A Speckled Trout

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.

A couple of weeks ago I made a quick trip to Chicago to see my mom. I had not seen her since last April when she fell from an unlocked wheelchair and face planted on the ground. When she was admitted to the hospital, she had a UTI and a MRSA infection and I flew home for what we all thought were her last days. She looked like she’d been on the losing end of a bar fight but recovered, and my siblings moved her to a different facility.

I hadn’t been to see her earlier because of Covid, but those numbers got better and traveling got safer. Then I got Covid which took me longer to bounce back from than I planned. Those were all legitimate reasons for not going, but the real reason was because there was no Mark to call to give me a pep talk before I went into her facility, there was no Mark to talk to when I got home to say she didn’t deserve this outcome, there was nobody to hold me for a good cry. In the union he and I made years ago, I am now the sole emotional carrier of my mom’s current life when that used to be shared by two.

On Sunday morning I went with my sisters to the Shady Acres of the southwest suburbs of Chicago. “Look who we brought, Mom,” my sister said and I pulled my mask down for a few seconds so she could see all of my face. She had the biggest smile and those few seconds alone made all of it worthwhile. She’s declined a lot which I knew from talking with her every week but seeing it on a phone is different from seeing it in person. The chatty, vibrant woman who started her day with several cups of coffee from an old-fashioned percolator now needs someone to hold the cup to her lips so she can take a few swallows. Words come slowly and hesitantly, but she did manage to make us laugh, and what a welcome relief to see a bit of who she used to be left. We spent a couple of hours with her and then wheeled her back to the common area, and just like every time I’d leave her after my dad died, it was hard to turn away and walk out the door.

For many reasons the trip was stressful from start to finish and I ended up leaving after 24 hours instead of staying until the following morning. My younger sister drove me to Midway which used to be the chill alternative to O’Hare but is now busy all the time. In what might be a first ever there, I walked right up to security. Once through, I badly wanted to sit and have a glass of wine but my stomach was in knots and that didn’t seem like a very good idea.

My cousin’s wife died eleven years ago of breast cancer and Mark and I flew in and out of Midway for the wake and funeral. Her death was a sad and shocking blow to our extended family even though it was expected. A friend recently lamented about the older people in our families dying and how they were steadfast attendees of every wedding, baptism, graduation party, and funeral. “They were there our whole lives, sitting with their coffee and gossiping about the family, and it never occurred to me that one day they would be gone,” and I think that’s how we all felt about Carol’s presence in our lives.

Growing up my grandma and her cousin lived on the same block. If I was staying at my grandma’s in the summer and got bored I’d go down to Belle’s house to hang out. She lived on a second floor apartment across the street from the cathedral. The bells would chime and rattle the house and the view outside her windows seemed mysterious and magical. Sometimes you’d get a glimpse of a group of nuns gliding through the grounds as if they were on air – straight up The Sound of Music stuff. At the time her son, Hal, who was in high school, would sometimes let me hang out with him and his best friend, Frank. I was all of about twelve years old and enamored with Frank.

As the years went by and I met Mark, got married and had kids, I’d ask Hal and Carol about Frank who came to their house most Sunday mornings for breakfast. “I was so in love with him then,” I told them and always said to tell him I said “hi.” For me it was a long running joke until Carol died and at the funeral home Frank made a beeline straight for me. He hadn’t changed much and we chatted in the awkward way you do when you hadn’t seen someone in forty years and never really knew anything about them besides their looks. Throughout that day and the next he kept looking at me which was weird and made me uncomfortable. He saved his move for the luncheon after the funeral, and as I was saying goodbye to everyone, Frank came up to me, hugged me, and whispered, “You need to ditch your husband and be with me.” I was horrified and nothing came out of my mouth due to pure shock, and then my sister came along and rescued me so her and her husband could take Mark and me to Midway. It was far earlier than we needed to be there but we were okay with that. “Good people watching,” Mark said, and once inside and through security we decided to go to a bar and have a couple of beers. As one tends to do after a funeral, we were processing everything that had happened in the last two days, how Carol left such a mark as a music teacher, how much she’d be missed, how Hal was going to fare without her. And then Mark asked me, “Who was that dude with the dark hair that looked like he came off the set of Starsky and Hutch?” I told him that was Frank and filled him in on the backstory of how I had a mad crush on him before I even needed a training bra. “Guy said the weirdest thing to me when we were leaving. Told me I needed to let you go to be with him,” and the shock I had when Frank said that to me was times a hundred that he had the audacity to say that to Mark. “Oh god,” I said, “he said the same thing to me but, jeezus, I can’t believe he said that to you.” I felt sick to my stomach at the thought but needn’t have worried. When I asked Mark what he said back to him, he took a swig of his beer and said, “I gave him a long up and down and decided I didn’t have a thing to worry about,” and I burst out laughing because it was so absolutely perfect.

