When Mark and I had been married for more than two decades, he decided to become a Catholic. I’d long given up on that, and though I hoped it would happen one day, Mark was Mark and he did everything in his way and on his own time.
It came to be because I started going to a new church, one that was much more welcoming than the one the kids and I had been going to for years, and also one with a very charismatic priest. I’d come home and tell Mark about it, how every Sunday this guy managed to tap into current events and stun and surprise me with a message, and how my retelling of it could never do it justice. “You’ll just have to come one day and hear it for yourself,” I said, and to my surprise Mark announced one Sunday morning that he was coming to church with me and the kids. He kept coming, I got involved in the annual auction, he started riding with the newly formed bike team, and things evolved. After a week long ride across Kansas where he spent a lot of time cycling the flat terrain with Fr. Matt, he came home and said, “I’ve decided to become a Catholic,” and I was speechless. He asked a dear friend, a doctor at the med center and fellow biker, to be his sponsor and went through the RCIA program. Every Thursday night he’d come home and tell me something he’d learned that night, something he would ponder until the next week, and in all matters both academic and spiritual, Mark flourished most when he was a student.
He got baptized at the Easter vigil while me, the kids, and much of my family who flew in from Chicago sat in the front row. I looked at him getting drenched and coming out a few minutes later in his linen suit and thought, “Never say never because this is a damn miracle.” He stood to the side of the altar, I smiled at him, he winked at me. The next day we had our annual Easter open house – our little house full to the brim. Mark thanked everyone for being there, got very emotional, and it was one of those lovely days that feels good to return to over and over.
If there was any gift at the time of Mark’s death, it was that this priest was in the country on that horrible day. Fishing in Alaska but on his way back to Kansas City before returning to South America. Our dear friends, Mark’s sponsor and his wife, contacted him to see if he could preside over Mark’s funeral. There is much I could write about that day, but it often feels like a dream, or maybe like I’d told Mark years ago, you had to be there. I remember Fr. Matt talking about he and Mark riding side-by-side on those Kansas roads, how Mark turned to him and said, “I want to be a Catholic,” and then taking off on his bike leaving Matt in the dust. “He was a Catholic long before it was official,” he said to all of us brokenhearted, and that was true.
This Easter our table was full and lively, and even though I find that beautiful church I went to for so long to be weighted with emotional flashbacks, I still possess the Easter spirit of someone who was raised Catholic, who raised her kids in that faith, and then surprisingly saw her husband ride a bicycle down that path. The following day I felt awful – dizzy, nauseous, and a headache that lasted for a week. I assumed I’d picked up a bug somewhere until I remembered that like clockwork I get sick after every holiday. Though my head and heart move forward, my body fiercely remembers how it used to be and needs to shut down for a few days to catch up with reality.
The grass has turned green again, the lilacs have started to bloom, the peonies are budding. I’m outside constantly, even in the cold and rain, to watch it wake up, to see what rises from the dead and comes back to life. A thousand times since he died I’ve asked Mark the same thing. “Where are you?”
“I’m everywhere, Kath,” he answers, and it is in the spring that I know that to be true.
Last week on the way to work I was at a stoplight waiting to make a left hand turn. While I sat there, the sounds of a siren could suddenly be heard. Within seconds, a fire truck came into the intersection and turned right. Immediately following was an ambulance, their sirens blaring and on the tail of the fire truck. The light turned green, I made my turn, and within a block was directly behind the fire truck and ambulance. I watched as the firemen jumped off the truck, the straps of their overalls dangling by their waist, one grabbing a stretcher, another a black bag, all of them running up the incline of the yard.
Suddenly, a woman my age came running out of the house, her face contorted with anguish, waving for the firemen to hurry. She ran back into the house and they followed her. This happened within seconds, oncoming traffic cleared, and I was able to drive around the fire truck and ambulance and continue on to work.
