Strong

The one thing I have heard daily since Mark died is…..

You are so strong.

I am not strong. I cry for that day, for the past, for a future that absent of Mark feels empty. I cry for my kids, for feisty, adorable Mabel that he was crazy about, and the new baby boy to come. I cry for his Saturday morning biking and breakfast buddies. I cry for his colleagues who continue to reach out to me. For his graduate school best buddy, Tom, who called me and said, “I didn’t call earlier because, frankly, I was too chicken to pick up the phone and talk to you.” I cry for his dear friend who knew him since middle school and found out a month after the fact, because in those shocking, early days I could not for the life of me recall his last name. When I think of his graduate students that he loved like they were his own, I cry. I cannot imagine what they are going through. Mark was their boss, the director of their future, the mentor they chose to work for and to get to the finish line of their PhD. He was demanding and had high expectations and they delivered in spades. “These kids,” he’d say with so much pride, “these kids are so smart.” Today I cried about a car repair that is NO BIG DEAL but it’s another weight piled on and there is so much piled on right now.

So strong I am not, but I might be brave because I have managed to push through. I have things I have to get done. Financial things that only I can take care of, and if you have ever dealt with the death of a loved one you would know that there is a ridiculous amount of stuff to do and none of it is easy. Today I called a business about an automatic charge to our credit card for a periodical that was posted to our account a month after Mark died. They told me they would refund it to the card and the credit would show up in 3-5 days. This is the first time something got taken care of with one call and without sending a death certificate. I cried when I hung up the phone because finally something was easy.

I don’t even know what being strong looks like from the outside looking in but I do know what it looks like to me since this happened.

It looks like you.

It looked like you coming to our door with stunned grief and ringing the doorbell. It looked like you with a catch in your throat telling me, “I don’t know what to say.” It looked like you with the weight of your own sadness and fear and nothing in the adult toolbox to fix any of this. It looks like you sitting in the uncomfortable silence when I stop mid-sentence because loss has choked the words out of my mouth. It looks like you with the cards and messages and flowers and plants and food that keep coming. It looks like you showing up when you have nothing to gain, nothing to offer, no words to break the unbroken.

In these days that overwhelm me at every turn, it looks like love and there will never be enough days in my life to thank you for choosing to walk this path with me.

We are brave in numbers and empathy. We are going to be okay.

Nomad

It is an unsettling thing, this grief. It feels like it’s going to strangle me every night, but sleep keeps it at bay until the alarm goes off. As soon as I roll over to stop the beeping it grabs me by the throat as if to say don’t you dare mistake today for an ordinary Monday. No, honey, daybreak likes to remind me, this is another day where you are here, and he is God knows where.

Since going back to work after Mark’s funeral, I find myself feeling resentful on the drive there. A drive anywhere makes me cry so by the time I get to my desk I look and feel exhausted. Would staying at home be better? This home that we’ve had for twenty-six years, the only home we have ever owned, doesn’t fit me very well these days. For years it was too small for us and the kids, the cats, and a dog. Now it is too big, too empty, too quiet. It unnerves me at night. The constant drone of cable news that Mark could watch for hours irritates me and so I accept most offers for drinks, for dinner, for any distraction in order to not come home. Very rarely does it work, more often I feel sad and lonely midway through and want to bail, so I leave and drive and cry, and then sit in the driveway wondering what the rush was to leave friends and food and conversation for a dark, empty house.

A few days before Mark died, I went to Target. I texted him while I was there to see if we needed dog food. He never answered. When I talk of his last day and say he left his phone at home, people gasp. A sign they say that he had made up his mind and didn’t want me or anyone else to call him and divert his intentions. Maybe, but Mark always left his phone, wallet, or keys at home on a daily basis. He was in every way the absent-minded professor so when I texted him and he never texted back that was not at all unusual. It turns out that while I was at Target he decided to walk the creek near the house and see what was living along the muddy bank.

There is some comfort in going to Target. When I am there my life feels normal so long as I avoid the aisle with LaCroix, the refrigerated case with the flavored creamer, the menswear department. I get dog food and toothpaste and long sleeved tshirts to layer for the approaching cold weather. I look at sheets and throw pillows and blankets. Sometimes I end up buying them and more often than not they get returned. I load the car and drive home and if it’s like that Saturday in September, Mark will come in the door a few minutes later with a big smile on his face and say, “I was down by the creek.” He will sit at the dining room table and pick seed pods that cover the front of his pants and dump them into the trash can. I will smile back and say, “I think it’s great that you did that. You need to do that more often like you used to do before you got so busy with work.” He will say he thinks you’re right and you will unpack the bags and put things away and show him the new flavor of creamer you got. He will tell you that one looks good and weeks later you’ll try to remember if his eyes seemed sad.

But it’s not September anymore and the house is empty when I pull in the driveway. The pants he wore that day have been washed and folded and put in a drawer I don’t open because those are the pants he wore whenever he worked in the yard. The same ones that he wore to the creek that day and the sight of them would send me down even further and that seems too risky.

