A Speckled Trout

Prior to Mark’s death, I knew little of a death by suicide. Both of my sisters had family members on their husband’s side who ended their lives, but other than that it was something I heard or read about, shook my head, and tsked tsked at the awfulness of such a loss. Then a friend’s son died and it landed on my street. When I heard the news and hung up the phone I couldn’t even absorb what I was told. Mark came out of the shower and when he asked who called so early I told him and he said, “Oh my god,” and started crying while I stood in unblinking shock in the bedroom. As the hours went by and I didn’t know what to do, I called my mom who asked me if I’d been down to their house to talk to them. I told her I hadn’t and she told me I needed to and I said, “Well, it’s almost lunch time so I’ll wait until they’re done eating and then go down.” The absurdity of that still baffles me, as if they were sitting around at noon having ham sandwiches and potato salad with a refreshing glass of lemonade and making a list of funeral homes as one does on a beautiful spring day. “You get yourself down there right now,” my mom sternly said and I will always be grateful she wasn’t about to let any kid of hers off the hook for not showing during someone’s darkest hour.

Five years later the same story would unfold in my house.

For those at the center of a death, whether intentional, sudden, or after a long illness, the moments pass in disbelief and fear. It’s like being on an out of control rollercoaster that nobody will stop as you are whipped from one side to the other. All you want is to get off of it so you can throw up, put your head between your knees to stop the spinning, and thank the universe that nonsense is over. Except over is very loosely defined and out of reach.

I was recently on the listening end of a story about someone I didn’t know who committed suicide. First of all, for the love of God stop using that term. It is loaded with shame and feels like salt poured on raw skin. Mark may have died that way but I know what he was committed to and every day but his last was not his own death. During this I sat with my hands under the table and my nail dug into my palm to keep from screaming, crying, or both. I could have spoken up but I knew it would be awkward and draw attention to the pain of a story that I thought was understood.

That night I had a dream that Mark and I were in a vintage store – something that he indulged me in often. We tended to wander away from each other and he was either way behind or way ahead of me but we would always find each other at the checkout. In the dream they announced that they were closing and all customers needed to bring their purchases to the front of the store. I was looking for him and he was nowhere to be found. An employee found me and told me I needed to leave as I was the only one left in the store. “I’m not,” I frantically said, “my husband is here. I was just with him five minutes ago.” She was guiding me to the exit and said, “You have to go,” and pushed me out the door and locked it while I screamed Mark’s name over and over.

I love a good story, I thrive on them. I have heard my brothers and brother-in-law tell the story of Mark’s bachelor party dozens of times and I never get tired of it. Each of them remember different parts of it so it’s layered, outrageous, and hilarious. You know what else is great about it? Everybody lived to tell the tale. End of life stories are missing the humor and waking up part which lands much differently. When anyone tells me about an untimely or awful death in their circle and asks me how to help a family, I feel their heartache and can think of so many things they can do. I am touched that they ask me, but anyone who has lived through it does not need to know about your cousin’s friend in the cul-de-sac one block over who is at death’s door. They have seen the color of death’s door. A person who watched someone they love have a heart attack in front of them will never need to know a single detail of a similar story you heard secondhand and does not affect your daily life. They witnessed and have relived every moment of it.

I was lucky enough to live most of my life without trauma or the resulting triggers and had no idea what a gift that was. That is not the case since Mark died and it is terrifying when I find myself in a loop of horrible memories. Each time another layer gets unpeeled because when you are no longer in shock your brain says, “Hey, remember this part? Oh you don’t? Let me turn the lights down and show you on the big screen because it’s a doozy.” There are coping strategies which sometimes work and sometimes don’t. There is ongoing therapy which often feels repetitive and unnecessary until you start sobbing in the middle of one and realize you’re not as okay as you thought, med adjustments, med changes, walking, walking, walking, digging in the dirt, and gently burying pieces of pain hoping it blooms into something beautiful.

I use all of the strategies and when they don’t work I go to bed and pray tomorrow is better which I also learned from my mom. But after a few painful days when I doubted whether or not I could kick myself to the surface one more time, I know I need to speak up, to address the awkward, and say that the need to tell a story I don’t need to know or you haven’t lived through, might land me back on the rollercoaster I worked desperately hard to get off of, and that feels landing back in my worst nightmare.

Before our kids were born, I told Mark that even though he wasn’t Catholic I wanted the kids to be raised in that faith. As we made moves for his career, I got to know different churches where I would take the kids and we would sit front and center so they could see what was going on and hopefully behave. When they were in grade school I enrolled them in religious ed. It was every Monday after school and they absolutely hated it. There were other Catholic kids on our street who went to the same church but also attended school there. “You’re not really Catholic,” one of the girls said to Will one day, “you’re only half-Catholic because you go to a public school.” When Will came home and told me I was first enraged and then thought it was hilarious. Talk about casting stones at the ripe old age of nine. “How you behave and how you treat people,” I told Will, “determines your faith and values and not where you go to school. Now go back outside and don’t give it another thought.” But I gave it plenty of thought, dug my heels in, and got more involved in that church and then another. I was committed to teaching my kids about a higher power and showing up weekly to make deposits into the Bank of Faith.

Last Monday I called a friend and it went right to voicemail which was odd. I tried again an hour later and the same thing happened. Later that night he called and told me he was in the hospital with six broken ribs and a concussion after falling down the stairs. He would stay there until Friday and is now in rehab. My hairdresser, whom I adore and have been going to for twenty years, sent a text that she was also in the hospital after her immune system went haywire fighting off bronchitis and a sinus infection. She’s still there. My neighbor signed off to finalize a divorce after 44 years of marriage. Another neighbor whose life fell apart exactly when mine did, who has sat with me many a night as we both cried and made dark jokes that I’d dare not repeat to anyone else, has to move because the house she has been renting for 15 years is being sold.

