everything over for the thousandth time until I gave up, went downstairs, fed the cats, and started the coffee. An hour later I went back to bed and fell sound asleep.

I don’t know how long I was asleep when I could feel Mark standing next to the side of the bed. “Kath, wake up,” he said shaking me. “I have to talk to you.”

I opened my eyes and he immediately started telling me that somebody wanted to meet me. I looked at him like he was crazy and said I would absolutely not be meeting anybody. “You have to, Kath,” he said. “It’s a friend of Joe’s.”

Mark, I can’t meet new people right now. I’m too sad. It’s been so hard since you’ve been gone.

“You have to,” he said. “I already told Joe that you’d meet this guy.”

I started crying and said I couldn’t do that since I’m not exactly liked I used to be when he was here.

“Look,” he said, “it’s a drink. He just wants to meet you and take you out for a drink. It’s not that big of a deal.”

Oh my god, Mark, are you kidding me? That sounds like a date. What is wrong with you that you would ever agree to something like that?

“Kath, please,” he said looking at me with those intense green eyes of his. “You can’t be sad for the rest of your life.”

And I sat up in bed, looked around and he was gone but I knew every second of it was real.

As the kids in this house started moving out and their rooms got little use, I decided we should put the t.v. in one of the downstairs bedrooms. As a nod to my husband who gave up having much of a say in the decor around here, I painted it a caramel color, bought some leather furniture, and went a little nuts with the antler trend. This was a special touch seeing as how Mark never hunted anything in his life except fish, but a room with antlers was cool even if had no bearing on your life.

The room stayed like that for many years until I told Mark that it didn’t make sense that there wasn’t even room on the leather loveseat for both of us to sprawl out and watch t.v. together, and that maybe we should look into a sectional. I’d been looking at the same one for two years at West Elm, paying frequent visits and checking the price, and so one day last August we both went on a Saturday afternoon to look at it again. While I have to kick the tires on a big purchase forever, Mark shopped differently. He had taken over doing the weekly grocery shopping because I hated it, and explained to me that shopping needed to be planned like a reconnaissance mission. “You move in and out. Under the radar before you’re detected.” This sounded more like an episode of WWII on the History Channel than a trip to the neighborhood grocery store but that was his style.

We got to the destination of our reconn mission and I pointed out the sectional I’d been courting the last two years. He sat down and said “I like it. Let’s get it,” and my anxious heart started skipping like a rabbit in the eye of a Jack Russell terrier. “Like today? Oh god, no. We can’t just buy it today. We came to look at it and think it over and then maybe look at Craigslist for awhile longer until we find something similar.” Mark hated Craigslist. Over the years I had involved him in enough hauling of furniture and having to rent U-Hauls to get it home that just the idea of Craigslist sent him over the edge. “I’m not going into another stranger’s house to look at another piece of used furniture that we can’t fit in our car. We’re here, we should buy this, and we should get it delivered.” I wasn’t prepared for it to be that easy. “That’s it? We just buy it now?” He nodded while relaxing on his new sofa, and because I can’t make anything simple I had to agonize over the fabric choice for an hour.

After we finished ordering the sectional, I told him I wanted to stop in Banana Republic to look for a dress for a wedding we were going to the following month. Taking Mark out shopping was often like taking an alien who had just landed from Mars. Everything was a wonder to him. He followed me around while I looked until I said, “The whole other side is the guy section. Why don’t you see if there’s anything you need?” Amazed by this piece of information he said, “They sell men’s and women’s clothes here? In the same place?” It was Friends & Family Weekend and everything was discounted so he came back with a sport coat, a few shirts, and a belt. I struck out on finding a dress but got a skirt and two tshirts. When they told us how much we saved with the discount plus opening a credit card we high-fived each other at the checkout. Never mind that we didn’t really need anything we got, we saved a significant amount of money or so we told ourselves. All that spending made us hungry and we finished our shopping spree with lunch at McCormick and Shmick’s. On the drive home I started adding up how much we spent in a couple of hours and when I told him the total he said, “Good. It was worth every cent.”

At the time of Mark’s death he had worn the sport coat just once, the shirts and belt hung in his closet unused. He also wouldn’t live long enough to see the sectional delivered. Since then the room has been repainted, the antlers are gone, and it looks more feminine than it would have been if Mark were still here. On that August day we thought we’d have so many more years ahead of us. We didn’t know that there would only be a few weeks, and that the jacket he bought that looked so great on him would be one of the few things of his that I could give away. When I offered it to Brian, who lost his mother and close friend in a matter of days, he said, “Are you sure you want me to have this?” I told him I was positive and after he tried it on he said it fit like it was custom made for him. “Mark would like that,” I said.