We spent another hour at the bar talking about life and how weird funerals can be, that maybe hitting on someone’s wife in the midst of the collective grief of a life gone too soon might win top prize. Then we got on the plane and both fell asleep, and Mark’s was the only shoulder I ever needed to rest my head on when everything got to be too much.

The day before the anniversary of Mark’s death, I had a yard sale. It was supposed to happen weeks earlier, but it kept getting postponed and my neighbor and I (whose life fell apart the same time mine did) decided it would have to be Labor Day weekend or never. We plowed forward which is kind of what we’ve been doing these last four years, and two former shop girls set up business on my corner lot.

The plan was for a one-day-only selling extravaganza, but at the end of it I said to Jen, “I’ve got nothing going on tomorrow but a day filled to the brim with sadness so if you want to do this again I’m game.” She was, we pulled our wares out of my garage on a late Sunday morning, and Jen got into merchandising mode. The garage door wasn’t open ten minutes when a friend of Mark’s stopped by with a bouquet of flowers. He has never forgotten the day of Mark’s death, and I somehow managed to keep it together while talking to him even though I wanted to sob out of gratitude. A neighbor down the street came to keep us company, another neighbor stopped by on her way to the grocery store, a friend decided she needed to shop again, another friend needed some advice on wedding attire from two pros. As far as socializing it was stellar, sales not so much.

We were starting to pack things up when a young guy on a bike appeared. “Aww, man, are you guys closing,” he asked, and we told him to shop away because we weren’t even close to our sales quota. “Is this your house,” he asked me and I told him it was. “I ride by here every day. What kind of flowers are those? I really like them.” “They’re hydrangeas,” I said and he slowly shook his head and said, “Word.” He then picked something off one of the tables, held it up, and said, “What’s a sham?” “It’s a fancy pillowcase,” I said. “Huh,” he said, “didn’t know there was such a thing as a fancy pillowcase. Learn something new every day.”

We learned that he was an art student, his name was Michael, that he rode his bike to a community college every day, that his goal was to get into the art institute. When he picked up a roll of cork and admired it, Jen said, “You can have it. It’s free for an art student,” and he smiled and said “Word.” The next thing I saw was him eating potatoes from a ceramic bowl with a plastic fork which was unexpected to say the least. “You guys have really good stuff,” he said, and when I asked him what was interested in he said, “Oh, I’m interested in everything.” I stopped in my tracks and studied that kid’s face hard. When I got my bearings I asked him what school he went to and where he lived. When he told me I said, “You bike that every day??? My husband biked to the med center but that’s about half the distance you ride. How long does it take you?” “Oh, it’s not bad,” he said. “Usually an hour but I like to take my time, stop and have some coffee, maybe get myself a snack,” he said as he ate another forkful of potatoes.

He picked things up, turned them over, admired them. “I wish I could get some of this stuff today but I’m supposed to be somewhere soon,” he said. “Here’s the deal,” I said. “This stuff is going back in my garage for who knows how long. If my front door is open that means I’m home so knock on the door and I’ll open the garage and let you look all you want.” To which Jen added, “When you’re done at Kathy’s house she’s going to walk you down to my house where you can do the same thing, okay?” And he took that information in, nodded, and said, “Word.”