All of those things made for a strong case of heartache but the week had another trick up its sleeve. Last Thursday the med center Mark worked at announced the purchase of a cryogenic electron microscope. This was a huge win for scientists in the Midwest who have had to rely on sending images to research facilities on the east and west coast. Six years ago when we were visiting Mallory, Mark scheduled a meeting with a scientist at UCLA who had access to a cryo-em. Mark wanted images of proteins he was working on, and besides being very expensive, the wait to get them was close to a year. After many emails and phone calls, he was hoping an in-person meeting would bump up his wait time. “So you’re going to schmooze him,” I said, and he told me he was pulling out every stop to get things moving along. It didn’t work and he would impatiently wait, call and check in, and shake his fist that such an incredible research tool was only available to a few. The initial happiness I felt when reading the news quickly turned into something different.

On the flip side of the grief coin is raging anger. I hate feeling it, I hate when it takes over, I hate it. It rears its ugly head when life goes on in ways that are the new normally crappy, and it awoke from its slumber and barged in the door over news of that microscope. At my regular appointment I unloaded on my therapist who said anger was fine so long as it is directed in the right way and asked me what I did with all those feelings. “Well,” I said, “I dug in my garden until my knees throbbed, and the next day when it was too cold to do that I cleaned my basement. I ruthlessly got rid of things, gave Mark’s very expensive treadmill away, mopped the floor.” “This is good,” she said, “this is a healthy way to handle these emotions.” So how come it doesn’t feel good? And why does drunk dialing when you’re pissed off get such a bad rap? Because my dead husband dreamed of that microscope being at the university where he worked so I need somebody in charge to answer the phone and explain to me why he isn’t here to use it.

On Friday I sat on my porch until midnight talking to my neighbor about her impending move and cryo-em. “You know what,” I said, “it should have been Mark that came home months ago to tell me the inside scoop, it should have been Mark showing it off because he was the one who was writing the equipment grant to get it. He was the one who saw the value in it and now all of that is gone.” “Here’s the thing,” Jen said, “Mark was the kind of guy who could build the room. There was nobody else who could envision what he could, nobody who was able to see that far in advance. He could create it, build it, he could even put the roof on it, but he couldn’t run it alone. He needed everyone else to do their part. They’re running the room that would have never existed if it weren’t for him.”

My first big attempt at gardening has in recent years been neglected for other spaces. As we sat on the porch, I told Jen I needed to work on it, needed to amend the soil so everything had a better chance at thriving. A few days later I carted a wheelbarrow of compost from her house to mine but first had to dig up my chocolate vine. It was healthy and filled up a lot of space but it had become invasive. It wrapped around other plants and choked them off, traveled then would root and shoot off in a new direction. I didn’t know how much until I started digging and two hours later got it all up. It wasn’t lost on me how similar this vine was to how grief travels, how just when life seems steady and I think I’ve got a handle on things, a tendril reaches out, grabs me by the ankle, and pulls me to the ground.

In the many things I’ve read on loss, the common thread is that you become another person in the after, you hone in on what matters, and simplify. You can’t help but be different but the rest of it I already knew. I knew Mark was the best thing that ever happened to me. I knew that how we raised our kids was our most important job. I knew how we treated each other inside and outside of this house mattered regardless of deposits made. I knew very early in my life that when it came to a foundation of love and faith I hit the jackpot.

I don’t know that so much anymore.

There is a saying in the grief world that “one moves forward” after the death of a loved one rather than moving on. The latter implies that you are leaving that person in the past rather than going forth with the spirit of that person into the future. That sort of thing seems like splitting hairs to me when for the longest time I couldn’t move at all.

I tend to grip tightly to the thought that I am stuck in grief, in life, in everything. I bring this up in therapy all the time until at a recent session my therapist listed all the things I’ve accomplished since Mark died. “And on top of that,” she said, “you went through a pandemic.” Her list surprised me because I am moving in ways I have not acknowledged. Though it may not be in the way I want or as fast as I want, I haven’t settled for stagnation which is an easy place to stake your tent when your world turns upside down.

I recently went on a date and as a chronic overthinker I am surprised at how much I underthought that decision. Said sure why not and my young, single coworkers said, “Way to put yourself out there, Kath, good on you,” and I said good on me right back to me and met this man at a dance performance. Having two daughters who danced through high school, and one who majored in it in college, I have been to more dance performances than I could count. Ballet, tap, modern, hip hop, all the dances, and so I sat down next to this man in the second row of a theatre, and in the universe’s way of saying I see what you’re trying to do here, one of Mark’s colleagues was sitting right in front of us which upended any confidence I may have thought I had. We exchanged pleasantries, said it was good to see each other, while my brain frantically repeated shit shit shit a couple of hundred times. The dance started and it wasn’t long before I thought how much Mark would have loved it, how it being a Friday night and being tired, I would have laid my head on his shoulder and rested, how we would have talked about it all the way home. Instead I kept wondering if I was crossing and uncrossing my legs too much, why was it so bloody hot, and if it would be rude for me to lean over and whisper, “You seem nice but I can’t do this tonight,” and got up and left.

