Peace On Earth

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.

I’m Dreaming Of A White Christmas

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.

The Shoes & The Firefly

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.

Parallel

When Maggie was a mere six weeks old, Mark and I packed up the graduate student life and moved to Maryland where he had accepted a position with the National Institutes of Health as a post-doc. The whopping salary for this illustrious career move in 1987 was $24,000. When we arrived, Mark ended up moving nearly everything out of the truck himself until a new neighbor came along and helped him with the heavy stuff. That would be our first indication that this move and the neighborhood we landed in would be a good fit for our little family.

That night as Mark was breaking down boxes at the dumpster, he met Betty. Betty was the mother of one of our neighbors, one who had a baby that was three weeks old. “I saw you moving in earlier,” she said, “and I saw that you have a baby. See that house over there? That’s where my daughter and her husband and her baby live, and your wife needs to meet my daughter soon.” Mark nodded. “Soon,” she said. It wasn’t so much of a suggestion as an order.

“So am I just supposed to go over there and knock on the door?” I asked Mark when he told me about the conversation with Betty. He said he thought so and it all seemed kind of odd to me but I knew nobody and was already feeling lonely in this new city, so one morning I took my baby and walked a few doors down and knocked on the door. Betty, who had never met me, knew exactly who I was. “Oh, I’ve been waiting for you,” she said. “Come upstairs and meet Carla and Christopher.”

The rest, as they say, is history. Carla’s husband, Jim, was an OB/GYN at Bethesda Naval Hospital – across the street from the NIH. With no family close by and husbands who were always working, Carla and I and our babies spent a lot of time together. After a few years and another baby, Jim and Carla would move a few miles away to a rental house but we remained close. Sometimes meeting at the mall so our kids could run off some energy in the play area, a wading pool in their backyard, a weekend at the ocean with all of us, including our elusive husbands.

When I was pregnant the second time, ultrasounds were the exception and not the rule for prenatal care. My dad’s cancer had come back and I was under enormous stress, and despite begging my own doctor I was told I did not need a scan. I told Carla and she arranged for Jim to give me one at the Naval Hospital. We would sneak in after hours – me, my husband, my toddler, Carla, her toddler, and her baby boy so that Jim could give me an ultrasound. In that little, darkened exam room he would tell us that both mama and baby were healthy, and when he was done he opened the door and yelled, “It’s a boy.” Carla came in with all the kids she’d been wrangling on her own in the hallway and we were all so happy and excited – our own little reveal party before those were even a thing.

As the years went by, Jim and Carla had a third baby (this time a girl), moved to Italy, then back to Maryland and finally home to Cleveland when Jim left the navy and went into private practice. We would leave Maryland for a move to Kansas City where Mark had accepted a position at a university and a third baby (another girl) would come our way too. In different cities with our husbands and three kids, we bought houses and cars, weathered scouts and sports, ACT tests, injuries, boyfriends, girlfriends, break ups, and break downs. Through it all Carla and I would always say that we were living parallel lives.

Four years ago, Jim and Carla came to Kansas City for Jim to compete in a triathlon. It was the first time in all those years that it was just the four of us – no kids to corral as they were all on their own by then. We went out to dinner, an art museum, had margaritas, and fell into long-established patterns. Jim and Mark talking about science and medicine, Carla and I about being empty nesters and travel and what was next. Despite the time and miles that had been between us throughout our friendship, there was never any awkwardness to navigate. The bond that we had established in those early years in Maryland never wavered.

The summer of the following year, Carla texted me that they were on their way to Sloan-Kettering. Jim had been diagnosed with a cancer that did not respond to chemo or radiation, surgery was his only choice. During the time that they were there, Carla and I texted and talked many times throughout the day. Mark and I were so worried about Jim but another bombshell would drop a few weeks later. Carla was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Carla would fare better than Jim. I wouldn’t find this out until May when I texted her a cheery update on Mark and I and the kids and she texted back the news that Jim’s cancer had come back and there was nothing more to be done. When I told Mark his whole body slumped. This world without Jim, he said, not possible. I called her the next day and on every Friday after that I texted or called her to check up on how they were both doing.

On my daily walks this summer, I would think of things I could do for Carla in the future when all those lonely days set in. I decided that her and I would take a trip to Maine next summer. Mark and I had been there for only a day last year and loved it, and it seemed like something Carla would probably like as well. I told Mark my plan and he thought it was a great idea.

At the end of June, Jim, Carla, and the kids took a last vacation together at a resort in Missouri – about three hours from our house. Carla invited us down for a get-together. I had my doubts. This seemed intrusive on what had to be an emotional gathering for them but she insisted. Mark and I drove down with plenty of anxiety. We had not seen Jim in four years after competing in a triathlon. Would he be so thin and sick that the shock show on our face? Would we stick our foot in our mouths and say something stupid? Would both of us start crying?

We needn’t have worried. Jim looked exactly like Jim, Carla was beaming, and we had the best time with them and their kids. All three hours on the drive home and for the following weeks, we talked over and over about how great it was to see them. On the other end of Missouri and then back home in Cleveland, Carla would tell me they were saying the same thing.