I remembered what my dad would say when encountering something like that. “Somebody is having their worst day ever,” and then would tell us to say a prayer for them. When he was dying and my mom could no longer manage his pain, Mark and I were there with our three-year-old, Maggie, and she told Mark to call an ambulance because he needed to go to the hospital. In her own anguish at that moment she said, “And tell them no sirens. I don’t want sirens.” It was a warm September night, and I walked out of the house, sat on the porch, and sobbed.
My parents’ neighbor, Shirley, came over and sat next to me. She asked why I was crying and I said, “My dad will never be in this house again. Once he leaves and goes to the hospital it’s over.” She said that wasn’t necessarily true and yet we all knew that to be the case. He got admitted into the hospital, was put on a morphine drip, and never came home again.
Mark loved my dad and grieved his loss greatly, but he had a wife who was bereft and needed a steady hand on her back to keep her upright when she’d rather stay in bed all day every day. It was a group effort between him, our Will that came three weeks later, and Maggie, that saved my life, that showed me that deep loss can be integrated into life, that moving forward is possible.
Little did I know that 28 years after that, I’d be in my own anguish, the details of an impossible death laid before me in a police station. Mark, the same age as my dad when a sirenless ambulance pulled up in front of the house, me, the same age as my mom when death came pounding on the door.
Last week I went to California to see that third child of ours, the beautiful dancer that came four years after my dad died. I arrived in Los Angeles, in the Southwest terminal I’d been in twice before when we were coming home from seeing Mal. The first time was when we moved her there, when Mark and I toasted late morning iced coffee to doing our job, to letting our youngest claim her future even if it was hard as hell for us to let her go. The second time we flew home from there was after a visit with her as tourists, Mark at the gate catching up on work emails, me in an airport shop buying a sweater because I was freezing. The restaurant was still there with people having breakfast before their flight, the place we bought our iced coffee. There was also the exact same shop in the exact same spot where I bought my sweater. It was as if I suddenly entered a time capsule except something was missing.
One of my favorite photos is of our young family at a lake near the Canadian border that Mark’s mom took. She booked a cabin when we traveled to see her and it was surrounded by pine trees. We loved it, and there we were frozen in time with our three little kids, who already had been planted with the seeds of adventure from their dad.
Like I was taught to do, I said a prayer for the women frantically waving for help from the driveway of her home that one morning on my way to work, and think about her every time I drive by. I’ve even thought of leaving her a note saying I hope everything turned out okay, but if it didn’t I don’t think I want to know.
Yesterday I was a young mom with three kids, married to a newly appointed assistant professor who was trying to get tenure and a lab up and running. I blinked and thirty years went by, I blinked again and my professor was gone. Maybe it was the way I was raised, maybe it’s life experiences, but I knew as those early, hard days of raising a family unfolded before me that it was to be cherished, and so I have to believe that while this one precious life guarantees nothing it also promises more to come.
On our first big family road trip, Mark, me, and the kids drove for three days from the midwest to Spokane, Washington to see Mark’s mom. After we had been there a few days, we left our two little ones with her while we took Maggie and drove to Seattle to see some of Mark’s friends from graduate school. It was a quick trip, and on the way back to Spokane, Mark noted that we weren’t far from Mt. St. Helens. “It sure would be a shame to be that close and not go see it,” he said. In reality it was a few hours away in a different direction but we decided to go for it.
I don’t think either one of us had any idea how long it took to drive up that mountain with the blown off top, but it took a long time and for me it was harrowing as we climbed higher and higher on the narrowest of roads. Mark would point things out and I would scream for him TO NOT TAKE HIS EYES OFF THE ROAD while Maggie giggled in the back seat at her panicking mom.
Before we headed up, one of the locals asked if we’d been there before and we said that we hadn’t seen anything but the news reports when it erupted. “Oh,” he said, “then you’ll be surprised at all the new life that’s sprung up.” By that point it had been fifteen years so we were expecting something vastly different than what we saw. As far as the eyes could see was tens of thousands of dead, flattened trees in every direction, stripped bare and laying like oversized toothpicks. “This is coming back?” I asked Mark. “I guess so,” he said as we stood in awe at the destruction before us.