But when I make a bad decision I dig in my heels and go all out. I stayed and smiled weakly at Mark’s coworker when it was over, met a few friends of my date, and went to the reception afterwards. He walked me to the parking garage and when he saw my car said he had the exact same one. I wanted to ask him if he had a dead spouse, too, because then we would have two things in common. Once inside I rested my head on the steering wheel for a few minutes, exhausted in every way. When I told my therapist about the night she asked me if it made me cry and I told her it should have, everything was in place for a good cry, but I was too tired to even do that.

I recently read that grief is stagnant and it is joy that comes in waves. In a tidal wave of joy, my daughter and her husband, after having two miscarriages and many dark valleys, gave birth to a baby boy last month. I was on duty as Grandma Doubtfire for a few days and was woefully out of practice to wrangle myself, two kids, and a dog in the morning in any sort of timely manner. The first day Walter went off to preschool and Mabel was on spring break so I told her we needed to go to my favorite store because my birthday coupon was about to expire. She got herself dressed in leggings and a mermaid tshirt. When I said to her, “You good now? Need anything else before we go,” she thought it over for a hard minute and said, “Oh yeah, I forgot something,” pulled her rainbow tutu out of the drawer, and my gay pride little mermaid and I got in the car and headed off.

There was no news of a baby yet and behind me in her booster seat Mabel said, “Mimi, do you want to know what I think?” I said of course I did and she said, “I think this baby happened because Boompa and my baby sister who died knew how sad my mommy and daddy were. I think they sent this baby to us so we’d be less sad because they’re not here.” It took me a minute to gain my composure to speak and when I did I said, “I think you’re right, Mabel. I think those two did have something to do with your new brother, and aren’t we so happy they helped us?” She continued her gaze out the window and said, “Yeah, I think they’re in the stars working together.”

There is no amount of time that will diminish the what ifs and if onlys with some losses. That’s the deal we make with life and it seems like a fair trade until the reality of it knocks on our door. Death’s echo can be excruciatingly loud when you’re bravely trying to crawl out of the darkness of the valley. Meanwhile, the unseen is alive and moving around us in ways a seven year old in a rainbow tutu understands far better than me.

Last week I took a trip to Florida to see two of my siblings who have second homes in Fort Meyers. I was scheduled for an early flight and booked an Uber to pick me up at 4:00 a.m. Twenty minutes prior, when I was ready to go and hadn’t got a text from the driver, I checked the app and discovered that the credit card linked to my account was one that had fraud on it last month. The payment never went through which I didn’t know. I had a slight panic attack, threw my luggage in the car and drove to the airport – the brand new Kansas City airport that was having its debut that very morning. I was low on gas and high on adrenaline, and as soon as I walked through the doors I wanted to turn around, walk out, and drive back home. Traveling without Mark is hard, he loved to go just about anywhere, was always content to be in the window seat and take it all in, and loved the sun. Escaping the gray days of winter to relax where it was warm might have required some arm twisting if he was busy at work, but I knew from experience that once committed he would have loved every minute.

While walking to my gate, I passed a crowd of construction workers in neon vests and hard hats and found out they were one of hundreds who built this new airport and were there to watch the first flight take off. As I was already a bit shaky on this whole trip thing it could have sent me spiraling, but they looked so proud and I remembered when Mark and I were dating and he’d drive me past some of the roofing jobs he did. “This will still be standing long after I’m gone,” he would boast, and so I hung around with the trades and watched as a Southwest flight left the gate and taxied to the runway.

The sun and heat did me a world of good as most days we hung out at the pool. There are plenty of activities to do in their complex, and I thought “so this is what retirement looks like,” knowing with certainty that even if Mark were alive and well he could never do it. After a few weeks he’d be climbing the walls, driving me crazy, and desperately wanting to be back in the science game instead of on a pickleball court. The man had things to do and relaxing wasn’t one of them.

The last night I was there we drove to Fort Meyers Beach which was directly in the path of Hurricane Ian. Much had been cleaned up, my brother-in-law said, and yet the devastation was staggering. Whole houses gone, others stripped of everything inside, boats in the marina piled on top of each other, no trespassing signs on lots reduced to a pile of rubble. The expensive newer homes were still standing and looked to have minimal damage, but the framed homes that had been there for decades, the old-timers the town was built around were obliterated. Every single thing inside swept out to sea with the storm surge. How do you calculate your losses when everything you own is gone, not even a photo left of your life? I felt that destruction in my bones while over and over seeing spray-painted signs reminding people of #FMS (Fort Meyers Strong).

I lived many secure years in the house Mark and I built and was certain it was indestructible until the morning he left it and never came back. The house is still there, but for the life of me, despite how much I try, I cannot get it to stand as straight or beautiful as it once did. I thought that was what was expected of me, what my job was in Mark’s absence, when what it needs most is for the foundation to be shored up. That is an ongoing project, and so I will plant a sign in my yard that says I’m not strong at all but I knew to salvage every broken thing that both of us knew was important, while telling every passerby that they should have seen my house when the storm hit.

I couldn’t even open the door and get out.

I was recently talking to someone about the early days of Covid and all that has transpired in our lives since then. The day we were sent home from the office, I had to send my boss a list of what I would be doing that justified my getting paid while working from home. There were things that needed to be fine-tuned and/or revamped, but my job was student focused and I was winging it when it came to accounting for my time. In those first few weeks it felt surreal for everyone in the neighborhood to be home all day every day, and there were offers of grocery runs, puzzles dropped off on porches, and long distance gatherings for wine and talk of how long this quarantine thing could possibly last. Four weeks tops is what we thought at the time.

