A Speckled Trout

When Mark and I became empty nesters, we had an agreed upon split of evening chores. I always got home before him and so I’d make dinner, and sometime between Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow, Mark would clean up the kitchen. Mark was a constant whistler, and no matter where I was in the house I knew when he was cleaning because I could hear him whistling. He’d load the dishwasher, put the leftovers in containers, hand wash the pots, and wipe down the counters. If he was feeling really ambitious he’d mop the kitchen floor. The last thing he’d do is get the coffee ready for the morning so that it was brewed and ready as soon as our alarm went off.

Since he died those things have become my duties. I don’t cook very often these days so there isn’t much to clean in the kitchen. The times I have it lacked the joy and purpose that Mark brought to the job, and there definitely isn’t any whistling. When I had made something in the crockpot and let it sit a few days, the crusted remains stayed put. I tried soaking it in hot water a few times without much luck. Mark would have taken that as a challenge and wouldn’t have given up until he had scrubbed off every bit of hardened chili. My method was different. After a few days of aggravation and half-hearted trying I gave up and took the whole crockpot outside and dumped it in the garbage.

Now I make the coffee every night before I go to bed just like Mark used to, albeit a much smaller pot. After a few weeks it seemed to me that the coffee grounds shouldn’t be in a cabinet on the other side of the kitchen but next to the coffeemaker. Mark would have admired the efficiency of this move and likely would have told me, “Kath, this is so brilliant,” a few dozen times.

It was one of those dumb things that neither one of us had ever thought to do before but that made more sense. Nothing about this life without Mark does as loss permeates everything.

You can even taste it in the coffee.

Since Mark’s death the replay of the last weekend of his life and the events that led up to it are on a constant loop playing over and over in my head. Even on the rare occasion when I am engrossed in something else the loop will start up – a reminder that it is in control and not me. It is exhausting to pick apart every detail in hopes of finding something that was missed earlier, a clue, an off-handed comment, anything that would unveil what he was thinking that morning. Sleep is my only escape and even then there are no certainties, because despite how tired I am when I get in bed it is the replay that calls the shots.

The replay rarely changes, repetitively wondering the same thing. If only I had woken up during the night, if only I had heard him leave the house, if only I had seen something that concerned me enough to stay awake with him, if only I had made a plan with him the night before to get some help.

If only if only if only.

I know that there is nothing to be gained by replaying things over and over but his death has obliterated the life I knew. Most of the time I feel like I have been through an earthquake and am on the floor picking up rocks where my house once stood. By continuously playing the loop, I can turn the rocks over and over and know that this one was the foundation, that one came from the kitchen, the pebble from the front steps. As if closely examining the rubble will result in a rebuild of the life I had where he comes waltzing in the door just like before.

Many people have asked me if I am mad at Mark. My reality is that I fell hard and fast for him on a blind date forty years ago. He was unlike anyone I had dated before and there was nobody that I would come to love more. Empathy, brilliance, and wonder oozed out of him. His curiosity about everything was contagious. At the time of his death I was going to physical therapy and after a month long absence returned. My therapist spent the hour listening to me tell her the events of that day and said, “When I heard what happened all I could remember was the time you told me a story about him and said that nobody made you laugh as much as he did.” He always did and yet died broken and alone, so how exactly am I supposed to be mad at him?

In the years since the kids have grown and left the house, we settled back into being two again. We went out to eat more, we saw more movies, we traveled, we sometimes grocery shopped together. I could even get him to go to Target on the weekend, bribing him with Starbucks. Because those things had been few and far between for so many years, I’d often look over at him and think, “lucky me to fall for that guy and to have him to myself again.”

Because the replay is unforgiving it also repeats the last thing I said to him as he walked down the stairs the night before. “We’re going to be okay, Mark.” I meant him and me but since then have wondered daily if he thought I meant me and the kids after he was gone.

One day the kids and I will be okay. For now we are in the weeds of a loss we couldn’t imagine, weeds so high we are unable to see a sliver of sunlight that would guide us out. Mark used to tell me how the Indians on the plains rode horseback through the tall prairie grasses so they would be obscured from enemies but have a vantage point to see what lay beyond. I think about that often. How one day I will see a life beyond loss, a life where empathy, brilliance, humor, and wonder will lead me where I am supposed to go, Mark’s spirit showing me the way.