After that visit I thought about this trip to Maine every day. How I had to make it happen, how I had to research the area for things for us to do, how her and I were going to get there come hell or high water. But every time I thought about this trip, every single time, Mark wasn’t there. I would start to walk and think about it and surmise that he would be home and going to work. The next day I would start thinking about it and when there was no Mark I would wonder why it mattered to me so much. He fully supported this week away with Carla that didn’t include him. The next day I would start walking and planning again, and when there was no Mark I thought maybe he would be gone on a work trip at the same time. This happened over and over and over until as soon as I started thinking it the same question popped up.

Where was Mark? I could not see him. I could not place where he was. He was gone and it bothered me so much I stopped thinking about this trip to Maine.

On the early morning hours of September 5th, I texted Carla the news about Mark. Her and Jim, like everyone else were stunned. A few days later she called me while sitting outside looking at a lake. Jim was being settled into hospice and I told her the heartbreaking details that were too much to share earlier. She told me the heartbreaking end days of life with her husband.

Eleven days after Mark died, Carla texted me that Jim had passed away that morning. The goofballs are together, she said.

Thirty one years and three months after we met we were both widows in a span of days.

Parallel again.

Ben

Dear Ben,

I saw you standing at the back of the church by yourself when it was still just family there. You looked uncomfortable, like you’d rather not be there. I could relate. I didn’t want to be there either. Before you even introduced yourself I knew who you were. Mark talked about you often when you rotated in his lab. He told me that you learned differently than the other grad students and that once he figured out your rhythm he was able to steer you in the right direction. In that short rotation time, he saw your progress and when you wanted to join his lab he was so excited.

It turned out that Mark already had a couple of grad students and so your #1 choice wasn’t going to happen. Mark was known to buck the system when he knew that students weren’t being served and he took that decision up the chain. He was turned down and months after the fact he’d still get riled up about it.

Before you came along Mark had another student that would need help. His name was Hiroo and he was from Japan. He and his girlfriend came to our house one year for Easter and when he was leaving he came into the kitchen to say goodbye to me. I said goodbye, hope you had a good time, it was great having you here, and they both stood there looking at me until Hiroo finally told me that Dr. Fisher said I should give them some leftovers because he was a starving graduate student. I thought that was so funny because I remember early in our marriage and those end of the month meals of ramen noodles.

Mark would say that Hiroo had magic hands when it came to working on the bench doing experiments. He was so close to graduating when the tsunami hit Japan. Here in the middle of this country with his family and girlfriend back in Japan, he became frantic with worry. He watched or listened to the news constantly. Even when he found out that everyone was safe he could not stop worrying. He wouldn’t show up in the lab for days on end so Mark would ride his bike over to his apartment. He’d bang and bang on the door and finally Hiroo would answer. Mark would tell him that he had to check into the lab regularly to show him his writing progress on his dissertation. He would say he would and he’d come in a few days and disappear again. This went on for months. His father once emailed Mark because he was so worried about him because he wasn’t answering his phone. After all those years of training, Hiroo eventually returned to Japan without his degree. Mark never heard from him again and would always refer to him as his lost soul. Isn’t it funny that Mark could see that Hiroo was a lost soul but he couldn’t see when his own soul was lost?

The chance of us crossing paths again is highly unlikely, but here’s what I wanted to tell you on that Wednesday morning; Dr. Fisher believed in you. He believed that you were capable of the work and that the med center owed you the chance to try, that their job was to work with your challenges to make you successful. I can’t even tell you how many times he told me that.

I hope you reach the goals you have set for yourself, and when you doubt your ability or your place in the field that you remember that from the very first day Mark saw your potential.

He would want me to tell you that. That science needs you, Ben, exactly as you are.

xo,

k.

Currency

Whenever Mark and I would go to a social event and someone would ask him what he did, he would say that he worked at KU Med Center. Then they would ask what he did there and he would say that he worked in the Biochemistry Department. Then they would ask what specifically he did in that department and he would say that he was a biochemistry professor. I watched this interaction dozens of times. Finally I asked him why it was that people had to drag that information out of him, why he didn’t just say what he did for a living. He said that people tended to think it was a bigger deal than it was and that he found it awkward. “If I say that right off,” he said, “then they would think that there wouldn’t be anything that we would have in common and I don’t want that.”

A few weeks after he died, his friend, Tom, called me. At one point in the conversation he said, “You know that Mark was world famous in his field, right? That everybody was hot on his tail to catch up to what he was doing?” Well, no, I didn’t know that. I knew that he was traveling a lot in the last two years, mostly in the U.S. but there was also a trip to London and Switzerland this year and Portugal last year. I only started to think he may have been a bigger deal than I thought when I got so many sympathy cards and emails from around the world. Mark was doing groundbreaking work in his professional life and it is among the many heartaches of his death to not see all those years of labor brought to fruition.