After weeks of not seeing anyone, my son called and asked if he could spend the weekend with me. He was also alone, working from home, and climbing the walls. I told him to come over and the minute he walked in the door he burst into tears. “Oh, buddy,” I said, “I know.” None of us understood what was going on, and if there ever was a time we needed Mark’s knowledge it was then, but we didn’t have that so we watched movies and reset our attitudes when it became clear this wasn’t going to be over any time soon. Will came every weekend after that, and when he wasn’t here I’d dive into a junk drawer or closet with gusto. Twenty years from now if I’m asked about the Covid years, I will say that’s when I incessantly read the news and organized every inch of my life.

Things started opening up, I got let go from my day job, and my fun weekend job took center stage. Slowly a new normal began to take shape which wasn’t nearly as terrifying to me as the new normal after Mark died. I went with the flow because if you learn anything in grief it’s that the more you fight it the more it controls your life. In the process, I have found out I’m more suited to a quiet life than I ever thought possible. Now that most things have returned to close to where they used to be, I’m overwhelmed by normalcy. Everything seems too much, too loud, too crowded. Relationships that were always challenging have run their course. I can’t do them any more. My energy reserves are at an all time low for problems that aren’t my own.

One of my favorite gifts this Christmas was an amaryllis bulb dipped in wax. I loved it so much I bought two for gifts. Every day I checked its progress and by centimeters it grew. I’d rotate it so all sides got to face the sunlight and when it bloomed I was as happy as my mom would be when her Christmas cactus sprouted color. It was gorgeous and I’d say “Look at you,” like it was my kid learning to ride a bike. In talking to my therapist, I wondered if this contentment from something so small was from grief, age, or Covid. “Probably a combination of all three,” she said.

During that awful time when Covid was ravaging the world, I watched a news report about a woman whose mother died, like most alone in a hospital ICU. The funeral was held in a parking lot and she sat on a folding chair underneath a canopy next to her mother’s casket where friends and family drove by to pay their respects. Such a contrast to Mark’s funeral, and I wondered how it is possible to survive the heartache of not only losing your mom, but then having to say your goodbyes on top of asphalt while people shouted condolences from car windows.

And yet somehow, I, like so many others have survived the heartache of the unimaginable. I’ve learned, I’ve changed far more than anyone realizes, I have oh-so-delicately dipped my toes into the pool of life and tested the water. This go ’round, though, is different. Because I am too familiar with how fragile this all is, the best approach for me is to live smaller and quieter. Will it always be like this? I don’t know, but I do know it’s the reason the beauty of a single blooming bulb in the darkest time of the year made me yearn for more of that.

I was recently talking to a widow friend about our journeys navigating the world as half of a couple. It wasn’t until I was alone that I found out how much power there is in being two. You have no idea of this when your partner is alive and well, but when that is no longer the case it is a startling revelation. Walking into a restaurant by myself or any kind of gathering, even after all this time, feels like a jarring exposure of every vulnerable part of me.

We also talked about being around people who constantly complain about their partner. That it is a different kind of jarring, the kind that can tip into rage at any moment. Thinking you know what life would be like without your partner and living in the reality of it are vastly different. “If only they knew what we know,” I said to my friend. “I could easily list a hundred things I miss about Mark without even trying that hard.”