The sectional is a different story. Unlike his clothes, I can’t avoid looking at it every day. It’s what I thought I wanted and it works better in the room, but like most of the things I thought were important, I am apathetic about it. Because I remember everything about that day I want to believe that there are threads of Mark exuberant life stitched into the cushions, waiting to be unveiled to me at some point. Until then I only can see it through the lens of sorrow, that exuberant life of his drifting farther from my reach day after day.

On the day of Mark’s death, that awful day in September when I was sitting in a sterile, white room at the police station, two detectives quietly and calmly told me that my husband was dead, that he rode his bike onto the tracks of an oncoming train, and that it appeared to be intentional. It was unbelievable and the most crushing thing I’d ever heard in my life. His bike? Onto train tracks? Are you serious? The guy who would cup moths and beetles in his hand to let go outside, who taught his three kids to do the same, that as toddlers would learn that smashing a bug with their chubby feet wasn’t something you did in our family. That guy rode his bike onto the train tracks on purpose? It not only made absolutely no sense to me, it was so horrific that considering it for even a few seconds made me physically sick.

The immediate aftermath of that conversation that afternoon was calling the kids home and telling them, their faces mirroring mine in shock and anguish, driving to the airport at midnight with my son to pick up our youngest daughter who came off the plane shaking uncontrollably, calling family and friends, and then the planning of Mark’s funeral. All of that kept me from diving too deep into the details of that day, but when family had gone home, friends went back to work, and the house became eerily quiet, that day was all I thought about. Besides going over and over it, I longed to have anything of his that he carried that day. Was all that gone too? No work bag, no keys, no wallet, nothing? Gone like him? Just disappeared from the face of the earth? The friend Mark was supposed to see that afternoon has been instrumental in helping me in thousands of ways. In one of our conversations I talked to him about Mark’s personal belongings, that I desperately needed something of his from that day and he offered to check on it for me.

Three weeks after Mark’s death I was back at the police station after calling to make an appointment with the property department to pick up his things. They told me on the phone that they had his work bag, his wallet, his keys, a bike helmet, and a bike. A bike helmet? A bike? The bike was in the warehouse but they would bring it to the station for me to pick up if I wanted it. Was that some kind of cruel joke? Hey lady, here’s your dead husband’s smashed bike. It’s not worth a damn but we don’t know what to do with it so you can figure it out. I told them I wanted it and decided that if it was in as bad a condition as I imagined it to be, I would find a dumpster on the way home to ditch it because there was no way in hell I was going to let the kids see that.

Three different people offered to go with me to the police department to pick up his things but I declined each one. Each one of them said they insisted, that I absolutely shouldn’t go there by myself, and I said they were probably right. I looked at the calendar on my phone which was empty of everything and told them Wednesday seemed like it would work. Then I picked up the phone, called the police department, and made an appointment for Tuesday morning.

I arrived at the station, checked in, and sat in the same chair in the same waiting area that I’d been in weeks earlier. My eyes never drifted from the door the detective came out of that Tuesday afternoon. I expected at any minute to be called back into that sterile, white room where the tone would be much different this time around and I would be peppered with questions about everything that led up to that day. That I would crack like a suspect on an episode of Law and Order and say the same thing over and over, that they would look at each other knowing they got their accomplice.

I didn’t wake up.
I didn’t wake up.
I didn’t wake up.
It’s my fault.
I didn’t wake up.

Instead, a very cheerful, female police officer came from an elevator behind me and I turned my head towards the sound of Mark’s bike. His favorite bike, the carbon fiber bike that he loved. When he brought it home he called me out to the driveway and said, “Look at this, Kath. You can lift it with two fingers. You know what that means? I’ll tell you what it means. It means the lighter the bike the faster you can go on it.” I marveled at the genius of this and he said I had to pick it up to really appreciate it so I put my hand under the cross bar and he said, “No, no, no. Two fingers. Pick it up that way.” I did and he smiled and said, “See what I mean? Can you even believe that?”

I had to sign some paperwork and the properties police officer disappeared with it for a few minutes. I grabbed my phone and took a picture of his stuff. I don’t know why. I wondered if that made me look guilty or crazy, and that on second thought maybe this wife did need to be interrogated by those detectives. I will never know what made me do that. I think it was because I didn’t actually believe his bike was intact. That it was leaning against a railing with not a scratch on it. The police officer reappeared and offered to help me out with his stuff. She started rolling his bike and I picked up the bag with his things. A white sticker on the front of the brown paper bag said “evidence” and I thought my legs were going to go out from under me.