As harrowing as the drive up had been, coming down was even more so as we hugged the paved road with barely a foot of gravel next to it, and a descent to certain death if you failed to pay attention for a second. Mark didn’t need me freaking out and said, “I’m going to tell you this and I need you to listen. Don’t look down, okay? Don’t look down and we’ll be fine,” and that’s what I did. I looked out, I looked in the backseat at Maggie, I looked at the pages of the visitor’s guide over and over, but not once did I look down.
Mark would say that to me another time when we were in Spain. While the entirety of his day was at a science conference, mine was hanging out with spouses I barely knew and that wasn’t going well. There was complaining about everything and it was spoiling the trip for me. After two days of that, I ended up doing things on my own, exploring the city and the beach every day after breakfast, meeting Mark back at the hotel for lunch, hanging out at the pool in the afternoon, and then meeting up again for dinner. One of the complaints that was valid was that the back staircase to the dining room always had dead roaches on it. Every day they were there and you’d think somebody would make sure they got swept up before meals but they never were. Mark never noticed them and when I said something about it he said, “Then just don’t look down.” I thought that was really dumb advice but I took it. We’d meet with friends in the dining room for dinner and drinks, followed by star gazing on the patio until midnight. We’d repeat it the next night and the one after that, me never looking down when we descended the stairs, and that dumb advice made for the most magical trip of our lives.
Recently, I was given some grieving advice. It caught me off guard because people just don’t do that anymore. As it goes when it comes to that sort of thing, I got defensive, and I hate when I get defensive. It sounds to me like I am bordering on hysteria and that is not who I am. One of the things that Mark appreciated in me was my calmness (sans the height thing) in most situations. But when it comes to being told what I should do about my life since the top of it blew off I push back hard.
We live in a society that tends to want grief to be like the express checkout lane at the grocery store, twelve items or less, move along, see you next time, don’t forget your detergent. Better yet, check yourself out so we don’t have to keep dealing with that sad vibe thing you’ve got going on. The weird thing about that encounter was that I wasn’t the least bit sad. I was fine, so when someone tells me what they think I need to do I want to shout THAT I AM DOING ALL THE THINGS and I’m here for yogurt and paper towels not life advice.
In the days leading up to Mark’s death, it felt like everything was unraveling in slow motion. When I told my therapist this week about something he told me years ago about his childhood, she said to me, “You know that’s just the tip of the iceberg, right? That’s what he could talk about. Imagine what he couldn’t,” and after forty years of knowing and loving him, I am still brought to my knees by the layers of loss he endured before he even met me.
And the oddest thing of all? He couldn’t look down because he couldn’t bear to see what was on fire all around him and I have to look down to see what’s growing from the ashes.
It was a rare occurrence for Mark and I to go shopping anywhere. He hated it. Once I asked him to stop at Hobby Lobby on the way home from somewhere, and after a few minutes of being inside the store he asked, “Are they playing hymns in here?” I told him they were and when he asked why I told him it was a Christian hobby store. “Christian? Are we supposed to not notice that all the shit inside this shitty place is made in China,” he said and refused to cross the threshold of that place ever again.
Mark rode his bike to work year-round and was having trouble finding gloves to keep his hands warm. A chat over breakfast with the boys in the Saturday morning Polar Bear Club determined that he needed to go to REI to get the best in winter gear, and so on a Saturday afternoon we went. Not because I especially wanted to go but more that shopping was so foreign to him that he needed an expert to tag along. He found his gloves and I found a jacket for him. A lightweight, warm jacket that he said he didn’t need but I insisted he try on. He bought this jacket that weighed nothing, and suddenly became the Joel Osteen of winter coats. He preached that investment everywhere he went. When he died I gave the jacket and some other things to my nephews. It was all hard to part with but that coat was one high hurdle for me to jump. “It’s stupid but it means a lot to me,” I said to my sister and she reported back that her son loved it and wore it all the time.