On a Saturday night last winter, Mark and I went out to dinner and then stopped by the med center for him to pick up something from his office that he wanted to work on over the weekend. Weeks before he had told me that he had been working on cleaning his office. “You would be so proud of me, Kath,” he said. “I just pick up stacks of paper and throw them right into recycling. I don’t even go through it. I put it right in the bins.” That’s good, I tell him like a professional organizer, they say a cluttered office equals a cluttered brain.

I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe a cleaned off desk or less coffee mugs or not the ever-present piles of paper, but when I walked in I was taken aback. Surveying the place like a judgey shrink on an episode of Hoarders, I moved a pile off one of the chairs to sit down. “I thought you said you were cleaning this place,” I say. “What did you even clean? It doesn’t look any different.”

He gave me the finger. I roared with laughter.

“I swear to god, Mark,” I tell him, “if you up and die and leave me with this mess I’m going to be so pissed off at you.” He imitates me in a high-pitched voice. “I swear to god, Mark…..,” and he keeps giving me the finger and I keep laughing and fast forward seven months and that’s exactly what happened.

I showed up in his building on a Saturday morning to meet his boss and a friend to go through his things and it felt like my chest was being split wide open. The sadness, the 26 years of his life there, flashbacks of the kids so little going to see daddy at work, the clothes he changed into from his biking gear, his notes, his box of change, coffee pods, his shoes, photos of me and the kids. I held it together to get the job done but when the last box was loaded in my car and I went back one more time to get my purse, I could not stop crying. That place was his life and then it was over and crammed into boxes, and the pain of that has not relented for a single minute.

The boxes were piled in an empty bedroom with all the other death related stuff and it would take weeks for me to open the door and figure out what to do with everything. I brought the box of clothes upstairs and sat on the floor near his closet to go through everything – making piles of what needed to be washed, what needed to be folded, what should be hung back in his closet. I picked up one of his tshirts and put my face in it and with sweet relief I could still smell Mark, so I put everything back in the box and taped it shut, hoping that the scent of my once beautiful life remains.

The kids and I made it through Christmas. We made it with plenty of crying and “aren’t we just the saddest bunch,” and gifts that had more meaning this year than any other. We made it with invites for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, outfits that had some sparkle, and a toddler and a baby that brought the sparkle just by walking in the room.

But New Year’s……

I dreaded New Year’s Eve more than anything else in December. Well wishes said with the best of intentions made me physically flinch. Is an entire year really supposed to be happy? Who ever has that happen to them? This new year represents twelve, long months without Mark and that seems too harsh to reflect on for more than a fleeting moment.

The last day of the year was spent on the phone trying to straighten out my health insurance. This is so routine now that it rarely leaves my checklist of post-death crappy problems. Just when my insurance got straightened out in 2018, the dawn of a new year brought a host of new problems, new phone calls, new departments to be transferred to for help and no definitive answers.

The business side of death threatens to do me in at every turn. Bearing the oppressive weight of loss, the mundane feels unbearable as I brace myself to tell another stranger “my husband died in September” when most days I don’t believe it myself.

In late spring Mark was writing a grant. Those grant writing times consumed him. Chances of getting a federal research grant seem slightly better than winning the Powerball but not by much. Nevertheless, he poured all his energy into it like every other one he wrote. Because of the timing of the due date on that one, he never planted his vegetable garden. Sometimes I look back at that and wonder if that’s when things started to go south. Was not being able to garden and watch lettuce and tomatoes grow a precursor for giving up? Then I think that if he were here and I told him that he would say I was crazy and that would be true these days. I often feel like I’m tipping over to crazy.

When I was done trying to get my insurance problems solved, I checked my email. Mark’s department head who was new to the job in July, and like everyone he worked with has had to deal with her own grief over his death, wanted me to know that the last grant Mark ever wrote was approved.

The work in his lab goes on and I whispered “you did it, buddy, you did it” and rang in the new year with heaving sobs.

Over the course of a birthday and Mother’s Day last year, I received two orchids as gifts. They both came from Trader Joe’s, and when their blooms fell off and never came back, I thought they should get pitched. Mark thought differently. One time while we were working in the yard, he told me that it must be really hard for a seed to grow and to become a plant, how much work it must take for a plant to come through the dirt and into the air. This was when we were arguing whether something was a weed (my opinion) or a plant (his opinion). After that discussion, I knew that if I wanted to dig something up out of my garden that it would be best to do it when he wasn’t around lest he got all existential on me. So you can imagine the horror he felt about my idea to throw out these living but not blooming orchids. “Step aside, Plant Killer,” he said to me, “I’ve got this.” Got it he did. Slowly he would pour room temperature water into their dirt and told me not to dump my ice cubes into them like I did the other plants. Too cold and no direct sun, he would say to me, it’s a shock to their fragile system.

