A Speckled Trout

Below is something Mark wrote about his friend from the UK at a symposium in his honor. Like Mark, he died too soon and with much left undone. I met Tony at a meeting in Spain that I went to with Mark about twenty years ago. It was a raucous time with the most fun people I had ever been around. While having lunch outside one afternoon, Mark and I walked up to a table that Tony was at and were chatting with some people. After a few minutes, Tony said, “Fish, can you move your fat ass? You’re blocking the sun.” In the years that followed, Mark and I would repeat that line a thousand times. Tony was a pied piper and Mark a most willing follower. The unabashed laughter of the two of these complex, brilliant, down-to-earth guys could get you into some trouble but the memories would be worth it. So much of what Mark wrote last year about Tony applies to him in so many ways.

I first met Tony at a SF conference. As we crossed paths, he looked at my name tag and immediately launched into our mutual initial work in the chaperonin field. I looked at his name tag and wondered “Who the F**k is Neil Ranson”. It turned out Tony was wearing Neil’s name tag to avoid paying the conference fees. From there, we instantly became great friends because of our mutual “working man/blue collar scientist” demeanors. I was a roofer in a former life and he certainly possessed a working man’s attitude and style. This meant we said F**k a lot, even calmly intertwining that language style into our scientific discussions. He would refer to me henceforth as “The F**king Fish”.  I had spent an adventurous three weeks in Bristol living with Binx, Kate, and Tony to attend numerous conferences on Prions and Chaperone Proteins, just in time for the Mad Cow Scare. It was a stimulating visit to say the least. There was literally never a dull moment. We spent an inordinate amount of time trying to make each other blow tea or beer though our noses with our silly little antics (imitating the pompous) or stories (my past adventures in roofing and his summaries of general science faux pas). On the flip side, Tony had an intensely serious and strong empathetic streak that would often emerge throughout the course of the day. When he would make it to the US colonies, we would sometimes go on long early morning hikes to go bird watching, hardly the habit you would expect from such a boisterous fellow since you had to be quiet for long periods of time. Tony was a keen kineticist and enzymologist who relished in uncovering the allosteric complexity of the chaperonin machine in his most thorough manner. He avoided experimental fishing expeditions, or as he called them…. “Strolling along the chemical shelf”. He was, without a doubt, a brilliant and accomplished scientist. He was an extremely complex man who enjoyed life to its fullest. I will miss my friend. His full-throated unabashed laughter will reverberate in my brain for the rest of my days.

When I met Mark he was a roofer. He had graduated with a degree in biology and had figured out that the next thing he would need is a degree in chemistry. Back in those days, a well-paying job like roofing would cover the cost of tuition, books, and living expenses for a good part of the year, but lord knows it is a hard job. Mark would sling 50# bags of shingles over his shoulder and haul them up a ladder all day long. He would work day after day in the summer heat and on winter weekends in the bitter cold. He fell off roofs and broke bones, he had hot tar slip down his work boots and give him a second degree burn on the top of his foot, he had a gun pulled on him multiple times. You would be hard pressed to find anyone waxing poetic about the life of a roofer, but those roofing days would shape who Mark would be as an adult. The guy hustled, and when he became a college professor and could have taken things down a notch or two, he never did. I used to tell him that the crazy thing about his white collar job was that he could take a day off and get paid for it. He never did and when he died his last check had 720 hours of unused vacation and sick time paid out.

Last year his boss announced that he would be retiring and the med center said that they would promote someone within the department to take over as chair. Mark got along well with his boss, and like anyone working under something that appeared to be running like a well-oiled machine, there was some concern about it being a cohesive transition. As those kinds of work situations go, there were camps assembled and loyalties split over who would be best at the position. After months of things being up in the air, his female coworker got named as department chair. Mark long championed for more women in science, and so having a woman in a leadership position at the med center seemed like a good thing for everybody, but there would be no coined phrase of workplace drama if everyone agreed.

At the end of June there was a retirement dinner for his boss, and as was typical of us we came flying in at the end of happy hour and were the last people to arrive. There was a short program with some gifts for Gerry and well wishes for his more relaxed new lifestyle and an invitation was extended for anyone to share some thoughts or memories. I leaned over to Mark and asked him if he was going to say something. He said he was going to take a pass, but before things wound down he did stand up and say he’d like to say a few things.