The street that runs alongside my house is filled with walkers, runners, and bike riders. It starts before the sun comes up and it’s not unusual to see someone walking their dog at midnight. Everyone who comes to my house says the same thing. “I’ve never seen so many people out. This never happens in my neighborhood.” I know who walks every day, who runs. There is a woman who runs between 8-8:30 every morning. She runs on the balls of her feet. There’s an older woman who walks several times a day even in the hottest hours of the afternoon. Another woman who walked two collies for years and now only one. My neighbor with her two bassetts twice a day. I know the bike riders and the patterns. There’s two groups of retirees that meet twice a week and leisurely ride by mid-morning, after-school kids riding their bikes to the creek, the weekend riders, the after-dinner riders, the hard-core riders that fly by. I’ve watched a parade of people going by my house for decades, so how is it that not once did I see a young African American guy riding a bike past my house every day that looked like it came right out of the Wizard of Oz?

A few days later I was at Jen’s house and she said, “I drove by your house and saw the cork was still sitting by your garage door. Michael hasn’t come back?” “No,” I said, “I thought for sure he’d be back by now.” As we were talking about him I asked her if she saw him ride up to the house. She didn’t. I asked her if she saw him get on his bike and leave. She hadn’t. “I swear to god, Jen, if you weren’t there I would think I dreamt that whole thing. It was like he was dropped from the sky for a few minutes and then got sucked back up.” “When you asked him what he was interested in,” Jen said, “and he said everything I thought Mark Fisher was standing in front of us.” I had the same thought, it’s why I kept looking at him after he said that, and why it took me a minute to recover. We talked about Michael a bit more, about the potatoes that came out of nowhere, about his presence, and then she said something I already knew. “You know we’re never going to see him again, right? That he was just for that day.”

I smiled and nodded.

Word.

Dear Mark,

In a few days it will be four years since you died. “Four years already,” someone recently said which startled me because how do I explain that four years is always yesterday in my life. You were here, I went to Target and texted you to ask if we needed cat food, you didn’t answer, I bought it anyways. I came home to find you at the dining room table pulling sticker balls off your pants. “I walked the creek,” you said, “it felt good.” I told you that you should do that more often and you said, “I know, I don’t know why I don’t.” You grilled some chicken that night and I mixed it in with a salad and a loaf of French bread on the side. “Perfect summer meal,” you said to me, and three days later you were dead.

The other day I was making the bed and flashbacks exploded within me like the finale of a fireworks show. The call from the police, you whistling When I’m 64 every day that summer, me sitting in the car in the driveway and unable to get out, you winking at me across the room at a party, calling the kids to come home and then screaming at the horror of it all, the smell of your neck, your phone abandoned on the dining room table, your bedroom eyes, the sobs of our three beautiful kids echoing in my head.

To this day there are people who still want me to be mad at you. I have surrendered that conversation. While I readily admit this was an awful decision on your part, I also know it is what you felt you needed at the moment to find peace. Last fall I stumbled on the song Wildflowers by Tom Petty and have let it wash over me so any times. You belong somewhere you feel free. Oof, that line does me in. Though it has caused me my greatest pain, I will never waiver from believing that you deserved to break free from the chains of trauma.

My mom is declining from dementia and will soon be wherever you landed. I used to be able to make her laugh when I got to talk to her via Facetime and I loved when that happened. I’d tell her some story about something that happened, pepper it with outrage, and her eyes would flicker back to life. How many times did I tell you that I thought she liked you more than me? Too many and you’d say in all seriousness, “Of course she does. How could she not?” Like you, I am counting on her looking out for me on the other side. Even when I watch her struggle to find the simplest of words, I sense that she knows more about the road I’m on than anyone else in my life.

Your two students reached the summit of the graduate school mountain and are now proudly in possession of a hard-earned PhD. I listened to their dissertations and took them out for happy hour afterwards. You would have loved the gossip. “Mark wasn’t like any of the other professors,” they said to me, and I needed no further explanation about that. There is a bench in your memory that will be installed soon on the campus of the med center outside the biochem building. When I went to see the plan for the garden and to pick out the location for the bench it was too much. That building without you in it, without you running towards me if I swung by to give you a ride home. I don’t know how I’m supposed to settle for a bench when there should be a Mark. Your beloved, Joe, spearheaded all of this, and in a recent conversation we decided that if it wasn’t littered with spandex biking shorts, stained coffee mugs, and stacks of research papers it wouldn’t be authentically Fisher .