• The smell of his neck.
• How tender he was with animals.
• The energy of him in the house.
• How the kids had to label their leftovers so he wouldn’t eat them.
• The sound of his bike coasting around the corner.
• His ginormous readers that looked so nerdy.
• Hearing at the end of the day about an experiment that his students knocked out of the park.
• His daily yelling at right wingers on cable news and Chuck Todd every Sunday morning.
• How every night he wore earplugs and a black sock over his eyes so he’d get a good night’s sleep.
• His whistling.
• When I was talking to him and he pushed the curls away from my eyes.
• Folding his clothes.
• How we worked side-by-side every Sunday to cook dinner for the kids.
• That he could sit on the screened porch and do nothing but watch the birds.
• The sound of his work bag when it thudded on the bench.
• His pride in the kids that would make his eyes tear up when he talked about them.
• That he was on so many committees at the med center because he believed it was his obligation, and also because he liked having the inside scoop on what was happening in that place.
• When he’d go to the store and would ask beforehand, “Good Visa (the debit card) or bad Visa (the one that always had a balance)? Then he’d use the wrong one.
• Seeing the debits in our account from him having a four-shot espresso with his students at their morning lab meeting.
• How he loved my style and would want to see what I was wearing before I went to work.
• That he could hear a couple of notes of music and know exactly what movie it was from.
• When he squeezed my hand every night before he fell asleep.
• That a prediction of any kind of storm caused him to say, “We’ve got to batten down the hatches,” as if we were on a dinghy in the middle of a nor’easter in the Atlantic.
• When I was telling him a story and got tripped up on some part of it and he’d say, “It was always, no it was never……..”
• That he appreciated homemade soup on a cold night.
• Going to the garden center together and him loading up on vegetables and me on flowers.
• Whenever he was near any kind of water he would crouch down and flip things over looking for snakes.
• The way he delighted in Mabel and being her Boompa.
• How he’d sit in the basement fixing a tire on his bike like he was doing surgery.
• That he loathed anyone in his field who he thought was phoning it in.
• When he came home with news that he’d gotten a grant and we’d go out for a steak dinner.
• How he called old professors who wouldn’t retire to make room for hungry, young ones “fossils.”
• The times Will would stop by with bagels after an early Saturday morning with his running group and he’d act nonchalant and then wolf down three.
• Watching him barbecue while reading a scientific paper over the grill.
• How my constant decorating and rearranging made him nuts but he’d always brag about it to anyone who came in the house.
• Him carrying the laundry basket up and down the stairs.
• That he’d clean the kitchen and make the next day’s coffee every night.
• How he’d putter with his fish tanks in the basement and after he died we found out there were thousands of guppies in them.
• When we’d argue about money and he’d say, “Tell me what it is we need that we don’t have.”
• How he loved talking to Mallory about dance and would research different styles for their next phone call.
• His intensity countered by his ability to be outrageously silly.
• How he hated hanging Christmas lights outside but did it because I loved it.
• The exchanges of love throughout the day, both big and small.
• When he’d hear me waking up and have my coffee ready when I came downstairs.
• How he’d say he was trying to lose weight and didn’t want ice cream but would help himself to a heaping bowl the minute I went upstairs to go to bed.
• How he always predicted another pandemic and would have been all over the research on Covid.
• How he’d say, “We need to get that fixed,” and pretend he was going to do that when we both knew it would be me that would follow through.
• Walking every night after dinner.
• That if he were flipping through the channels and came across Shawshank Redemption he’d watch it every single time.
• His disdain for wealthy people who didn’t use their money to make life better for others.
• How he could string curse words together like it was an Olympic event.
• His roofing stories and the pride he had in starting out as a blue collar guy.
• That he was adamant that every person who did any work in our house be tipped.
• The empty spot on the sectional we bought before he died that he never got to sit on.
• The many conversations we had about the kids and how he didn’t want them to make the same mistakes he did when he was young, and me saying, “And what part of that would you give up? What part didn’t lead you to where you are now?”
• Going Christmas shopping for me with Maggie and how I could tell when he walked in the door that he had so much fun with her.
• How he always kept the birds fed.
• That whenever I’d say, “Since you’re not doing anything…,” he’d yell, “I’M THINKING!!!” from the movie A Serious Man.
• That the cats ran to the door when he got home because they knew he’d give them more cat food even if they’d already been fed.
• How much he looked forward to he and Nate going off to see a guy movie together.
• The way he cherished the friendships he had with his biking buddies.
• When we had to do our taxes and he knew the details of every work trip he made that year and whether we could claim it or not.
• How he often repeated the story of the neighborhood kid who knocked on the door and asked to speak to Mr. Kathy.
• That his favorite winter activity on a Saturday night was sitting at the dining room table watching music videos on Youtube.
• Making something new for dinner and him raving about it.
• Knowing every single day that I was loved.
• How he worried about me every time I got a kidney stone.
• When I’d call him at work for something and he’d say, “Hey, darlin.'”
• The gentle way he always spoke to his sister.
• When he’d come home from work and say, “I was talking to Joe and he said…..”
• Our road trips.
• That he thought I never spent any money on myself because he never saw the bags.
• How when we’d get in an argument I’d say, “I’ll tell you one thing, Mark Fisher, my next husband is going to respect me,” and he’d imitate me and we’d both burst out laughing.
• His obsession with ridding the yard of squirrels.
• How he rated peaches and loved opening the fridge and seeing a bowl of cherries.
• When we were going to get something to eat and he’d say “no” to everything I suggested but could never come up with an alternative so we always ate at the local pizza place.
• How much he would have loved the bedroom flip I did because of how dark and quiet that room is.
• When the cats would scratch at the bedroom door at night to get in and he’d throw a pillow at the door and go right back to sleep.
• How he’d advise his mom on on her meds and tell her she needed to take care of herself.
• That he hated shopping but loved Costco.
• How he tried to learn as much as he could about each of his graduate students and stayed in contact with them after they graduated.
• That he was proud of his degrees and just as proud of the plaque he got for being Rookie of the Year for hockey in his freshman year at Purdue.
• Sitting around and deciding what we would do if we ever won the lottery.
• How he would research any subject that caught his attention.
• How he always wanted to take a sabbatical to work in Europe so we could have an overseas adventure for a year.
• That somehow his bike was an extension of him in ways I couldn’t explain.
• How he wore his shoes until there were holes on the bottom.
• That he never minded mowing the lawn or shoveling the driveway but hated taking the trash to the curb.
• Being at his work events and seeing how much his colleagues and students liked him.
• How much he loved my mom.
• That he only learned to appreciate the strategy in baseball when I explained it to him when he was high.
• How when we were in Portugal he noticed all the men wore scarves knotted around their necks so we went out and found him one and he wore it all the time.
• Taking care of him.
• Hearing the garage door roll up when he worked late and knowing he made it safely home.
• Checking National Parks off our list.
• Saying “This is my husband, Mark.”
• His work ethic.
• How he paid close attention to politics around the world.
• Our dream of having a cottage on a lake.
• His eyes, dear god, his eyes.

I will always feel fortunate that Mark and I gave each other a wide berth to have interests and friendships outside of our marriage. It made life more interesting for both of us, but at the end of the day it was him and me navigating life and marriage and jobs and kids and the world. If you think your life would be better without your partner next to you, then I think by all means you should make changes to make that happen. But for those of us on the other side, those of us who didn’t have a choice, please measure your words carefully. You have no idea the vacuum that absence creates, the huge and the small things that slam into you, even years later, from nowhere.

One hundred things is but a tip in the iceberg of loss.

On our first Christmas together as a married couple, I was working at a bank and Mark was a grad student. The bank was open on Christmas Eve until noon and I had to work. Mark decided to go into the lab for a few hours, and the plan was to meet back at our apartment, get our stuff, and drive the two-and-a-half hours to Chicago. We woke up to snow, and as the morning progressed the weather got worse. By 11:00 the interstate was closed due to blowing, drifting, and ice covered roads and there went our opportunity to get home to family. Because we had been planning on leaving town, there was little food in the fridge. On Christmas Day, we ate minute steaks and canned green beans on tv trays while sitting in lawn chairs (our furniture at the time), drinking the last two beers in the fridge, and watching MTV. I was either crying or napping from crying until Mark declared we were leaving the house and going to the movies. We saw Terms of Endearment.