I opened the tailgate and she wondered if we’d be able to get the bike in there and I said don’t worry I’ve done this a hundred times. It will fit. Mark and I had that down to a science. I put the brown paper bag inside and she lifted the bike and said, “This is the lightest bike I’ve ever seen. Look at this. I can lift it with one hand.” I tell her, “Two fingers. You can lift it with two fingers.” She tried and said oh my gosh you’re right, I think I love this bike.

He did too, I say to her. He’d never have let anything happen to that bike and isn’t that funny? In the last moments of his life I can picture him gently laying that bike down along the grassy side of the train tracks like he did with every harmless bug found inside the house. But I cannot picture that without also picturing that he thought his life should end with the cruel violence of cold steel.

When I got home I sat in the driveway for a long time, just me and the stuff of his ordinary work week in the back of the car. Eventually I decided that sitting there in shock and tears wasn’t making anything better so I opened the garage door and wheeled his bike next to the three others he had. The late summer morning was so quiet except for the ticking of the chain – as if all the birds and the cicadas in the neighborhood stopped for a moment of silence. His riderless bike rolled into the garage, his last words tucked in an envelope inside a brown paper bag.

All evidence that his life was over.

I have and will always deeply love you. You were the light to my darkness…..

As a couple who had been together a long time, Mark and I were pretty much drawn to the same kind of people. If I met someone and liked them, there was a good chance Mark would as well and vice versa. The common denominator for both of us was that they were smart, interesting, they didn’t take themselves seriously, and most importantly, that they were funny. There weren’t many people we didn’t like and if there were we did our best to steer clear of them.

But there were difficult people in our lives that we had to have a relationship with that didn’t bring out the best in either one of us. When I look back at those relationships and the cumulative effect they had on Mark, I second guess myself for not being more protective of him. That’s the kind of stuff that keeps me up at night, the overthinking that sometimes makes me believe that he’ll come back in the door saying he was sorry he was gone so long but now that I cracked the code he was back for good. Up until the weekend prior to his death, Mark seemed to be handling things just fine so either I really dropped the ball or he was good at hiding his hurt. I tend to think it was a bit of both but I’m here, he’s gone, and during those sleepless nights it’s another tally mark in the Things Kath Should Have Done Differently column.

When both of us were holding the history of those hurts and grudges, they usually seemed like nothing more than an annoyance. That isn’t the case these days. As my therapist recently told me, the fallout of Mark’s life and death has landed squarely on my lap. It isn’t just the emotional aspect which is daunting from the minute I wake up, it’s every relationship he had, his career, the entirety of his life. Without him here to help shoulder the weight, the energy of those relationship challenges have nowhere to go but on me.

Depending on the day I am having, my thoughts about that swing from apathy to despair to rage. Not unexpectedly in regards to those connections, it seems that the minimum boxes of support for me and the kids have been checked off or we have been ghosted all together. I’m unsure if that reaction is the by-product of guilt or that they would rather stay as far as possible away from our sadness. On the receiving end, it feels like a lit match to my gasoline fueled heartache. There are moments that I daydream of a reckoning where I lay bare every injustice and call them out for their past and current behavior. It has a Real Housewives kind of flair where glasses are flung and tables upended, and I triumphantly stride out to the cheers and high-fives from every person who loved Mark, followed by a nighttime visit from him saying “atta girl.” It’s dramatic and satisfying and a figment of my grieving imagination.

While that would be a welcome release valve for all that has been building up and piling on, it doesn’t change anything. Mark’s demons had the final say and in that moment he didn’t think redemption was his gift to receive. I daily wonder if death delivered the redemption that I thought he deserved. Was peace of mind the final blessing bestowed on him that Tuesday morning? I’m not sure I could draw another breath if I didn’t believe that he was worthy of both, and that his well-lived life was reason enough for those lasting gifts.

As the days have passed since that I got that phone call at work, the nagging question is what do I do with the pain my dead husband endured at the hands of others? Much as I’d love to deliver my fury and judgement on their doorsteps like death was suddenly delivered on mine, there is only the aching weight of his wounds sitting on my crowded lap.

That and the awareness that the road to redemption is a two way street.