Random photos pop up on my phone regularly and they are usually of Mark. Is it him letting me know he’s close by or is it random? I don’t know. All I know is that they stop me in my tracks, usually make me sigh, and think, “Oh Mark, if only..” If only what? I don’t know any more. Last week a photo showed up of Mark and Mallory in the lobby of the theatre at her college where we waited to see our girl after a performance. I vividly remember all of it. Maggie, Nathan, and Will were there, too, because we all loved to watch her dance. It was packed with people waiting to find their dancer, most with flowers in their arms. “Damn it, Mark,” I said, “we forgot flowers.” We always forgot flowers. Every single time. In the crowd we found our girl and I took a picture of her (sans a bouquet) with her dad which is what showed up on my phone last week.
They both looked so happy and there was Mark in his REI jacket. I couldn’t stop staring at it, and over and over the same thought kept going through my head. Was this even real? Was he really here or did I imagine all of it? Did we build a life together or was that some story I told myself? I remember us at REI buying the gloves and that coat, of going to the movies with friends and him saying, “Brian, you need to get this coat. It’s the best.” I remember a hundred times hanging it on the hook inside the coat closet, of seeing him wearing it and thinking “damn he’s good looking” and now all of it feels like a dream.
The first thing you notice on the If Only…Trail is that it is clogged with travelers. The ones who missed their mother’s passing by seconds and are unable to forgive themselves, parents of children who go out to play and never come back home, spouses who watched lives withered away by disease, by accidents, by chance, by a split second decision, missing best friends, siblings, cousins, favorite neighbors, mentors. Mothers who never see the face of a baby they loved since they stared in hopeful disbelief at a pregnancy test. Empty chairs, empty beds, empty cribs.
On the If Only…Trail, the wounded and the wise clear the brush and preach to the newly ordained who are desperate for a copy of the instruction manual for rebuilding a life. Listen to me they say to tear-filled eyes. No life slips through our fingers without a trace. Look at your hands. They are coated in stardust so they can lead you out of the dark.
Two months after the 1st anniversary of Mark’s death, a symposium was held in his honor at the med center where he worked for 28 years. I have wanted to write about it ever since, but it has been difficult for me to convey what it was like for the kids and I to be invited to step into Mark’s world of scientific research.
It was set in motion by Mark’s dearest friend, Tom, who is a professor at Brandeis. Both he and Mark were the stewards of a shameless and inappropriate sense of humor. They met at the University of Illinois where Tom was a post-doc and Mark was a graduate student. They were willing cohorts in antics around the lab that as Tom said, “It was the kind of stuff that nowadays would get you hauled into HR in a minute.” Tom got the ball rolling on this symposium and worked with Mark’s department to make it happen. The gratitude I have for Tom is hard to measure. He was so dear to Mark through decades – absolutely one of Mark’s favorite people, he stays in regular contact to see how I’m faring and that means so much to me, and he was the reason there was a day to honor Mark and his work.
Many of the people who were coming for the symposium were friends from years ago that I hadn’t seen in decades. Because of meetings and conferences, Mark would run into them but I rarely did. I wanted to have a happy hour the night prior to the symposium to catch up with them, for my kids to meet the people that formed their dad’s career, and to start it off celebrating Mark’s life and the people he met along the way. It was important to me that it not be somber or laden with grief.
We had the happy hour at my daughter and son-in-law’s house. I invited a few people from the med center who Mark was close to and loved, as well as his graduate students because there were a lot of contacts in that room that they needed for a future job. It was a lovely, boisterous night, and one of my favorite memories of that second year which was much harder for me than the first. Most of those who were there weren’t able to come in for Mark’s funeral so I threw some of the mass cards we made on the table in case they wanted one. Tom asked what they were and when I explained he said, “Wow, a Mark Fisher trading card. These might be worth something one day,” then burst out laughing which is exactly why Mark loved him so much.