The kids and I fell like dominoes to Covid this summer. That sort of thing was your Super Bowl and if you were here you would have provided a detailed play-by-play. We muddled through without the presence of your enthusiasm for complex viruses, and even that felt like we were being cheated. Maggie is back in her school library introducing little ones to the wonder of reading, Will started a new design job and found the perfect work home for him, Mal is juggling a job and graduate school and shares your enthusiasm for diving deep into tough subjects. They miss you far more than they tell me but, oh my goodness, if you could witness their bravery, empathy, and wit you would be so proud of them.

Unbeknownst to 95% of my inner circle, I have been dating someone for the last year. He is a musician, introduced me to live music all over town, and this summer we danced the night away many times. It was fun and new and exciting. It was also hard and confusing which is why I intentionally kept it under wraps. Along the way there were things that sometimes didn’t feel quite right, but loneliness tends to turn red flags into the most harmless shade of pink. In what is the worst time of the year for me to make any decisions, I decided to end things with him. I instantly regretted it but that was fear-based and not a good reason to stay with someone.

I don’t know what this weekend will look like. Hard, sad, unreal like this anniversary always looks. I can’t say I have settled into this life or ever will, but I do feel like I’ve got my sea legs and have the most faithful squad of cheerleaders rooting for me. That goes double for you as you are right by my side, always reminding me that I am a writer before I am anything else.

Vivre, Mark Fisher, vivre. Messy, complicated, unpredictable life, and all those years we poured into making it beautiful. I haven’t forgotten that part.

love,
k.

Sometimes when I think about the unfairness of these last few years, I want to gather every breakable thing in this house and fling it against a brick wall. Not because I think it would be especially helpful, but because the thought of it feels satisfying. I considered it when I was having the kitchen remodeled last year and was getting rid of some old dishes. Maybe, I thought, I should take those plates to the basement and start chucking them against the wall and breaking them into hundreds of pieces. Midwest values, though, won out and smashing things that are still usable felt like it would fall into the sinful category. Instead, I put them in a box to donate and later found out about a business that does the very thing I needed, a place where you spend money to go in a room and smash things. I told my therapist about it and she said I’d be surprised by how often she advises someone to do that very thing.

These dog days of summer coat me in sweaty misery. “My people,” I used to tell Mark, “thrive in overcast, chilly days. Give me one of those, a candle burning, a decent book, and some music playing in the background and I’ll be happy.”

This summer has been hard, way too hard for someone who has been on this ride for nearly four years. I told my therapist about driving somewhere and out of nowhere crying so hard I had to pull over. I told her nothing had happened, the day had been fine, and all of a sudden I’m in my car bawling. “There was no reason for it,” I told her. “Maybe,” she said, “the fact that your husband died will always be reason enough for tears.” That sentence was a gift to me. It let me off the hook, stopped my overanalyzing, and allowed me to let things be what they are whether good, bad, or in between.

I used to work with someone who had a life story that should be made into a movie. When I arrived at the store one day for my shift she told me she was pregnant. It made me teary-eyed and I immediately offered to have a baby shower at my house for her. Two months later I walked into work and learned she had a miscarriage. When I talked to her about it, when I said how sorry I was for her and her husband, she said something I will never forget. “I learned a long time ago,” she said, “that the Universe trusts me with her most precious gifts, but I don’t get to decide for how long.”

Besides getting rid of plates last summer when the kitchen was being remodeled, I went through the ridiculous amount of coffee cups Mark and I had accumulated over the years. I didn’t keep too many of them except for his favorite Periodic Table of Elements cup and my 1969 Chicago Cubs Bullpen one. They have seen better days, are so stained inside that they don’t come clean, and I don’t use either one of them. They sit nestled inside of each other in the cabinet over the coffee maker, and on those summer mornings when the dog days seem like they will never fold over into cooler mornings and changing leaves, I think about hurling them into oblivion out of frustration and grief.

It’s a fleeting thought, though. Both of those coffee mugs are older than my kids and carry the stories of how two people who fell in love on a blind date began their days. One who loved science, the other who loved the Chicago Cubs, and a Universe that entrusted both of them to each other for a very long time.

As spring was winding down, I told my therapist that I was dreading summer. Both of our girls have summer birthdays, Mark’s birthday is on the first day of summer, followed by our anniversary, then the anniversary of our first date which both of us recalled with 100% accuracy unlike the date of our wedding. When that is over, that dreaded day in September shows up and hits like an annual head-on collision.