Whenever I have told the story of how Mark and I met I say that I knew on the first date that I was going to marry him. After looking at dozens of houses, I knew the minute I saw this one that this is where we would raise our family. For all these many years, it was this sweet, old, cape cod on the corner that felt like my refuge from the world.

It’s a beautiful house and I am grateful to have it, but it was always Mark who was my home.

The Day He Forgot To Say Goodbye

For the past six weeks, everyone has looked to me for the answer to Mark’s sudden, intentional death. I understand this as I have many questions myself, but what a burden this has been at times. The explaining, the wondering, the conversations that sometimes felt like a casual discussion between friends of the latest episode of 48 Hours instead of the horrible ending to my married life.

The weekend before Mark’s death the lid blew off decades old trauma that he kept tightly contained most of his life. Was there a trigger that unlocked all that anguish? Yes but that is something the kids and I will sort out, probably for the rest of our lives. On one of our many walks that weekend, he told me things I had never heard before. Things that as a boy made no sense and that as a man looking in the rear view mirror seemed very confusing and wrong. As we were walking in the park on Saturday night, me listening to him trying to figure so much out, I said that I had once read that men sometimes manifest depression as anger and that it seemed to me that at times he got angrier than the situation warranted. He stopped in his tracks and asked me where I read that. I couldn’t recall but he said, “Oh my God, that’s it. That’s what I do. Sometimes when I’m riding to work I’m so pissed off and I don’t even know why.” For his entire life Mark was a student, an avid seeker of information to put pieces together both professionally and personally, and finally this seemed like the missing piece that explained much of what he was feeling. He talked about that several more times that weekend as if it was a relief to know why he thought and reacted to things the way that he did. On Monday night, he told me he was going to make an appointment to see a therapist at the med center that he had seen years before. While I stood in the upstairs hallway, he descended the stairs, stopped, looked up at me, and I said, “We’re going to be okay, Mark.”

At 9:30 he emailed a close friend that he had seen on Saturday and who he wanted to talk to again regarding what he was going through. “I’m going to go into work a bit in the morning,” he told me, “and then ride out to his house in the afternoon.” I told him that sounded like a good plan and went to bed. I don’t know when he came to bed but sometime during the night I heard him get up. He was hot, he told me, a frequent occurrence on our second floor bedroom during the summer, and said he was going to the basement to sleep.

That morning, I got up, fed the pets, had coffee, and turned on the news. Normally, Mark would have heard me or the coffee pot and woken up on his own but I thought that since he had a hard weekend and a restless night that I would let him sleep a bit longer. He wasn’t asleep on the basement couch, and I instantly panicked. I sprinted up the stairs, saw his phone on the table and his work bag gone. I ran out to the garage to see if his bike was there and told myself to calm down – that he had left early to teach and that he didn’t want to wake me to say goodbye. But the minute I walked back in the house everything felt off.

Everything.

I went to work, answered some emails, went to a staff meeting, and then called his work number. It went straight to voicemail.

Hey, it’s just me. You’re probably teaching but I wanted to check in and make sure you were okay.

The next few hours became a round robin of calls – his work number, our home number, his cell. I emailed him. I texted him.

It’s me again. Maybe you’re at lunch. Call me when you can. Are you in a meeting? Call me when you get out. Give me a quick call when you get a sec. Are you okay? You left your phone at home but I thought you might have stopped to get it before you went to Allen’s house. Just wondering if you’re okay. Please tell me where you are. I’m so worried about you.

Three hours after my first call to his office number, I emailed my boss to say that I needed to leave early. I looked up his friend’s address, wrote it down and called his cell again.

You’re at Allen’s, right? You’re there and I’m going to come and get you. You’ll be okay, Mark. Just stay with Allen and I’ll come and get you and bring you home.

As I was packing my work bag my cell phone rang.

Is this about my husband? Is he okay? I’ve been calling him for hours and I don’t know where he is.

Twenty minutes later I arrived at the police station and was taken through a door and into an interview room. Sitting at a small, white table with four chairs, two police officers told me that my husband had died, that it appeared to be intentional, and did we have any marriage or money problems. I don’t remember how long I was there. Not long but there was my life prior to setting foot in that police station and then there is the after. The after felt like I was watching a movie of myself where I was told my husband was dead and since that didn’t make any sense I still struggle to believe that any of it was real.

Since that day I have replayed our last weekend together over and over and over. It was difficult and emotional, but thankfully it wasn’t burdened by the distractions of social commitments, our phones, or the television. It was the two of us like it’s been since he picked me up for our first date at Denny’s forty years ago.

In a better ending of that day that I also replay over and over, I would hear him close the front door and run downstairs in time to see him in the driveway. I would watch him swing his leg over his bike, hook his shoe onto the pedal, adjust his work bag over his shoulder, and look back to see me. We would lock eyes and despite all that troubled him he would know that at day’s end he should come back to me. He would tell me to have a good day and I would tell him to be careful as he pedaled down the driveway and into the street.

And then I would go back in the house and pour myself a cup of coffee, unaware that I should fall on my knees and thank God for another ordinary day.