My fragile system since Mark died would like this month to be over. If I could pull the covers over my head and sleep until January 2nd it would be a much needed gift. I am so tired. Tired of figuring things out, tired from crying, tired from the questions and the what ifs and the if only, worn out from sleep that escapes me too many nights.

But tis the season where a baby that was born in a stable and who would grow up to be a savior is the oldest and most repeated story many of us have heard throughout our life. And whether you believe it or not, there is no more perfect symbol of hope than a baby. Despite the pain of the last few months where the absence of Mark looms large and constant, there is a baby in this family now and he innocently fills much of that void. I look at him and wonder if he’ll love the outdoors as much as his grandfather, if he’ll grow up and one day look at a plant in my garden and wonder how it got there, whether he’ll find sweet freedom the minute he masters two wheels on his bike, will an interest in science become a lifelong passion? Who will this baby grow up to be?

About a month after Mark died I knocked over one of those precious baby orchids of his and decided to pitch it – out of frustration, anger and sadness. I thought about throwing the other one out as well and it was only guilt that changed my mind. A few weeks ago it bloomed and that delicate flower has clung to its stem with all its might. It’s as if every day it’s saying to me, “Lookie here, oh ye of little faith. I am here, I am still alive, I am in the air.” Surely that’s a sign, people tend to say, and I know they mean well but it’s a poor replacement for Mark Fisher.

But in all its tender glory, like the story of a baby boy born in Bethlehem and a baby boy born in Kansas City to my daughter and her husband, it is life…..and even in the fog of loss and fatigue I know that hope is winking at me just like that husband of mine did a thousand times.

Every year during the holiday season when we were growing up, my sister and I would stay up late to watch White Christmas. Long before video tapes and then DVDs, White Christmas would play just once a year and usually late at night. We both loved that movie and knew all the words to every song. As movies from the 1950s tended to go, it was pretty hokey and unbelievable. Chance meetings and instant connections, a retired general down on his luck, and snow magically appearing just in time to save the inn for the ski season. We didn’t care, though, about the unbelievable part of the movie. It was the hokey that was the attraction.

This year as the kids and I cried and stumbled through Thanksgiving, we convinced ourselves that Christmas without Mark would be easier. By far, Mark loved Thanksgiving more as a good turkey got him more excited than any present ever could. One year after having one at a Boy Scout campout, he deep-fried a turkey and never stopped talking about it. I wasn’t a fan because there was no dressing and no pan drippings to make the gravy but he didn’t care about that. Every Thanksgiving after that he’d say, “Remember that time I deep fried that turkey? Wouldn’t you say that’s the best turkey we ever had?” And I would say, “You mean when we had dressing from a box and gravy from a jar? That time? Yes, yes, I do remember that.” And I knew he wasn’t even listening to me as he recalled pulling that golden, beautiful turkey out of the fryer with nary an overboil of hot oil that would have burned the house down.

When the kids were young, Mark and I would take a day off work and Christmas shop, knocking it out in a single day. We always stayed on a pretty strict budget, spending the same amount on each of the kids and not going overboard with each other. As the kids got older we kept the same patterns, shopping together and staying in our budget except for the time a few years ago when he took Will to help him shop for me at a store where I used to work. He liked going there because the manager and I had worked together in two different places so he trusted Marianne when it came to picking things out for me. That year they picked out $700 worth of clothes and I would end up taking most of it back. I told Will his job was to keep his dad in line and he had failed. “I couldn’t stop him, Mom,” Will said. “Everything they said you’d like he put in the pile. I told him it was too much but he wouldn’t put anything back.” Budget shmudget was Mark’s response to me. What’s wrong with spoiling your girl at Christmas?

A few weeks ago I was at Target and bought two stockings. I knew it was dumb but I felt like the stockings represented that two people lived in this house, that it was filled with love and dreams and laughter, that there were plans made every day. A plan for dinner or laundry or yard work, a plan for the weekend, a plan for travel, a plan for the life ahead. The walls of this house held no plan for death, for being alone, for suicide.  

On my Facebook feed a link showed up for Oprah’s favorite things. I took the bait and one of the things on it was a bike helmet that had lights imbedded into the design. Mark would have loved this. All winter he rode home from work in the dark and being visible to drivers was necessary for his safety. He wore a neon jacket, had a light on the front and back of his bike, a light on the back of his helmet. This entire helmet, though, lit up from front to back and it is easy for me to imagine him being so enamored by it that he would show it to everyone, much like a kid with a new set of Legos.  