The plan for the day of the symposium was for me and the kids to go in the morning, leave at lunchtime, and then come back for the happy hour and dinner, but that changed for us after the first speaker. We knew nothing about any of the subjects but were fascinated by all of it. Questions after a presentation sometimes felt like a DA grilling a murder suspect on the stand. My daughter leaned over and whispered, “I feel sorry for some of these people. This feels mean.” Mark’s friend, Joe, must have sensed our shock because during a break he came over to us and said that these things can be kind of intense and added, “Mark told me about one he went to where the argument was so fierce that it spilled outside and fists were thrown. Then everybody kissed and made up at the bar afterwards.” I told Joe that Mark never told me that story and he said, “Oh Mark wasn’t in there throwing punches, but he might have encouraged it because he did think it was some shit science.” Besides the science part of it, there were personal stories and Mark’s friend, Neal, said, “He was one of the kindest men I’ve ever known and I’ll leave it at that so I don’t start crying.”
In a twist of irony, the dinner was held in the restaurant of the art museum I worked at for two years. It was the most toxic work environment I’d ever been in, and when they told me that’s where the dinner was going to be I burst out laughing. If Mark were there we would have sat in the back and mercilessly trash talked the place which felt like the kind of dark humor I needed to get through it. The kids and I sat together and I told them they wouldn’t believe what I went through at that job, I fortified my nerves with a little wine, and then got up and spoke to the group.
“I fell under the Mark Fisher spell on our first date, a blind date set up by a friend. When Mark called to ask me out, a call I was expecting, I remember desperately looking around the room trying to come up with an excuse not to go. No believable answer appeared, and so a few days later he picked me up in his mom’s car, hit the curb when he parked, said, “Welp, I guess we’re here,” and held the door open for me as we went into the fine dining establishment known as Denny’s. By the end of that date I knew he was going to be my husband.
Throughout our years together, I rode the highs and lows of his career in science – promotions and pay cuts, the tenure golden ticket, increasing administration expectations, and the constant chase for grant funding. I don’t need to remind you that this is a tough business to be in. It is also tough to helplessly observe from the spouse’s seat.
Mark spoke often of what his legacy might be in the science world. What this career sometimes considers important will not be what most of us remember him for. Mark will be remembered for his quick and outrageous wit, his unwavering passion, the endless pots of coffee he drank, his steadfast support of students and faculty, and that daily dose of spandex shorts that once seen cannot be unseen.
His legacy in life is Maggie, Will, and Mallory who uniquely and fiercely loved their dad. They have always been mine and Mark’s most successful experiment, and with Nathan and Rubin have supported me and each other with enormous compassion. Mark was always so proud of them and they have risen to heights in the most difficult circumstances that neither of us could have imagined when we were raising them.
For forty years Mark was my everything, and like all of us, he had a light and a dark side. Each of you are somebody’s everything. You light up life in ways you cannot comprehend because most days it is so routine. Because of the light you cast, you owe it to yourself to be as aware of your mental health as you are your physical health.
I so wish this day came to be after Mark had sailed off into the sunset after a short stint in the Shady Acres Home for the Old & Brilliant. That is not how it turned out, and in every way, my life came to an abrupt halt on that Tuesday afternoon. The dark side claimed Mark, and for me it often feels like that side won, but by remembering how he lived and not how he died, it does not get the final say. On behalf of Mark, who is with me with every breath I take, and our family, thank you for being here and honoring his well-lived life.”
Recently there have been some high profile deaths by suicide in the news. These affect me greatly. I am too familiar with the aftermath of a decision that cannot be undone. Part of me feels grateful that Mark’s suffering is over for him, but it didn’t go away. It got transferred. I know that was never his intent but it was the result.