Mark

On the morning of September 4th, my husband ended his life. There was no warning, no chance to beg him to stay. This is what I read at his funeral the following Wednesday.

Mark always told me that I should write a book. I was never convinced I had enough material to do that until I tried to write this. Sometimes I think that people who had never met him thought I embellished my stories of him with a heavy dose of comedic flair but I promise you that isn’t the case.

As most of you know, Mark biked back and forth to work every day. This started in 2001, and he was so out of shape when he started that he’d stagger in after work and make it to the stairs where he would sit trying to catch his breath. I’d make dinner with one hand and hold the phone in the other because I was certain that one day I would have to call 9-1-1. He got better and better at this means of transportation and pretty soon he was going back and forth with ease, driving in on the weekends to swap out his work clothes. During those early biking days, I became especially concerned about his underwear. I was doing the laundry and it seemed to me that there wasn’t enough rotation of boxers and briefs. As I am prone to do, I became obsessed with it. Was he turning them inside out and wearing them twice? Was he washing them in the sink of the men’s bathroom and hanging them to dry in his office? Was he even wearing underwear? His mind was always on bigger things, and whenever I brought up the subject he waved me off and said he had that part of his life under control. I knew I was thinking about it way too much when on the way to work one day I saw a pair of underwear in the middle of the road, and hours later on the rainy drive home it was still there. Mark came home from work a bit later, drenched from head to toe. He took his computer out of his bag, set it on the dining room table and plugged it in. Then he walked back to his work bag, unzipped a different compartment and pulled out a pair of wet, white underwear, strolling over to the kitchen sink to wring them out like it was the most normal thing in the world. “Kind of crazy, Kath,” he said. “I started thinking about this underwear thing and decided to stuff some in my bag to take to work. So I’m riding home tonight and I see this pair of underwear in the middle of the road, and I say to myself hey I think that might be my underwear.” I listened in fascination and horror. “So I rode over to them and picked them up off the ground and held them up and sure enough they were mine.”

“That underwear,” I said, “has been on the street since this morning. It has been rained on and cars, CARS, Mark, have driven over them all day long.” “Well,” he said, “I guess that means I’m going to have to put some muscle into bleaching out the skid marks.”

For those of you who know him professionally, I will tell you that his mind also worked in overdrive at home. When some friends of ours had come to visit us, Jim told us a story over dinner that was featured in the Cleveland paper. A local kid who had no interest in college had started reading about raising tilapia. His dad was so happy he was interested in something that he jumped in with both feet and provided his son with everything he needed to start this business. Before long, all the best restaurants in Cleveland were buying their tilapia from him and he was making bank. Jim pulled up a photo from his phone that showed the young businessman in the basement with plastic wading pools full of fish. I was amused. Mark thought this couldn’t be more brilliant. A few days later, he’d looked into the startup on this and for a few hundred dollars we could get into the tilapia business. He’d taken some measurements in the basement and said we had enough room to start with twelve wading pools. “You cannot be serious,” I said. “Kath, this science gig doesn’t exactly have us rolling in dough,” he said, “so I’m thinking that with some commitment to this, we could be this close to becoming thousandaires.” I told him it was the dumbest idea I had ever heard. A few days after that, he came back to me and said he would settle for six plastic wading pools and we could use the kids’ red wagon and put the tilapia in buckets and roll them up to the Blue Moose to sell. “Here’s what I’m thinking,” he said. “You could hang out in the basement with the tilapia, making sure they’re not banging into each other cuz I think that might affect the price, and you can take a laptop down there and write since basically you’re just babysitting fish, and I think in no time we’ll be loading up the money truck.” “So let me get this straight,” I said. “We take the dumbest idea you’ve ever had, cut it in half and go forward with it so now we have a half dumb idea instead of a whole dumb idea.” “Well, you’re the one who is good at math so I’ll let you figure the fractions out,” he said. I told him the answer was still no. The next day he said he’d be perfectly fine starting out with three plastic wading pools to launch this business and even if they all died we weren’t out a bunch of money. Finally I said, “Mark, let me put it to you this way. If we have three wading pools in the basement with fish in them, we are going to have a lot of humidity in the house. My hair and humidity aren’t a good mix so here’s what you have to decide. Do you want tilapia in the house or me and my hair? And as he’s been known to do a thousand times over, he slapped his forehead and said, “You are so right, I didn’t factor in the humidity but I’ll research that.” And the next thing I knew he was at his computer googling Residential Tilapia Humidity.

Over the last week, many people have said to me that they wished that they had done more for Mark. No one will ever wish that more than me, but Mark didn’t suffer fools or fakes, so if you are here it is because he wanted you in our circle. If you asked him how his research was going, you did enough. If you bought him coffee, you did enough. If you asked how his vacation was, how his kids were, what kind of lettuce he planted, how many miles he rode, how many steps were on his Fitbit, how his last talk went, if he could explain the entire last season of Westworld, if the Bears had any chance of doing well this season, and especially if you made him laugh…..you, my dear friends, did enough.