I had never seen Mark teach or heard him publicly speak. He was handed off the microphone and started out by saying how much everybody loved Gerry – the staff did, the faculty, the students. “The reason,” Mark said, “is that Gerry checked in on everyone. He made a point to stop you and ask you how things were going, what was new with your research, and how you were. He did what mattered.” He would go on to say, “That is our challenge now as faculty. To uphold Gerry’s legacy, to be sure to take care of one another and the students, to move us all forward, to support each other and to move as one.” For a guy who had no intention of speaking and had not rehearsed anything I was amazed.

When we were dating, Mark would drive me around and show me the places he’d roofed. He would tell me the pitch, the kind of shingles they put on, whether or not they would have to go back years later to figure out a leak and repair it. “You know what I love about roofing,” he would say. “I did that. I can drive by it years from now and it will still be there. I made something.”

He made processes in science that would also stand. A colleague from Israel sent me a note that said if a technique was done in Mark’s lab there was never a question of its integrity in replicating it in his own lab. “If Mark did it,” he wrote, “you knew the science was impeccable.”

That night when Mark spoke to his colleagues it was to remind them that it didn’t matter who their preference was leading up to that night, that there was a new leader on that floor and she deserved the best from each of them, that she deserved fairness and loyalty. That it was important to check in with each other, that even though your life may be burdened it is essential to be aware that you aren’t the only one carrying hurt and disappointment.

Most of Mark’s legacy is on the roofs of homes and businesses in the Chicago metro area and in labs around the world, but the rest is mine to carry. Over dessert and coffee and socializing at a table at a restaurant in Union Station, neither one of us would know that the tsunami of grief that was about to come would flow from every direction, and though never meant for me it is the echo of his words that I return to over and over.

In the last few years, Mark had been doing a lot of traveling. He had bought a piece of equipment for his lab, that if rumors are to be believed, he was passionately in love with. He was so enamored with it that the company asked if he would be a reference for others who might be interested in purchasing it. He enthusiastically said yes, and what started as phone consults with would-be buyers turned into the company paying travel expenses for him to attend biotech conferences and give a talk centered around their product. After one of those meetings, Mark had dinner with the CFO who said that he was one of their best salesmen, racking up over a million dollars worth of sales directly attributed to him. This was a good professional marriage and even the company sales rep would come to his funeral, telling me that Mark hugged her every time she came to pay him a visit. “That was a first for me,” she told me at the back of the church. “Nobody ever hugs their sales rep.”

These meetings were in and out kind of deals. Fly in the night before, give a talk the following day, go out to dinner, and then fly home the next day. Mark always wanted me to go with him, but though my job is part-time and very flexible, it wasn’t so flexible that I could take a few days off every other month to hang out with him.

When Mark would come home and unpack, he’d cheerily announce, “Brought some more soap and shampoo,” and he’d scoop up his tiny bottles and bars from the bed and dump them in the bathroom cabinet. I would let out a deep sigh every time. “Why do you do that,” I’d ask him. “Soap isn’t even expensive.” “Because,” he’d say, “it’s my way of sticking it to The Man.” Mark had been on a decades long quest to stick it to The Man – that elusive, anonymous person who overcharged, underpaid, had his foot on the neck of our bank accounts, salaries, and 401K, the one who was relentlessly on our tail causing us to constantly hustle to stay one step ahead. I didn’t think pilfering tiny soaps and shampoo bottles from a hotel room was really sticking it to anyone but Mark thought differently. For him those dwarf-sized samples were a moral victory.

One day last year we were driving to Lowe’s and I announced that come thigh-high snow or polar vortexes that I would be going to Florida the following February. “Okay,” Mark said eyes straight ahead on the road. After a long silence he said, “So can I go?” “You can,” I said, “but you have to give up a full week of work. You can’t overschedule yourself so that it winds up only being four days. A full week commitment, got it?” He got it and we shook hands on the deal. The deal, of course, went to hell when he died but I did go to Florida last week with my daughter and her family, where two of my siblings have places in Fort Myers. I have traveled without Mark before but that was when I knew he’d be waiting at home when I’d get back. This trip was a different beast. I was doing okay when we got there and the sun and warm temps were wonderful, but when I walked into that hotel room and looked at that perfectly made bed for two, I cried until I finally fell asleep.

Little did I know that coming home five days later to this lifeless house would make that night seem like a cakewalk. At day’s end I went upstairs to unpack my suitcase which didn’t take much time since I hardly wore most of what I brought. When I was finished, I scooped up the tiny shampoo bottle and soaps off the bed and dumped them in the bathroom. Don’t you worry, Mark Fisher, I said to myself. The Man might have claimed you but I’ll be damned if he’s going to get your soap.