Watching t.v. and clicking around one night, I stumbled onto AMC where Christmas movies play around the clock this month. Twice I’ve watched White Christmas, captivated again by the hokeyness of this old movie where falling in love and snow drifting from the set of a musical during the finale saves the general’s inn from bankruptcy.

I ended up returning the stockings that I bought, but letting go of not needing to buy that helmet for Mark has been a different kind of loss – one that in the big picture of all that has happened seems like it belongs in its own special category of grief crazy. If I had a crystal ball last Christmas to show me what the following one was going to be like, I would have blown that budget to kingdom come for my favorite guy, and left it up to my dreams to figure out how to pay for what would come due.

As a science researcher throughout his career, Mark was a devoted and frequent attendee of professional meetings, and for decades went to the biannual Gordon Conferences in Vermont. He wanted me to go with him on every work trip, but I have a job that I’m required to go to on a pretty regular basis and for me these trips were often boring. Mark could easily be gone from the hotel for 8-10 hours a day, and it was rare that he would cut short even a single day for fear of missing some great speaker. Despite my apathetic attitude about going with him last summer, he insisted it would be wonderful and booked our flights.

For all its charm and rural beauty, Vermont didn’t offer a whole lot for me to do all day and it didn’t take long for my boredom to tip over to resentment. Mark’s intellectual tank was being filled and I was frequenting the same bookstore and coffee shop enough for the owners to greet me by name. After a few long days by myself, I had to remind him that the whole idea of this trip was for us to spend time together and that he should ditch at least one day of meetings.

He agreed and we decided to drive up to Maine for the day. It only took minutes for us to fall in love as I gasped, “It’s exactly like One Morning in Maine,” a book I used to read to the kids . We stopped in Yorktown and had fish and chips by the seaside, picked out our summer home in Kennebunkport, and walked the trails in the Rachel Carson State Park. We made a detour to a shopping center and would discover that this town was a stopping point for supplies for hikers on the Appalachian Trail. Mark got bored in the grocery store and was on the hunt for some coffee and would come back a few minutes later to tell me that hikers give themselves names on the trail.

How did he know this? He had just met Firefly.

This started a conversation between us about hiking the Appalachian Trail and how fun that would be. At least that’s what Mark thought. I couldn’t see me hauling a backpack around, sleeping in a tent, or showering once a week. I was certain, though, that it was something my brother-in-law would love and told Mark that I would gladly bow out so they could go together. Mark would disagree and say that it was something we should do together, for no other reason than to have trail names.

After we paid for our groceries, we went next door to a sporting goods store. We headed off in different directions and I ended up at the back of the store where I found a pair of Keen sandals that I thought Mark would like. He never bought himself much of anything but he loved those shoes as soon as he put them on and wore them out of the store. The rest of that summer and this one, those were his favorite shoes. Good for the garden, the creek bank, walking to the park with me or the hardware store for birdseed, a Saturday night movie, and wherever else his wandering feet would lead him. Despite the old adage that money can’t buy you happiness, it could buy a pair of shoes that made Mark pretty content with life.

In the Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion writes, “We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally, crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.” 

Nothing I have read about grief has connected more with me than that. Obliterated? Yes. Most days I still feel like I’m a character in terribly sad movie and if somebody could just dump me back into my old life that would be so helpful for my state of mind. And that crazy, cool customer with her husband’s shoes? Every pair of Mark’s shoes are exactly where he left them. Two pair on the back porch, another flung off in his closet, and his favorite, the Keens he bought in Maine, still tucked under the buffet in the dining room. When I noticed them there the day after he died, I asked that nobody move them and now the Christmas tree is up and his summer sandals have remained in the same place since September.

We never did come up with any lasting agreement on what our trail names should be. He thought he’d go with Catfish which was what he was called in his college hockey playing days, and I couldn’t get past the cool, hip hiker with the flowing hair that went by the name of Firefly. Mark said that name was already taken and I had to pick something else but nothing rolled off the tongue quite like Firefly.

Maybe I didn’t give it much thought because I had no intention of hiking the Appalachian Trail, or maybe I had a feeling that I’d end up on a different trail one day. One that would require me to magically synchronize my blinking light with the stars in the winter sky, so that my husband would know that I kept his shoes where he left them in case he returns.