Mark’s needs were few. He never got tangled up in material things and he loved an engaging conversation on any subject more than anyone I know. He loved his work and often told me that he spent so much time on it because he believed it to be his legacy. More years were stressful than not, where the the regular process of getting funding for his lab felt like a recurring, bad game of Chutes and Ladders.

More than anything, Mark believed in basic research. He loved his coworkers and adored his students, and despite how hard this field can be, he would never want any of you to give up the commitment to the work. He thought research science was the noblest of professions, and for most of his life I think he believed that a guy who started as a roofer spitting nails out of his mouth won the career lottery.

Last summer, we were in Vermont for a biochem meeting and I picked Mark up late in the evening. The drive back to our hotel was pitch black. “I bet the stars are amazing out here,” I offhandedly said and he immediately pulled over to the side of the road. We both jumped out of the car and took a good long time gazing at that lit sky, and that sweet, quiet night will remain one of my favorite memories with him.

I would rather be anywhere but here today, but life had other plans for me and my favorite guy. So if you want to do more for Mark, behold the wonder of the world around you like he always did, and please tell our kids stories about their dad. Many years ago, a friend said to me that she wished her husband looked at her once the way Mark always looked at me. I pray I see those eyes again in my dreams. Last Tuesday, everything in my life got knocked off its axis, and at this moment the only two things that I am certain of is that Mark’s love could never be contained in one life, and that I couldn’t have been luckier to have had him beside me.

He took me on the ride of my life.

 

The Recipe Box

With only two adults left in this old cape cod of ours, I have spent the last year trying out new recipes, searching for them on cooking blogs and Pinterest. Some are vegetarian, some meant just for two, others are low-carb, low-fat, and sometimes low-taste. Bookmarked on my phone, I can shop for the ingredients at the grocery store after work and then come home and start dinner. Cooking via cell phone, though, is frustrating for me due to the constant need to refresh the screen when time management of sizzling ingredients and the need to know the next step is critical. But if a digital recipe is deemed a success after a few tries it gets printed and stood up in file folders next to the microwave marked Main Dishes, Appetizers, Sides, Vegetables, Desserts.

And if I forget to print it? Then I go down the rabbit hole of my Pinterest account for the thousandth time trying to find the breakfast casserole that was kind of spicy and had sausage. Or was it bacon?

A couple of weeks ago I made corned beef and cabbage, and from the cabinet over the stove I pulled out my recipe box – plain, black, plastic. A relic from Office Depot of a time before computers when 3×5 cards were what everybody used to keep track of the important things in their life. From the first section of main courses, I pulled out the hot pink piece of paper with my mom’s recipe. This one was written by me as I sat at her dining room table and asked her to word-for-word dictate to me every step of the process in cooking her corned beef. It has never come out less than perfect so I know she didn’t miss a step, and my writing it on a hot pink piece of paper was deliberate. I always wanted to see it when I opened up my recipe box.

There is another recipe from my first adult job in Chicago where I worked with a guy named Frank Chico. One day when we were talking about tacos, he said I needed to know how to make tacos from a real Mexican, and so he wrote down his recipe and included hot sauce and beans. I’ve kept that recipe since 1982 because Frank Chico was one of the finest men I’ve ever known.

I have a recipe for Hawaiian Glazed Ribs from the mom of my best friend in grade school. She included it in her shower gift to me for my wedding 35 years ago. Years later, after having a stroke in her 40s, she wrote down the recipe for her Zucchini Bread – one of the things she could still make with her good hand.

I have my mother-in-law’s Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe which Mark will bake a couple of times a year because he doesn’t think anyone else’s can compare. Someone I used to work with wrote down her Coffee Cake recipe, another her Cherry Cobbler.

Around the holidays I always make my sister’s Toffee Apple Pie recipe. The other day I made my other sister’s Enchilada recipe – a 3×5 card so faded I have to hold it up to the window to read all the ingredients.

I have often thought of starting a recipe box for my own kids. Sitting down and writing out the recipes for the things I make that they love. By now I have made some of these things so often I don’t even need a recipe. It is muscle memory to pull out the ingredients, brown the meat on one burner, make the sauce on another. I can remember my kids as little ones, standing by the stove when the smell of dinner drifted through the house. “Spaghetti? You’re making us spaghetti tonight?” Yes, I would say and and off they’d run to be the town crier announcing the good news.

Many of my recipes are fragile – used so often that they are on the verge of disintegrating. Some have never even been made, but they were handwritten on an index card by someone I loved and so they will always have a place in my recipe box.

While thankful for many of the things a digital world offers, it is fitting that the written recipes that have been passed down to me are in a box that can’t be closed. Butter, aprons, flour on Grandma’s wrinkled hands from making her famous sticky buns, the smell of a roast, Thanksgiving dinner, Easter brunch, the written documentation on an index card of a conversation about a favorite dish.

Memories, my own and those of many others are in that box, and with a flip of the lid I can spend time with them again. In my empty house making dinner for two I am not alone.