Every year we would talk about that Christmas and how it was an Epic Holiday Shit Show. Terms of Endearment? What were we thinking? Mark was in love with Debra Winger and came out of the theatre so bereft over her dying he could barely talk. We drove home in silence, killed some roaches in the bathroom like we did every night before we brushed our teeth, and fell into bed. “Thank god this day is over,” I said to Mark before we both fell asleep. The following day the sun was out, it reached the high 40s, and you would have never known there was a winter storm the day before.

For decades we would drive back and forth to Chicago for Christmas. When we lived in Maryland it was twelve hours each way with two kids, from here nine hours with three kids. A few years before Mark died, I said “enough” and we stayed in our own house for the entire holiday. Turns out there are no trophies for driving through treacherous weather or ending up sick and exhausted from stress. I loved it and never wanted to go back to how we used to do it. Mark came to love it, too, especially when the kids piled through the door, but for all the happiness he felt for us to be under one roof opening presents, he was a horrible gift receiver. He never asked for anything extravagant, every year it was socks, biking stuff, new pajamas. The kids would call me and plead for ideas but Mark was never enamored with stuff unless it was useful. Every year when it was his turn to open, I had an underlying feeling that he felt a little embarrassed as if he didn’t deserve any of it.

Now I have a hard time being near the men’s department of any store. Sometimes I’ll be brave (or maybe punish myself) and wander through to see what I would have bought and put under the tree if Mark were still alive. Useful things like sweaters and dress shirts for work, maybe a pair of slippers, new biking gloves, and socks, good wool socks. He, on the other hand, always went overboard with me, and as they got older I’d send one of the kids with him to keep him in check. “Don’t you dare go over our budget, Mark,” I would say to him as he left and he waved me off in that way he did when he thought I was being ridiculous.

Last year we had Mallory and her boyfriend in California on a video call as we opened our gifts from Secret Santa. Later when I talked to her, she said that they both felt spoiled with everything that was sent to them for Christmas. “Good,” I said, “that’s exactly how I wanted you to feel.” In writing this blog, I often feel spoiled with love and support. I am grateful that openly talking and writing about loss has an audience, when for so long grievers have felt forced to stuff that pain so deep down it exploded out in other ways. Writing is a quiet and solitary endeavor, so if you have shared my work, left a comment or feedback, called or texted me after reading something I’ve written, I want you to know how much that means to me. I don’t think of this as a journey of mine alone but for all of us. I just happen to have figured out how to put it into words.

My life is proof that the most unimaginable things can happen when you least expect it, and if this season hits hard, terribly hard with longing, you are not alone. Maybe if we promise to stay the course, to not give in or give up, we’ll find a clearing in the woods under the stars where all of us heartbroken can gather to dance in the joy of loving and being loved so perfectly it hurts.

Merry Christmas,
k.

After Mark died and I started therapy, I told my therapist that I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with not only the absence of Mark, but the absence of his career that loomed so large in our lives. Like him it was layered and complex, but one of my favorite things in the course of my work day was when Mark and I would email back and forth about our jobs, and seemingly being the only sane ones plopped against our will into the Land of Misfit Toys. I would laugh out loud at my desk at his takedowns, while across the state line he’d do the same with mine until we had to cut it off to actually do our jobs. My therapist said my life would eventually fill in with other things, and that Mark’s career and the med center would no longer be something I daily missed. Like many things I was told back then it seemed like utter bullshit to me.

By virtue of death, I was suddenly thrown into the job of being Mark’s designated hitter, and three months later went to his department Christmas party. When my ticket number was called and I won a door prize, I walked to the front of the room in my party dress and misty eyes, and wished a sinkhole would swallow me whole rather than having all those pitying eyes on me while I was handed a box of cashews. The following year I went again, that time with Joe and his wife. Was it any easier? I don’t know, I don’t remember any of it. Then Covid hit, the parties came to a halt, and I was so relieved to not have to show up and be on.

In the aftermath of Mark’s death, the med center wanted to honor him with the donations they received in his name, and I was in contact with his department on a regular basis. We mutually decided that a bench outside his building would be fitting, so on a hot summer afternoon I met Joe, along with the head of the landscaping department, to discuss the bench and pick out a spot. I stood there looking at the window of his former office, empty and still unused, and tried to pay attention to what was being said to me. I was so distracted, so shocked at being there without Mark that I kept mumbling “okay” over and over regardless of what was being said.

After years of delays, the bench was installed and dedicated a few weeks ago. I was dreading it and my anxiety was off the charts. The kids pointed out to me that this time around it wasn’t a solo mission, but one that they would be at and that we would all prop each other up. I was sick, tested myself that morning to make sure it wasn’t Covid, and drank cough syrup straight from the bottle so I could get through it without sounding, as Mark would say, like I was coughing up a lung. It was a warm, sunny November day and most of his department was there for it. It was brutal and it was beautiful. The bench is perfect – simple, quiet, the most understated stone. It faces the road alongside his building, the apartment buildings many of his students lived in, and the Vietnam Cafe, now torn down, where he would often eat lunch. The engraved dedication on it was the idea of his department chair and grad student. Whenever Mark would introduce a speaker, a class topic, or his own research, he would set it up and then say, “Without further ado….”, which then Joe said would blow the doors off and always be much ado. In the fastest decision ever made, the kids and I agreed it was the perfect thing to put on the bench.