“Maybe,” she said, “you can not look at the whole summer but section it into weeks and then it won’t seem like too much.” I said I didn’t think that was possible, because even though I’m paying her to help me with this exact sort of thing, sometimes I am pissy and tired and want to pay her to make all this go away.

The kids’ birthdays have their own particular sting as every year Mark and I would reminisce about their entrance into the world. How when I was pregnant with Maggie, Mark sat next to the phone in the lab for weeks for fear that someone else would answer it and forget to give him the message that I was in labor, how we walked the halls of the hospital to speed things up and I kept stopping at the waiting room to watch the Cubs game, how Will’s labor started during Sunday Night Football and the doctor was running between two woman, the other who screamed relentlessly, how my nurse was so annoyed at her for the ruckus she was causing, and it was her who delivered Will because the doctor couldn’t get to my room in time, how The Circle of Life from Lion King was playing on the radio when we were driving to the hospital to deliver Mallory. When the doctor arrived and asked who was watching our other kids Mark said, “Since this is our third we figured it was going to be quick so we left them in the car but they’ll be fine because we cracked the windows,” and he and the doctor laughed and laughed while I laid there like a bloated extra in a buddy movie.

After outrunning it for over two years, I tested positive for Covid when I got home from our beach trip. It knocked me flat and it wasn’t until ten days later that I tested negative and could go back to work. If I was ever sick I could tell by Mark’s eyes if he was worried about me. He knew when to take Tylenol versus ibuprofen versus naproxen, he always pushed water and sleep, he researched everything, and if he had any questions he would find somebody at the med center to answer them. What I wouldn’t have given for those eyes to have been there to nurse me back from Covid.

There’s a term in cycling called bonking which is when your body has depleted it’s store of glucose. It happened to Mark a few times and he always made sure he stayed hydrated and kept glucose tablets in his bike bag, his work bag, we even had them at home. The body experiences a hypoglycemic crash which hits suddenly causing light-headedness, nausea, sweating, and shaking. You literally cannot go on. Sometimes Mark would go on a long ride for fun or charity and come home and tell me about a bonking incident. He always said it quietly and seriously, like everything was going fine until somebody ended up prone on the ground.

After I got over Covid I was walking early one morning when a cardinal darted in front of me. “That you, Fisher?,” I asked because if cardinals are dead people he’d definitely be the darting kind that enjoyed scaring the daylights out of me. It landed on a branch overlooking the creek and I said, “Listen, I’m bonking here. Besides missing you every waking minute of the day, there’s a horrific war in Ukraine, a pandemic, inflation, half-naked Vikings going on trial for trying to overthrow the government, melting runways, massive fires, and now monkeypox which I know nothing about but that sounds unpleasant.” I don’t think that cardinal was you-know-who because he flew off leaving me with my bonk, and even a reincarnated-bird-Mark would hang around for clarification on the monkeypox thing.

When I was a little girl and there was no air conditioning, my siblings and I would impatiently wait for the call from Mrs. Glaser who lived down the street saying it was okay for us to come and swim in their backyard pool. We could never go without Mom and she’d sit in the hot sun with her feet in the water and talk to Fran until it was time to go home and start dinner.

There’s another term in biking called drafting. It’s when somebody takes the lead in a pace line and reduces the wind resistance for everyone behind them. When they tire out they move to the back of the line and someone else takes over. Everyone benefits from the work of the lead cyclist, and how did it take me this long to figure out that my mom and dad were drafting the six of us through summer for decades? That Mark and I drafted our three kids and now my daughter and her husband are doing the same so that somehow we grow older fiercely believing that there is nothing better than the long hot days of summer.

The first summer after Mark died, the kids and I went to Yosemite for a family trip and to spread his ashes. I nervously decided to mailed the ashes to my daughter in California rather than have to explain to TSA what was in the box. “Your boy arrived,” my daughter texted me a few days later when they showed up on her doorstep. We arrived in Los Angeles and picked up both of them then crammed into a mini van to head north for our national park adventure. As those kinds of things go with us, over the course of a few days and many trips in and out of the van with the ashes, some of them spilled onto the floor. I tried to scoop them up as best I could but there were still dusty traces left when we turned over the van at the airport. I told Mark I was damn sorry about how that was going to turn out for him, and I imagined he would have rolled his eyes, and with the faux outrage he perfected over the years, said, “C’mon, Kath!!! You can’t really be leaving me here to get sucked up by a vacuum cleaner.”