 

 

Cancellation Notice

Long before I dated and eventually married my Mr. Science Guy, I was smitten with a guy named Andy. I have no recollection of how we met – most likely at one of the many discos my friends and I frequented back in the day. I’m sure that somewhere in the introduction mixed drinks were involved. By most dating standards, Andy and I didn’t go out a whole lot, but he was creative when it came to inventive dating nights which was just one of his many charms.

When I told my mom I was dating someone new and that he was a tennis pro, you could feel the weight of the world descend upon her already weary shoulders. Her oldest daughter, who was striking out spectacularly in the dating world, now had a prospect that couldn’t have been more unstable. “What exactly does that mean,” she asked me. “It means,” I said, “that he goes around competing in tournaments.” I could tell that this didn’t seem one bit legit to her. “Oh you mean the kind of guy who hangs around country clubs and teaches housewives how to hit a ball,” she asked. Poor Mom with her six kids and her cooking and cleaning and ironing in suburbia couldn’t possibly understand the glamour of my life as the girlfriend of a tennis pro.

Because Andy would be off traveling to play in tournaments around the country, there would be long gaps in our dating. It didn’t matter to me. I would get on the bus to go to work in the city every day and pine away for him every night, waiting for him to get back in town and for us to pick up where we’d left off.

After Andy had been gone for many months, I got a letter in the mail. My heart skipped a beat. He was coming back to town and I was the first person he wanted to see. Instead it was a generic Christmas letter. The kind you run through a copier, hit print, and shove in with your Christmas cards. On the bottom scrawled in pen it said, “Living in California now. Hope things are going well!!!” California? Hope things are going well? I was sitting on a bus choking on exhaust every day, daydreaming about my wedding dress and being the wife of a tennis pro, and all the while he was in California???

Mom wanted to know what I got in the mail and I showed her his hastily scrawled dismissal of our relationship. You could feel the weight of the world lift from her shoulders and get squarely dumped on mine. She would never have to explain to her relatives and church friends that the best her daughter could do was end up with someone who taught housewives how to hit a tennis ball. I, on the other hand, had been flung once again into the deep end of the Loser Boyfriend pool.

******

Fast forward a few decades and I met another man – an insurance man. I have no recollection of how or when we met but I do remember there being long, lingering talks about deductibles and protecting our house, cars, and family jewels. One time he made a visit to the house to discuss all this. He told us that he and his wife were a very exciting couple – he being the insurance man, her a librarian. I found this to be funny and honest and I liked Mr. Insurance Man even more. Over the course of the next twenty years I would talk to him occasionally.  Cars would come and go, kids would get their drivers license and need to be added, accidents would happen, and each time I was grateful for his help. A few years ago I had a question about our homeowners and a painting contractor who never finished the job so I called him to see if I had any recourse. He suggested that the next time I get a contractor to get a copy of his insurance policy as I might be able to collect from them. “Oh, I do have that,” I said and he heaped praise on me. “Maybe you’ll get something from them, maybe not but I can tell you hardly anybody does that and they should when they are having work done on their house so good for you for asking for it.”

I think my insurance man thought I was very smart.

Over the years, though, this insurance kept going up a lot. Each year when the homeowners bill would come the prior incremental increases turned into hundreds of dollars. I thought this was typical of everyone due to more destructive storms, wildfires, and tornadoes causing so much property damage. If the subject ever came up and I thought to ask others, though, it seemed I was paying way more than I probably should be. Then I would go down the rabbit hole of quotes and immediately get overwhelmed and put it aside for another day. Days would become months and then years and another bill would arrive and the mortgage company would pay it and I would repeat the cycle.

This year when our escrow account was short twice by a significant amount, I decided to finally get serious about our policies. My biggest worry, though, was having to tell my long-time insurance man that I was dating another. That my loyalties now lay with someone else. I would get flustered just thinking about it. What were Insurance Man and Librarian Wife going to do without our business? I dreaded the conversation.

In talking with my new insurance agent I found out that once I was committed to them they would notify his agency. They would be the bad guys and I was off the hook for delivering the news of our break up. Still, I thought, after twenty years he would probably want to know what happened, what he could do, how he could keep us as the loyal customers we’d always been. I practiced imaginary conversations in my head, each time thinking I’d probably end up paying for two insurance policies because cancelling anybody isn’t my strong suit.

None of that happened. After all those years there was no begging, no crying, no asking for forgiveness, no request to patch things up and make them better. In black and white there was a Notice of Cancellation that came in the mail. An abrupt end to a long insurance marriage and that was that. For days I thought about calling him and saying, “Geez, Andy Insurance Man, aren’t you even going to come back and fight for me? Doesn’t what we had mean anything to you? Oh, and just to set the record straight, you should know that I moved on LONG before I even got this stupid letter.”

Once in awhile Baby does get put in the corner but when she does she saves more than 50% on her insurance and has imaginary conversations to keep her company. And Mr. Science Guy. She’s got that too. Things are going well.