You, my dears, have been through hell and back since your dad died, yet here you are managing to show up – for your jobs, for grief therapy that feels like building a new house without any nails, for life that does not stop for the brokenhearted. I know that most days that feels monumental. Because I love you I am going to tell you that you don’t have to do it all. You can say no and you can say it without explanation. You can say thank you but not today. Flashbacks are a beast so you are allowed to watch tv for hours and not pay attention to a word of it. You can forget and be foggy and be mad. You can read the same page over and over in the same book that’s been next to your bed for months and that’s okay, too. You are allowed to give yourself a break, because for you and me, Dad dies every morning.

We have been through trauma, and because of that every single thing we thought we knew for sure has been upended. It is hard, it is unfair, it is shocking, it is our life these days. It makes us question why this happened to someone so passionate and fun and full of life. Because if this is possible with someone like him….

Dad lived all his days with meaning but maybe now isn’t the time for us to figure out our own purpose in life. We have paid our dues in love and loss and have entered the Club of the Fragile. It isn’t for the faint of heart, as you are finding out when your throat tightens and your eyes brim with tears so often. Now you are able to look at others and instantly recognize the ones who know loss. In the unspoken moments, you see that their eyes mirror yours in sadness. But you know what? I can still see that you have managed to stay kind, especially to each other with such love and concern that it stuns me. You have been especially kind to me, in ways that surely make your dad proud. When you were just wee babes, we would talk about that. That our hope was that you would grow up to have a tank full of kindness and empathy. In the thick of this grief that seems harder by the day, maybe that is purpose enough. To wake up and give and receive and call it good.

You know what I have always said when things go south? This too shall pass. So comforting to me so many times, but this won’t pass, kiddos. It will settle into your bones, and years from now when you think you are just fine, it will roar back to life when you least expect it. It can scare the living daylights out of you but you will be okay. We will be okay.

I try to think like Dad a lot these days. I ask myself all the time what he would want for us. So far I have no answer, but I do know that he would probably go outside and take a deep breath of this icy February air and pay attention to the birds. He knew that even when the harsh winds blew them out of their nest time after time, they could still fly. You will too. I promise.

xo

When our kids were younger and would complain about being bored, I would tell them to be grateful for an ordinary day. “It can all change in the blink of an eye,” I would say like some wise, old sage. I even said it when they became adults, but of course I always meant for someone else, not us, not on a Tuesday afternoon, not with such awful news.

This drastic, new change in my life affects me every waking minute of the day. There is nobody to share the coffee, nobody to bitch with about current events, nobody to cook for, no flipping off the light switches that Mark always left on, nobody to chat with on long walks around the neighborhood, no extra clothes to wash, no LaCroix to buy, no jockeying schedules when Mark needed the car, no hearing about how things are going in the lab, the department, or the med center, nobody to pick up from the airport, no flying out the door in the morning and yelling “have a good day” behind me. Except for the constant banging of my thoughts about him and that day, my life got instantly quiet.

Mark and I didn’t talk on the phone very much during our regular work days. Besides having plenty to do at our jobs, we just weren’t good at it. For most things, we texted or emailed each other. Mark had far more responsibilities than I did, and so I always tried to put something attention getting in the subject line to make him laugh and to get him to respond. When things were in flux in his department because of the egos that some in academia have, I put Boom Goes The Dynamite as the subject. He thought that was hilarious and we emailed back and forth about who was losing their shit and why. On that Tuesday, when hours went by and he hadn’t answered my email I knew something was very wrong.

Now I don’t know what an ordinary day is, I’m still trying to figure that out. So far it’s going to work, solving ongoing insurance problems, and thinking of somewhere to go after work so I don’t have to come home too early. And crying, more crying than I thought possible.

A few weeks ago my friend who lost her husband right after Mark died, texted me that she was sitting in the Costco parking lot listening to old voicemails from her husband. Is that crazy? Despite our preferred manner of communicating I have many voicemails from Mark that I have listened to over and over, so if it is then I am also an active, dues paying member in the Crazy Club. It’s not just the sound of Mark’s voice that does me in but the sound of an ordinary day – him calling to say he had to work late, leaving a message with his flight info, asking if I could swing by and pick him up, calling to tell me he wanted to take me out to eat, calling with great news in the lab.

Despite the gut wrenching loss of Mark, I think every day about the wonderful run I had with that guy. There were the usual marriage ups and downs, the making of a life in Illinois, Maryland, and finally Kansas City, three great kids (each one born in a different state), the trip we took together to Spain many years ago and Portugal last year, the week we spent in Montana. The highlights will always stand out as they should, but looking in the rearview mirror it will always be those ordinary days I miss the most.

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.