Last year we went to Boulder and left some of his ashes in the Rocky Mountains. You would think it would be easier the second time around but it wasn’t. I never know if I’m doing the right thing or choosing the right place. I only know that these are places he would have loved, where for a brief time his burdens may have lightened.

This year we opted not go to a national park but rather to the beach – Gulf Shores to be exact. After we picked up our rental cars and headed to the house we were renting in Alabama, we stopped at a restaurant. We got a table that overlooked the water and my Pisces heart was in heaven. After a bit my daughter said, “Mom, look over your shoulder,” and I gasped. “Jeezus,” I said, “it even looks like his writing.”

There aren’t many of Mark’s ashes left but I brought a small amount with me again. This time I wanted to be alone and walked down to the beach one morning. Mark and I loved the beach, be it the ocean or the shores of Lake Michigan in our early dating years, and we especially loved it in the morning when it was quiet. I sat there and before long noticed a heron a few feet away staring out into the gulf. I waited for the water to reach me and slowly let go of the ashes. They turned and swirled, got caught up in the surf, and quietly disappeared along with the heron.

When we were in Yosemite, I wandered over to a group of people listening to a park ranger. “You’ll notice the feet of the sequoia,” he said. “These are big trees and they have big feet to keep their grip on the earth,” and I swear that once you see that in a tree you cannot unsee it. Mark loved reading about trees, about their secret language underground, and how they leave space in their canopy for light so the little ones will grow, but I’m not sure he knew how tightly they had to grip the earth to stay alive.

One day Mark lost his grip and there have been many days since then that I thought I was losing mine. Despite the distance and now years since his death, the same message seems to travel back and forth between us.

I’ll find a way to fall in love with where I am, you find a way to fall in love where you are, and won’t we have so much to tell each other when we find ourselves on the same side of the moon.

On the day that Mark died, when I was frantically trying to find him, the police were frantically trying to find me. A close friend and neighbor of mine who was walking her dogs, told me later that she had seen them in front of my house about 10:30 that morning. When they couldn’t find me they drove to my daughter’s house, and thankfully both her and her husband were at work. Hours later they were able to contact me via my son who gave them my number.

The detective said he needed to talk to me right away. I told him I was leaving work and he offered to meet me at the house. I was terrified, shaking, and confused, but not so confused to know that I didn’t want them anywhere near my house. He said we could meet wherever I wanted and suggested a coffee shop. That seemed absurd to me which is how I ended up at the police station.

That summer I had been going to physical therapy for sciatica and was at an appointment the day after Mark’s funeral. The therapist, whom I barely knew, had heard what happened from another client who was friends with Mark, and hugged me long and hard. “Come here,” she said and led me into a back room. “I’m going to let you talk as much or as little as you want,” she said. “You can tell me anything or nothing at all and then I’ll work on your back.” I poured my broken heart out to her and will always be grateful that she was in my life at that moment. When I told her about the police wanting to come to my house to tell me what happened and that I refused she nodded. “I don’t even know why,” I said, “I just didn’t want them in my house.” She told me about her and her husband telling their kids that they were divorcing, that they all sat on the back deck, that it was such a hard conversation and everybody was crying. “I loved that deck,” she said. “We were out there all the time and from the moment I had that conversation with my kids I hated it. You did the right thing. You didn’t invite trauma into your house.”

Last week I was coming home from the grocery store, and as I turned right onto my street a patrol car was waiting to turn left. My stomach flipped, I felt sick. Police just don’t drive down our street for no reason so I pulled into my driveway and watched to make sure they were driving away. An hour later my neighbor stopped by with the awful news that our dear friend’s son had died, that the police car I saw was indeed delivering bad news, this time to a different house. Two hours later I walked into their house without a single word to offer to make anything better.

I have spent the last few years writing about grief, about the beautiful and awful things that have been said to me, and despite all of that I can tell you that there are deaths that leave you hollowed out, and that experience flies out the window in the reality of loss. Grief is pain, excruciating pain, and there is nobody who feels comfortable in it or around it. “I think I’m in shock,” my friend said as I stood beside her. “You are,” I said, “your brain is doing its job. It feels like you are going crazy. You’re not, you are being protected.”