 

 

I See You

A few years ago someone I vaguely knew from the church we went to friended me on Facebook. I have not gone to this church very much in the last few years, but for a long while we were pretty active there. Mark joined the bike club and I got involved in social events – a couple of auction committees, the 150th anniversary of the church, the going away party for a beloved priest. I met a lot of people doing those events, and I knew this friend requestor. He and his wife were musicians and were frequently asked to provide entertainment. I was never the one doing the asking and our interchanges were no more than brief “hellos”, but I don’t think they ever said no to helping out in whatever way they were needed. So in light of the brevity of our interactions and my absence from there for awhile, I was surprised he even knew me at all.

He didn’t post much but occasionally his name would pop up on my feed. The regularity of that happening seemed more in recent months and I got the impression he was sick. I thought about inquiring of mutual friends who would know but that seemed intrusive to me. Does the health of someone you barely know in person, and only incrementally more through social media, allow you to poke around in their life to ask why the sudden surge in photos of a noticeably thinner version? I didn’t think so but I wondered about it often, because even in a digital world there was a kindness to him that I had recognized years before.

What I had gathered on my own was confirmed when his wife posted on his page that he was turning inward on his journey, and though his page was still up, he was headed elsewhere. It was poignant and not a surprise. A few days later, she recounted their wedding day – not with the grief that must have been bearing down on her for months, but a touching recounting of the snowy day that started their marriage. Three days after that she wrote that her husband had died peacefully. It wasn’t until the following morning that I read the news and the shock and sadness of the death of someone I barely knew surprised me. Why I was staring at a Facebook post on my phone crying for someone on the periphery of my life? Someone I was certain wouldn’t know who I was if he saw me in the grocery store. Why did this feel like a baseball bat to my knees? The condolences that were shared would confirm what I thought I already knew about him. This was a very decent man.

In the hours that followed I would chalk up my sad reaction to his death as the stress of my own life lately, and the toxic swirl of hate that seems to be overwhelming us all. It wasn’t him that was making me sad, it was everything, and all day that everything-that-wasn’t-him sat like a rock in the pit of my stomach. I decided to pick up the rock and flip it over to see what I had missed, and underneath I found plenty of chances to know this man more. It was clear that he was deeply loved and admired so why didn’t I go further than the briefest of greetings? This rock was laden with regret.

And then I remembered something. Following my dad’s death, somebody left a handwritten letter in the mailbox saying how sorry she was when she heard the news, that she had admired my father from afar when she saw him at church, and though she never knew him she wanted to express her sympathies to his family. We were stunned when Mom passed the letter around. “Who is this,” we asked her. She had no idea.

There are a lot of reasons to admire someone who would do something like that but it wouldn’t be until this week that I would come to understand it.

Many people live in the periphery of our lives and their leaving is not a cruel teaching moment for conversations that never happened, friendships never formed, a thousand missed opportunities.

It is an affirmation that all along the way you saw them. Oh my did you ever see them, and for reasons you couldn’t begin to explain you are better for it.

The Thieves of Joy

I am an overly frequent user of social media. I have long perused Facebook, all while having a conversation with myself about how much time I am giving away for something as useless as sitting at a slot machine. I wish I could say those conversation have made me more aware of how often I could be doing better things, but the truth is I let my time slip away like I’ve got it banked in a Swiss account that even the Grim Reaper couldn’t touch.

My social media drug of choice for months now has been Instagram. I started dipping my toe into it this summer, taking and posting photos of our house and garden. There is a twofold reason for this. I have always loved decorating and if I could make money doing store displays, which I’ve done plenty of in my life, I’d quit my accounting gig and just do that. Retail display work, however, is part of the package of working retail and so I had to let that one go when I could never get out of a pay scale that exceeded ten dollars an hour. Crunching numbers and paying the bills for a business is at the lucrative end of how not to make much money over the course of your life. The other reason is that friends and family, who know how much I love all things house, have encouraged me to write a decorating blog and I have thought about it, but it is something that I clearly don’t have the time for with my part-time job and overloading on social media.

The rose that is posting on social media, though, has started to turn brown on the edges. I started to notice it a few months ago, these accounts with the perfect homes, the tablescape for fall, the perfect outfit to wear for the dinner party around the tablescape, the boots, the blanket scarf, the throw pillows, the sofa, the newly painted rooms that were newly painted a year ago BUT YOU GUYS THE BUFFALO PLAID. Overall, it seems to me that most of these accounts are women far younger than me and I couldn’t fathom having that kind of disposable income twenty years ago. That turns out to be something I’m grateful for most of the time. There isn’t much that is new around here – most of it has come from estate sales, flea markets, antique malls, Craigslist, and from the side of the road, and therein lies the untold stories of these things in a different house with different people.

Oh but…..

I study the photos, enlarge them, envy them, and even though I know better I have to remind myself often that comparison is the thief of joy.