In those many years at the med center, speakers would often come to town, and Mark (along with other faculty) would be obligated to take them out to dinner. Spouses used to be included and I’d go along every once in awhile, but then they put the brakes on that and Mark would go solo. When he’d get home I’d always want to know every detail. He’d give me the stats on the person and their science, which was very much him, when what I really wanted to know was what everybody had to eat from appetizers to desserts. Every time he’d order a pork chop and every time he’d tell me it wasn’t very good. One night when he was disappointed in his meal yet again, I asked him why he kept ordering that and he said pork chops were his thing whenever he had a work dinner. I don’t know how long Mark had been gone when I was thinking about those stupid pork chops again and how in this entire city nobody seemed to know how to cook one. How is that even possible? It made no sense and then it hit me. He down played every bit of those fabulous dinners because he knew I was at home eating a bag of microwave popcorn.

My therapist was right in that other things would eventually fill in my life to take the place of Mark’s career, and while I am grateful for that it will never be close to what I had. I miss hearing about lousy pork chops at expensive restaurants, papers published, colleagues, Mark’s exuberance and joy of discovering new things. Someone recently told me that they’ve thought of Mark so many times during these Covid years and asked me what he would have done. “I’m not sure,” I said, “but I do know that it would have been his Superbowl.”

With the last piece of business being taken care of at the med center, it no longer feels like showing up and being on is an obligation that is mine to fill. It took a long while and a lot of emotional work for me to get to this point, and like many parts of this journey unseen by most. After I spoke at the dedication, the department admin said to me, “Mark was always so proud of you. He’d come into my office and talk to me about you all the time. Sometimes he’d tell me about something you wrote and made me promise that I’d read it.”

Of course he did, because everything about him was about about blowing the doors off and making people pay attention to what he thought was important.

How do you not miss that?

There is a popular writer by the name of Glennon Doyle, who over the years, has coined the phrase “We can do hard things.” Her audience is predominantly women – the kind of women who have seen plenty of hard times and were desperately in need of a funny, poignant, and honest writer to push them through the goalposts of life’s challenges. I have read all her books, saw her in person at an author event, and listen to her podcasts. I’m a huge fan so when the kids were having problems, Mark’s funding dried up, or I was worried about anything, I would repeat her mantra with the fervency of my grade-school-self touching each bead of the rosary like a budding, little saint in the batter’s box.

IcandohardthingsIcandohardthingsIcandohardthings.

Oh, yes I can. I can do hard things.

Then Mark died and everything became hard. On a cold night during those early days, the smoke detector went off at three a.m. and the battery, incased inside and shrieking nonstop, pushed me close to the edge. I couldn’t shut if off until I got a hammer and beat it, the next day the dog ran away, the car needed repair, the holidays were coming, I barely slept. All of this was on top of the after-death things that consumed my life, but I kept showing up for the hard things like the infantry and getting them done. I couldn’t tell you how, I just did.

The hard things come less often these days which is a gift because I was about to collapse under the weight. My new normal has been mostly free of fear until this summer when mice decided my garage seemed like a good place to homestead. Every time I’d pull the garage door up I’d see a mouse scurrying about, and every time it scared the living bejeezits out of me. I resorted to banging on the door before I opened it to give the Meeska Mooska Mousketeers time to hide which they never did because they had a good attorney who told them that possession is 9/10ths of the law. I’d wring my hands and worry and incessantly read how to get rid of mice on the internet. Will, who had been setting traps for me, said that I needed an exterminator and I said, “No, honey, you see I feed you and your beau a fine meal every Sunday and whether you realize it or not, you have entered Bartertown. Now you two get out there and start doing some gang banging. Chop chop. I want to see dead bodies.”

Then my neighbor told me she had such a big mouse in her house she thought maybe it was a rat and I said to myself, “Speckled Trout, you gots to get your shit together on this mouse problem or you’re going to have Ratatouille in the kitchen and you don’t have a husband to handle such a thing.” So I went to Target and headed straight to the liquor department, the shoe section, checked out the Hearth and Hand aisle, browsed the books, and then went to the candle aisle for peppermint oil. The internet said THE MICE HATE PEPPERMINT and I came home and sprinkled it like confetti and I am here to tell you something incredibly shocking. It. Did. Not. Work. Neither did the Pesticator which emits a sound that mice find offensive. What is this sound? Nobody knows but it cost $35 and I set my money down and never thought twice that maybe this whole mouse eradication bizness is a racket.

One night while reading in bed, I heard something in the ceiling and here’s an interesting twist to this story. I have two cats that somehow could not be bothered hunting mice unless it’s at the downspout of my neighbor’s house where they camp out because actually physically chasing after mice isn’t necessary when they just drop down in your lap. So that Sunday I told Will he had to go in the attic and set a trap. “How am I supposed to do that?,” he asked and I told him his dad did and NEVER COMPLAINED and maybe he shouldn’t either so he squeezed his shoulders through the small opening in my closet and set a trap. The next week he squeezed back in and the trap was empty and I let out a sigh of relief because that mouse must have up and left because it knew I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Hashtag blessed.