Working through my shock and pain has been the fight of my life. I once read that trauma is the gateway drug and nothing could be more accurate. How easy it would be to pick an addiction to bury this, but instead I have paid thousands of dollars in therapy to prevent that from happening. But this death that landed on my street and to someone I care about so much has rocked that newly built foundation to its core. My therapist once told me, “All death will be about Mark because that left the deepest cut,” and the last week has proven that true. At my friend’s house and talking to her a few days ago, I saw the business card of the police officer on the table, his cell phone number on the back. “I have one of those cards,” I said to her, “I saved it.”

I don’t know why. It’s tucked in a drawer, and many times I have thought of calling him and telling him that I survived the worst day of my life and the days after, that my garden this year is the best it’s ever been, that I have a different job and out of the blue they offered me a raise because they like me and want to keep me around, that I’m even dating some. How odd to want this person to know those things when he delivered such devastating news, left my life, and then everything collapsed. Maybe it’s because if he were to deliver different news, news that it was a very unfortunate mix-up, that he was clearing things up and finishing the paperwork, I would want to overhear him say, “She says that when I bring you home things will look a little different, but not to worry, that you’ll still recognize her smile.”

And I would smile hearing that because if Mark thought he was responsible for breaking the bough of who I’ve always been, of causing the thing he most loved about me to go away, that would be unbearable.

When I had my job at a local university, I was responsible for managing the finances of our student organizations. At the time there were over 300 student orgs, of which roughly half were active. Each organization had to submit a budget that was considered for approval by the student council, and once they got their final numbers they could spend on their events. The majority of expenses were for food and t-shirts which they used a university credit card to purchase. Every purchase request came through me, I’d approve, decline, or ask for more info and then they’d come to our front desk to use the card.

I interacted with students daily regarding their events and finances while my coworker dealt with them on all aspects of student activities. He was contacted by a couple of students who wanted to start a new student org for a gun club. He turned them down because it went against university policy to promote guns on campus and they showed up one day with a faculty advisor determined to get their organization approved. It was a heated debate, and after much back and forth with our office and the administration they were approved for a Historic Gun Club – the focus and interest being in vintage firearms. Once they were approved, the org president came in with a gift for me and my coworker. “My mom made these,” he said and we were given sugar cookies in the shape of a handgun.

The first year they were an org they were pretty active, the next year less so until spring. The org president contacted me to request to use the credit card to make a donation to a local shooting range in exchange for targets for shooting practice. I turned him down because we didn’t allow use of student activity funds for donations. It was pretty cut and dried on my end but then he looped the owner of the shooting range into the email and there were many emails back and forth regarding their rights. I bowed out and passed the email to my boss who declined it for the same reasons I did, and because from the onset it had been made clear that student funds were not going to be used for ammunition or targets.

The org president was at my desk often in the beginning to learn the ins and outs of requesting and using budgeted funds. He wanted to know every detail and I’d go over it and then a few days later he’d stop by and I’d go over it again. “I don’t want to mess this up,” he said and I told him it was a learning process and once he’d done it a time or two he’d be fine and not to worry. He was always polite and very nerdy. I wanted to tell him that chicks love nerds, that I was married to a science nerd, and that to me he seemed far too sweet to be swept up in the gun culture, but my job was managing money not giving life advice to young adults who weren’t asking.

*****

Last week I was getting ready to leave work when I checked the news and heard of the shooting in Uvalde. The story was unfolding and as the hours went by it kept getting worse. That night I checked on my daughter, the one who has spent the last thirteen years inside an elementary school, and she was not okay. As a librarian, she told me, it would be impossible to hide twenty kids in her space and what about her own daughter down the hall?

The next day I went out to lunch with her and my granddaughter and couldn’t stop staring at Mabel. How in God’s name could anyone go into a school and take their rage out on children? And how do we continue to allow this to happen over and over and over? Mabel brought along her Disney cookbook to show me all the recipes that she and her mom are going to make this summer. When the check came she said she would pay for it and gave me a nickel from her sequined mermaid purse then skipped to the car under her umbrella, the one she was swinging around earlier when her mom had told her she needed to learn umbrella etiquette. “What’s etiquette?” she asked. “It’s manners, Mabel,” her mom said, “so you don’t hurt anybody when you’re using it.