In a social media world that he didn’t have much use for, his likes were people he met along the way. A Holocaust survivor that once sat next to him on a plane, fellow bikers he would meet on the way to work, a young kid he met when he waited six hours at the DMV this summer to get his license renewed, the owner of a lawn care business that our neighbors used.

I was not prepared for the number of people outside of our family that came to his funeral. Everyone in his department, every department chair he ever worked for, friends, neighbors – current and past, fellow dads from Boy Scouts who he hadn’t seen in years. I would find out later that the med center chartered two busses so that all the graduate and medical students could attend. It was an overwhelming show of love.

After the service ended, I greeted people who I hadn’t had a chance to talk to during the visitation. A man came up to me and introduced himself. “You don’t know me,” he said. “I live on 42nd Street and your husband used to ride his bike down my street on his way back and forth to work. My dog used to hassle him whenever he rode by so one day I went out to yell at him to stop barking and your husband stopped to talk to me. After that, he’d always stop whenever I was outside and we’d talk. Your husband was a good man.”

Of all the people there……

How did he even know Mark’s last name? How did he know he died? How did he know where or when the funeral would be?

Despite the title of Mark’s occupation and the years of training it took to achieve that, more years than not were tough financially. We struggled to put our kids through college. I would often complain about things around the house that needed fixing or renovating that it seemed we could never afford. Mark would nod and agree and then say he thought we were just fine.

In a world that is more and more impoverished by money and fame, Mark Fisher’s currency was his connection to every living thing. I never saw him kill a bug that was in the house but rather scoop it in his hands and take it outside. The squirrels who ate his tomatoes all summer were trapped and transported to a park. We even argued over killing weeds.

Now he is gone and my reflections are forty years of memories that I play over and over in my head. My daily prayer that he always stays connected to me.

 

                 

 

Be Not Afraid

I pretty much have lived most of my life afraid. Afraid in grade school of never cracking the code to learn how to read, afraid in high school of never having anyone to eat lunch with in the cafeteria, afraid of never finding a partner in life, afraid I’d never get pregnant, afraid of being broke, afraid of a terminal illness, afraid, afraid, afraid.

I have been afraid of heights for a very long time and yet went to the top of Mt. St. Helens. This was Mark’s idea on a trip back from Seattle after seeing some old grad school friends. I was terrified. It took us forever to get to the top, but there I was curled in a ball on the front seat Lamaze breathing my way up. As scared as I was the view was worth it. I have never seen anything like it in my life. According to the locals things were coming back to life in leaps and bounds, but to my eyes the devastation years after the top of that mountain blew off were beyond words.

Four years ago on a trip to Montana for a biochem meeting, we took a detour on the way home to Glacier National Park. The Road to the Sun is a steep climb up thousands of feet and on the way Mark drove and pointed everything out to me, not because I couldn’t see it for myself, but because he knew if he kept talking to me it would keep me calm. When we did reach the top he told me to relax in the car for a few minutes while he looked out on the gravel edge. It seemed like a reasonable suggestion for my phobia, but watching him taking that view in made me realize I was missing out and so I jumped out of the car and joined him. Not as close to the edge as him, but close enough to know that I’d always remember that stunning landscape.

There were many adventures with Mark. Wading in creeks looking for fish, trekking through knee high weeds along the roadside and leaping back when he’d flip a discarded piece of wood looking for snakes, hiking up the sand dunes along Lake Michigan, swatting mosquitos in a dense, humid nature center. Mark did not live small. He found adventure in his daily life and was on a near constant search for all signs of life.

With Mark by my side I was less afraid of everything. Even when I thought it was a bad idea, or in my anxious mind a highly dangerous one, I went along for the ride. Sometimes he made fun of me because even I knew I was often being ridiculous, sometimes I could feel his gentle hand on the small of my back, sometimes he would give me a lengthy explanation of how proteins fold for distraction.

In all these years of being afraid, there was no fear more terrifying to me than that of someone I love dying suddenly. Many times I read of those deaths, those come from nowhere accidents or the intentional ending of one’s life, and I could not fathom how anyone could recover from that.

My biggest fear is now my daily life. There was no goodbye, no I love you, no hey buddy don’t you even think of leaving me because you made everything better. No kiss, no wink, no hand reaching for mine before we both fell asleep, no please wait one day for things to get better before you think about ending your life. No but the kids, Mark, you know the kids and Mabel adore you.

One day he was here and the next he was gone and ever since I have looked for him everywhere. Two months later my heart still skips a beat when I see a cyclist. There you are, Mark. We’ve all been looking for you. I look in the cold, cloudy sky, in the wind, in the nearly barren trees, in the dark night. I never stop looking but I have always known that Mark was an explorer at heart. That given the chance to see it all he’d soak in every minute, every experience, every flutter of life. That he really is everywhere and trying to tell me that the universe, the goddamn universe, Kath, is blowing his mind. Everything has its season and so I have faith (very, very tenuous faith) that one of these days he’ll stop wandering and come back to rest in my soul where he belongs.

And when that day comes, that sweet, longed for day, my eyes will no longer see the devastation but the life.

 

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.