A few days later I was doing laundry, and the sticky trap for the jumping crickets (and that’s a whole other story) that was in the corner of the basement was flipped upside down. That seemed odd so I flipped it over and there was a tiny mouse glued to its death and I lost it. I got in the car, drove to the hardware store, and bought another Pesticator and more traps. I got steel wool and shoved it in every crevice I could find around the garage. I got the high school kid who mows my grass to come down and assess my basement for entry points. I handed him a flashlight and he Sherlocked Holmes the place like a boss. A friend of Mark’s came over and set more traps in the garage, and when Will and Nick came over this Sunday I asked them to check all the various traps. “Yesterday that one in the corner had two babies on it,” I said, and Will found it, picked it up, and said it looked like somebody had been eating them. “I think you have rats,” he said, and the beauty of having adult children is being able to honestly ask them something (without hurting their little feelings) like, “Why are you being such a shit and saying that when you know it’s going to freak me out?” He laughed maniacally and hadn’t even gotten in his car and pulled away when I was on the internet trying to find out who eats baby mice.

When I was a little girl and at my grandma’s house a mouse ran across the kitchen floor. I screamed. “Hand me my broom, honey,” my grandma said to me and she smoked that mouse out, gave it a good whack, swept its dead body into the dustpan and tossed it out the door. I thought she was the bravest person I ever knew. Now I think that after losing two husbands prematurely it had more to do with her goddamn nerves being shot than bravery.

As of today there were no dead rodents in any of the traps, and even though this mouse cartel may be on the run, what little that was left of my frayed nerves is shot to hell. I need to get back to my regularly scheduled tragic life, and so I am terminating my membership in the I Can Do Hard Things Club. I’ve got nothing left to give, I’m cooked, tired, done with all the hard things. I do love a group project, though, so I am starting the I Am Sick of This Shit Club where the mantra is whattheactualfuck which I’ve been saying daily for the last four years.

I am also going back to the hardware store for a good, sturdy broom because my grandma really was the bravest person I ever knew.

Whenever we would go on road trips, Mark was constantly scanning the landscape for hawks and eagles. He’d point them out, and when I couldn’t see them he’d start yelling at me, “WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? HOW CAN YOU NOT SEE THAT??!!!” I’d tell him that’s just how it went with me and dodgey birds and go back to reading my book while he’d mutter under his breath. When we would be close to the Mississippi River on the way to Illinois, he’d put me on high alert. “Pay attention now, Kath. You always see the big birds near rivers,” and I’d kinda, sorta, half-ass pay attention and he’d point something out and I’d turn my head that away and say “OH MY GOD IT’S HUGE!!!”, which satisfied him and saved the marriage for another day.

On a Sunday morning many years ago, when Mark and Will were on a weekend camping trip with the Scouts, I went out to get the paper. As I was walking back to the house I looked up to see several huge birds lurking in my neighbor’s tree. I was so creeped out that I stood there staring at them and then looked up and down the street for someone, anyone, to witness what I was seeing. There was nobody and I went inside and got my camera. I snapped a few photos and kept going in and out of the house to check on them until they mysteriously left like they came.

When Mark got home I told him about it. “They were the biggest birds I’d ever seen,” I said and he was like okay, yeah, sure, you-who-never-can-spot-a-bird. Then I got my camera to show him and he said, “Holy shit, Kath, those are vultures.” There were six of them and you-know-who captured it on film like a boss and I said, “Try to top that, Fisher.”

Mark liked all birds (except “those goddamn grackles“) and could easily identify them, and while he took care of them all year round, I feel like taking care of me is about all I can manage since he’s been gone. For months I’ve had a bag of seed in the kitchen and I cannot seem to be able to open it and fill the feeders. It was never my job and it feels like even the birds are disappointed when I show up to do what Mark did better and more consistently.

My biggest fear in life was for someone I loved to die suddenly and violently and then it came to be. There are details of Mark’s death that I have never told anyone, and even though my kids are adults, I will do anything to protect them from knowing all that I know of that day. But those details will suddenly slam into my consciousness and they carry so much weight. Crushing, horrific weight, and so I have to constantly refocus my thoughts on every other day of Mark’s life except the last.

A couple of weeks ago I had come home from work, left everything in the car, and went to the curb to get the garbage can to take to the backyard. As I was approaching the gate, I saw a hawk sitting on the lawn. I ever so quietly went to my car, grabbed my phone, and snapped a pic. That bird kept his eyes on me and I kept my eyes on him. He hopped a few feet back to the fence and it seemed like he was sitting on something and I couldn’t figure out what it was. All of this happened over the span of 2-3 minutes and then he flapped his wings and flew off with a squirrel dangling from his talons. I screamed like I was about to be the next victim in a horror movie. Then I ran around to the front of the house to see where he went but he and his dinner disappeared, and just like those vultures I’d seen years earlier, I needed somebody, anybody, to witness this murder in my backyard. “That was Mark,” my sister said when I told her. “He would never come back as a cardinal. That’s way too lame and everybody knew how he hated squirrels,” and we both laughed at the thought of him with beefy bird thighs vigilantly securing the perimeter.

As the days went on and I kept picturing that squirrel flying in the air, it circled back to Mark’s last day like it always does, how his mind convinced him that he had to leave, and how it was so not like him to ever consider let alone do something like that. In the thousands of days he has been gone there has not been a single one that I am not stunned by his death. Not one single day.

A week later I was on my way to Lowe’s when I noticed a hawk flying overhead. I watched it, saw the tail, and thought oh my goodness, look at me. I actually know that’s a red-tailed hawk, the hubs would be so proud. It was gliding on the air and it was such a peaceful sight to see it letting the wind tip his wings this way and that.

At the intersection of Mark’s horrific death and the aftermath, the details often sit like lead in my lungs. I fight to breathe, I fight to remember how it used to be. But I also think that unburdened by everything that caused him so much pain for so long, Mark’s soul effortlessly glided on air to the other side of life where it was tenderly scooped up by love and light, where he could finally set it all down and rest.

At least that’s what I think a Cooper’s hawk and red-tailed hawk were trying to teach me.