*****

I was at my desk cleaning up student org accounts getting ready for our audit after the academic year ended. I opened an email requesting that a student be removed from all mail lists immediately due to his sudden death. I saw the name and jumped out of my desk to talk to my boss.

His name was Ryan, he had graduated a week earlier with a masters degree in engineering, he was the president of a gun club at an urban college, and the cause of death was a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

In the weeks and months following Mark’s death, when I rarely slept more than a few hours every night, I would lay in bed and listen to the sounds of the trains. I decided that if I paid close attention to the time and the blast of their horns I could figure out their schedule and thus know the exact train that hit Mark. This never happened because at some point I’d fall asleep and then I’d have to start all over again the next night and the next until I ended up back again at Tuesday.

To say this was an exercise in insanity is an understatement but that’s where I was in those days.

A few months later I started going to therapy every Monday. I was working close to the therapist’s office and would leave work a bit early and talk about train schedules and last day walks in the park, about the summer of foreboding I could not figure out, and all the other things that go with a traumatic loss. One week I told her that the staff in our office received an email about a student who was kicked out and had his eyes set on making things right, specifically with our office. His picture was included in the email. An hour later the building services manager went desk to desk to show his photo to all of us with instructions on what to do if we encountered him, and that’s when it occurred to me that this was some serious shit.

Campus security showed up to patrol our floor and that’s when the wheels of my fragile state of mind came apart. I walked out the doors of the office to go deliver something and approaching me was an officer, his hand resting on a weapon. As soon as I saw his uniform I panicked. I made a beeline to the bathroom where I hid in a stall until my heart stopped pounding. The rest of the week I went up and down the stairwell at the back of our office so I didn’t have to see him because if he couldn’t find me he couldn’t tell me my husband was dead.

This is how a traumatic death leaves its calling card.

When I talk about therapy, it often feels like it’s met with a “Oh, that’s nice you have someone to talk to about your feelings.” And that is true, but it’s also about managing trauma that resurfaces over and over. Working through scenarios where every police officer who happens to cross my path isn’t there to deliver devastating news, stopping the movie in my head that says I did something wrong and made this all happen, letting go of train schedules, of learning to live daily with the sound of their long, urgent blasts day and night.

On three different occasions since Mark has been gone, I have received a text with news that someone had committed suicide. Committed suicide is a gut punch and I never word Mark’s death like that so to read it in a text is even worse. Because I did not know any of these people there was no reason for me to be informed. In one case it was to cover a work shift and since I was on a leave I couldn’t work it anyways. That one went on and on until the point I had to turn my phone off. “If you’re ever thinking of ending your life call me even if it’s in the middle of the night….” it said. That night I was in a terrifying loop of memories of the days before Mark died, that day, the days after.

Reliving. Reliving. Reliving.

That took weeks to shed and several therapy appointments, and in retrospect it now seems funny in a ludicrous way. Like you are on the precipice of life and death and suddenly remember that you and Angela worked stock that one time and she seemed kind of nice so maybe you’ll give her a ring-a-roo so she can talk you off the cliff.

I no longer have the job I did when Mark died and have since moved my therapy appointment to earlier in the day since I am off on Mondays. They are often still surprisingly hard, and as I told my daughter recently, it is talking about how Mark the boy grappled with his childhood that does me in. “You know, Mom,” she said, “you gave him everything he needed. You gave him your big family, the three of us, security and safety.” I can remember so many times watching Mark interacting with my family and looking so happy, Mark with his colleagues and biking friends, Mark at Thanksgiving with our friends and her siblings deciding he was to be named an honorary brother, Mark when our house was full and the table overflowed. He loved that.

Those things have taken me a long time to take credit for, to acknowledge that maybe he’d have been gone sooner if not for me. But the anguish of death lurks around corners and surfaces with no warning flares, so I am begging you to not share your devastating news with someone who deals with the long-term effects of a traumatic death in ways you will never know. Because though she may look the same on the outside, on the inside there hasn’t been a single day that she doesn’t remember how it used to be, and how she must make peace with the weight of an untimely and violent death that has settled deep inside her bones.