Two weeks ago the very styled Instagrammed Christmas decor went up and my feed was flooded with dozens of pictures of trees and mantels that were decked in glittery goodness and I started to feel my chest tighten. We were going to Portugal, we were returning on the weekend, we were working two days and then driving to Chicago for Thanksgiving until Sunday. Sunday??? That’s the 26th of November. Why even bother? It’s like the season will practically be over by then for the savvy decor minded and in those perfectly styled photos was a decorated linen closet.

Somebody decorated their linen closet.

We headed to Portugal and had a fabulous time and I forgot that I should be decorating my home and now my linen closet for Christmas. Instead I was grateful that my husband working and me working allowed us the means to travel to an incredible place.

And I came back with a new perspective which is the pot of gold at the end of the travel rainbow. I saw churches that made me so overwhelmed I couldn’t talk, sculptures so preserved that I thought surely they could not be a thousand years old, cobble stone walks that have been traversed for centuries, a castle, custard tarts from a secret family recipe from the 1800s.

I saw that the things that make a life are never going to be found where I have been looking and that when the paying jobs are over there will be other work to do. Worthy and quiet things like packing bird seed and heading off to a park bench to sit with an old friend, and watching joy unfold for those who choose to live a life beyond comparison.

Tethered

Every year, on the anniversary of his death, I write something about my dad. It is how I honor him, this dad of mine who also was a writer, but writing, in general, has been hard this last year. Writing something worthy about him is daunting on a tank that runs dry most of the time.

I started mulling over this empty tank of mine while I was in the car running an errand which naturally led me to think about the last few days of his on this earth. Those were his toughest days, waiting to die. They were also tough to witness and there are a lot of painful memories that rise up every September. He got admitted to the hospital and a nurse was having trouble getting his catheter in and she was pissed. Banging stuff, half-yelling, frustrated, and from what it seemed like to me waiting in the hallway, taking it out on Dad. Everybody calls him Bill, not William, I wanted to say to this nurse. He raised six kids in a small house so you couldn’t begin to imagine how much he loves the quiet. And since he’s dying and this catheter business you’re so mad about is preventing him from getting to his destination, why don’t you just let him have some of that fucking quiet so he doesn’t look so scared and then maybe the rest of us won’t be so scared either. But that’s the sort of thing you think to say a couple of decades after the fact which is a useless exercise in coulda shoulda.

Rather than a melancholy piece, I thought about writing about the parts of him that drove us nuts. He was a perfectionist, which in these days is more likely to be referred to as a healthy dose of OCD. We all inherited some of that from him. I have to write a grocery list in the same color pen. I can’t start it in black and then go to blue. No, I cannot or I would have have to start over or breathe in and out of a brown, paper sack until the next black/blue trigger. Or when we were kids how we all had to take our turn picking up sticks in the yard before he mowed, and after what seemed like hours of bending over and picking up stick after stick, he’d look out into the yard and say, “I thought I told you to pick up sticks. There’s some there, and there, and there….” When you were the one old enough to mow he’d look out over the finished lawn and tell you that you needed to work on making your lines straighter. If your first line is straight, he would say in all seriousness to your flushed, sweating face, all the rest of them will be straight. And the straightness of mowed lines have plagued me ever since.

He died a few short months after he retired, which was the result of using up all of his disability time with the company when there were no tricks left up anybody’s sleeve to keep him there. They gave him a big sendoff and we were all invited. We were in a packed room at the offices of Commonwealth Edison in downtown Chicago, with coffee and cake, and his boss said some nice things, and somebody else said some nice things, and they gave him a lamp made from an old meter and he said that was just wonderful. He’d always wanted one of those. When it was his turn to talk he thanked everyone, said he was grateful for the 45 years he worked there, that my goodness just look at all of you who came today to wish me well, that he didn’t know what the future held but he had Ger and the kids and the good Lord and so we’ll just take it as it comes. Before we left the house that day, Mom said just pray he makes it through this because he’s not good this morning and if he can’t say goodbye to his work friends I don’t know what we’re going to do.

His bad luck in getting cancer meant that we all took it as it came and twenty seven years have passed since then. There has been so much that has transpired in the family that he has been absent for – marriages and divorces, a slew of kids born, graduations, the death of his brother, a nephew, in-laws, the deaths of more friends of him and Mom than could be accurately counted.

So what is there to write about when it seems a lifetime has passed?

Sometimes I have imaginary conversations with him. When things are worrying to me, I am likely to run them by him in my head. I often wonder what it would be like if he just showed up on my doorstep one day. Rang the bell and when I opened it he would be standing on my front porch like he took a detour years ago and just now figured out people were looking for him. Would he even know it was me? I was a 33 year old pregnant mom of one living in Maryland when he died. Now I’m the 60 year old mother of three adult kids, one granddaughter, and living in Kansas. Kansas, he would say. That’s quite a leap you took there, kid. Two years after you died, Dad, I would say.

Almost to my destination I waited at a stoplight and watched an inflatable, green stick man announcing the grand opening of a used car lot. It bent and twisted with the wind over and over, never staying in one place for more than a second. Disappearing and nearly on the ground one second only to pop back up with an ever-present smile until the wind had other ideas. That’s me, I thought. That’s me in this country for the last year. Buffeted by the wind of current events, trying to smile, bouncing up and convincing myself that sooner or later it’s all going to be okay. Look at me. I’m smiling. That means it’s all okay and bad credit and no credit are our specialty, and thank God for being unplugged because night brings relief from another ugly news story.