Ever since Mark died, people have been compelled to share their thoughts on the events of that day and what I should do to rebuild the rest of my life. The list could fill pages but below is the highlight reel of the things that have been said to me in the last six months:

Why do you think he killed himself?
You’re not staying in the house, are you?
You have to wait a full year before you make any decisions.
So life insurance for suicide? Does it pay out?
When you start cleaning his stuff out, I’d like to have something of his.
Do you think he smoked some bad pot that morning?
Just stay busy.
You should go to a suicide support group.
You should go to therapy.
You seem like you’re doing fine. I don’t think you need therapy.
Are your kids in therapy? I think they should be.
I saw somebody started a GoFundMe for you. Don’t you have any money?
I know Mark stopped drinking a few years ago. Did he start up again?
You should exercise.
Don’t walk outside now. With all the snow and ice you might fall and the last thing your kids need is to have to take care of you.
Mark Fisher can go fuck himself.
I know you said it was suicide but I think it was an accident.
We thought about going to the funeral but we’d have to cancel our vacation.
You definitely didn’t seem like yourself at the funeral but not in an inappropriate sort of way.
I’m so pissed off at him.
I know you said you don’t know when he left the house but what time do you think he left the house?
Oh, you’re still sad? I thought by now you would be better.
Do you have a financial advisor?
You should interview at least three financial advisors before you pick one.
Don’t invest in the stock market.
You should invest in the stock market.
Just think happy thoughts.
Are you going to go on social security?
You shouldn’t go on social security yet.
That fucking coward.

I have an uncle who has experienced more tragedy in his life than anyone I know. Now in his eighties, his health is compromised in too many ways to list. Decades ago, he and his wife were coming home from seeing a movie and were hit by a drunk driver. She was seven months pregnant with twins. The accident caused her to go into labor, both baby girls were delivered but did not survive. They would have three more children after that and he would sit by the bedside of his 12 year old daughter as she died from a heart ailment. One of his sons would be diagnosed with the same disease and would get a heart transplant. He would die at the age of 19. How my uncle has endured these losses is a boots-on-the-ground kind of miracle and God knows I am paying close attention to those kind of people. After Mark died he called me and as the conversation was ending he said, “Honey, I sure loved the two of you together.”

It was a profoundly beautiful thing to say because that simple sentence recognized what I had and what I lost. What someone like my uncle knows is that the only thing necessary to bring in the midst of someone’s darkest days is light. No advice, no questions, no commentary, no anger. Just a sliver of light, and when you know that person has walked through fire to place it in your hand and curl your fingers around, it you believe them when they tell you that one day you will be okay.

As for the other stuff, you will desperately try to let those things go for the sake of your own mental health and the memory of your husband. A man who on a sunny Tuesday morning in the waning days of summer lost his way, not his love.

.

A few months before Mark died, he twice said to me, “I’m on to something so big it scares me.” By the look on his face I could tell he wasn’t exaggerating. He, of course, meant things in the lab. He had signed a contract with a biotech company to purify their proteins, and a pharmaceutical company had scheduled a phone conference to hopefully do the same. His fear was that this was going to take off and he wouldn’t be able to find a qualified lab tech to replace the one who had recently given his notice to take a position on the west coast. His worry was for naught, within a day he found someone at the med center that was looking for a new position and was a perfect fit.

Besides my own nagging feeling that a future trip with a friend would be missing Mark, I had something else happen that was as powerful to me as Mark’s worry was to him. I was upstairs making our bed, stopped for a minute to look out the window and knew that I would one day be alone in the house. I shuddered at the thought and figured that would be decades in the future, but it unnerved me. Looking back now, it seems that we were both experiencing a shift in our universe that was tilting out of control in ways we couldn’t imagine.

Many times over the years we were married, Mark would tell me that I saved him. I thought he gave me far more credit than I deserved, considering that on any given day I am a mess. While Mark was intense and focused, I am dreamy and rudderless. In my 6th decade of life, I am still unsure what I want to be when I grow up and am prone to the gypsy life when it comes to a job. Mark could never understand why I couldn’t just stay on a job and like it, but I always had to pack up my work tent and move on every few years. It drove him crazy, but I stayed friends with all those people in all those places and he often said that I got an A+ in making our circle bigger. Despite that, I was stable and calming for him. When things at work went off the rails, a grant didn’t make the cut, or he was raging against the administration, I was able to take things down a notch, steady his nerves, and turn his face toward the sun. We were Team Fisher and immensely proud and supportive of each other.

Whenever Mark would say that I saved him, it felt too much for me. He never seemed like he needed saving, but the weekend before he died I got a glimpse of the darkness he rarely showed and we talked about all of it. What time he left the house that morning has haunted me more than anything, and now that day in September has given way to winter and spring will be here shortly. Still I struggle believing any of this really happened. Every night I lay in bed looking at a photo of him from one of the thousands of happy days, and ask him to show up in my dreams. In those shocking, early weeks, I prayed he would let me know that he is okay and that the something so big filled him with wonder and not fear.

Now I ask him to tell me me how I saved him so I can save myself.