By the time I reached the parking lot of Jo-Ann Fabrics I sat in my hot car and had a good cry thinking about all the things I thought I didn’t have left to say.

Sometimes I wish my dad would show up on my doorstep and ring the bell, and even if it only lasted a few seconds, I could look at him and remember it all. How he always said to us don’t you kids forget that you are your brother’s keeper, and then because he knew we watched more than we listened, he lived the life of a keeper. Maybe then I would know that no matter what happens or how the winds batter me, I have been and always will be tethered to goodness.

I forget that these days.

Floor*Rida

Every year in September, Mark rides the MS150. This is a two day biking event to raise money for multiple sclerosis, and as the name implies it is 150 miles. The starting point is twenty miles away from our house, so for him it is two days, 150 miles, and an extra twenty thrown in at five a.m. on day #1 because he is muy macho.

He has been doing this ride for about fifteen years, however, when he started he was under the age of 50, and things have changed a bit since then. Now he is knocking on Medicare’s door and 150+ miles in two days isn’t quite so easy. Unlike years ago, though, he doesn’t push it or isn’t trying to finish day #1 in record time. No, these last few years he is content to take his time on this ride with a more leisurely pace and chat with his fellow pre and post Medicarers.

The first day of the ride ends in Lawrence, Kansas which is about forty miles away. Mark used to bring a sleeping bag and a change of clothes and camp outside but he came to his senses about that few years ago. Biking all day and then sleeping on a cot? No, not any more. This year he ended up at the Days Inn and called me about 4:00 to tell me he was checked in, all was good, he didn’t push it, no problems whatsoever, and he was going to a dinner gathering for all the riders and would be going to bed soon after.

Considering the upbeat call the day before, I was a little unprepared for what I saw when he walked in the door on Sunday afternoon. My husband looked like he’d been run over by a truck. It turns out that the night before his legs started cramping up. They woke him up out of a sound sleep and that is something that in all his years of biking had rarely, if ever, happened. He got plenty of fluid in him in the morning and he was fine, but, that man was worn out.

He started some laundry and laid down on the couch in the basement, where it is cool and dark and just how he likes his sleeping quarters. He was down there for a long time and said he never slept but he was so tired that I was sure he must have dozed off. When he finally came upstairs he headed straight to the shower which lasted nearly as long as his non-nap.

At 9:30 that night he flopped into bed with his usual sleeping gear – ear plugs in each ear and a black sock over his eyes. He was sound asleep in seconds. I came to bed later but was abruptly woken up by a thud in the middle of the night.

My husband had fallen out of bed.

He had fallen out of bed, hit his face on the nightstand, thudded onto the floor, and was stringing a litany of curse words together.

I bolted upright and said, “Did you just fall out of bed?” And he said yes and that he was bleeding and there was an added bonus of about twenty five ef bombs between the yes and the bleeding part. I asked him how he fell out of bed. The short pissed off version was that he had a dream that somebody was in the house trying to get Will and he was trying to stop them. By this time he was in the bathroom saying his goddamn nose was bleeding and he had to stop it and then go downstairs and get a goddamn band-aid.

And I’m wide awake at three o’clock in the morning wondering how in the hell my husband could fall out of bed.

After a few minutes he came back upstairs with his green earplugs sticking out of each ear and trusty black sock in his hand to mask the night vision. His second attempt at sleeping didn’t last long as he was still mad about the dream, the falling out of bed, and the bleeding nose, and so he decided he would sleep downstairs. As he pulled the bedroom door closed behind him he hit the back of his foot with the door. That launched a whole new string of ef bombs.

And I’m wide awake at three thirty in the morning wondering how in the hell my husband could fall out of bed and then hit his own foot with a door.

The next morning he got up and looked worse for the wear with his beat up body from biking 150 miles over the weekend and a bandaid covering his bashed up nose. “I didn’t sleep very well last night,” he said, which might have been the understatement of the year.

Later that day when he got home from work (which he biked to and from) he told me more about the dream and how he was trying to grab the boogie man who had been hiding in our closet and was trying to get to Will which is why he hurtled himself right out of bed. I told him it was a good thing that we have a lower bed now or he could have banged his face up even more. Nope, he said, it’s that low bed and that Ikea nightstand right next to it. That was what did it. That Hemnes nightstand. It was a pain in the ass to put together and a pain in the nose when you smack your face into it. I didn’t really buy into any of that but I wasn’t about to argue with him or his band-aided face.

Thankfully the next night was uneventful – no dreams and no falling out of bed. It was a blissful night’s sleep. In the morning I noticed that my husband had taken some extra precautions the night before to prevent a Hemnes attack leading to further injuries.

All these years I have blamed the kids as the reason we couldn’t have nice things around here.

Turns out I was wrong. So wrong.