I struggle with suicide awareness information (especially the kind posted on social media) because I don’t believe that someone teetering between life and death is capable of googling the phone number of a suicide hotline. I may be very, very wrong about that but I can tell you with absolute certainty that whenever Mark spoke of suicide in all the years I knew him, every single time he said he couldn’t believe somebody could do that.
Instead I think we should all start being a little more honest about our lives. That there are traumas that have taken root in us that we can’t outrun or outwork, that this constant chasing of stuff is siphoning the life out of us, that periods of sadness and loneliness are not something to be ashamed of but rather our common denominator, that life is often incredibly difficult, that it’s easy to look on the bright side when everything is going your way but finding it when you’re flat on the ground is work. I am doing the work and it’s the hardest thing I’ve done in my life. Some days joy is right in front of me wildly waving, and other days it comes at the end of the day when I can crawl into bed and go to sleep.
I like to think my symposium will be after a short stint in the Shady Acres Home for the Wild-Haired-Bohemian-Gypsies, my trading cards will be limited because that’s how you create demand and drive the price up, and I’ll fly away to my everything. But now there’s a life to figure out, to be thankful for, to write about, to honor. It’s not what I wanted or ever imagined but I can tell that something is growing from it.
In the meantime, let’s all agree to stay here, shall we? So that when it is our time to see all our beloveds again, we can look at them and say, “You won’t believe the life I’ve lived since you left.”
Last August I got a job at an interior design firm. I had known and worked near this business many years ago and nobody was more stunned than me when at the end of the second interview, they offered me the job. I felt like I’d hit the work jackpot. It has lived up to its expectations, and when the day is rocky and I feel like I’m in over my head, there is a massive collection of fabric in the basement for me to run my creative hands over and reset my tired brain.
The job is mostly accounting, and at the start of every month creating client invoices of billable design hours from an Excel spreadsheet. In the interview they asked me if I could write and I confidently said I could, but I was unprepared for this kind of writing. My first month of flying solo in invoicing, I proudly turned over my work and it came back with so many redlines I felt like I was back in my 4th grade math class with Sister Morrison. This writing is laborious with an “L”, as a front entry isn’t a front entry but a Front Entry, and you’d be surprised at the amount of time and lines required for a Front Entry. But I have learned and slowly gotten better, and last week because of a new hire not starting yet, I was asked to help out in creating cost estimates.
Cost estimates take invoicing, sprinkle it with steroids, hand it back, and say, “Take every tedious detail you can find in a description of a light fixture, read the fine print until your eyes go bonkers, and include all of that but not too much”. When my first batch was redlined because among other things, antique bronze is Antique Bronze, I looked at that stack of sheets and shakily said, “You are not the boss of me.” It took four tries to get it right, and that part of writing I am familiar with because it’s always about trying to get it as close to perfect as possible.
The day prior to learning this new skill set, I had made some changes to my phone plan and decided to cancel my landline. I never used it and rarely answered it because nearly all of the calls were trying to sell me something. Last week my cell phone had a whisper of battery left and my youngest daughter and I had planned on talking. I picked up the landline and no matter how many times I tried the call it wouldn’t go through. I texted Mal to call me and when that didn’t come through either I admitted defeat. I have always hesitated on canceling the line because it’s the only number my mom ever used to call me, and it seemed like the final admission that her dementia had won and calling me was never going to happen again. Oh, to pick up the phone and hear her say in her ever cheerful voice, “What are you up to today” or “How are Mark and the kids?” It would be such a gift but she has been unable to do that for several years, and every week when my sisters Facetime me with her I wonder if she knows who I am or that I’m the one with the dead husband.
I texted the kids to let them know our landline had gone the way of the dinosaurs, and while I was working on these cost estimates they were texting me back to say that POOF there went a part of their childhood. I smiled at the memories of all those calls coming through the phone that hung on the wall in the kitchen, the one with the cord that was long enough to answer the front door, and then from out of nowhere was gut punched by the thought that if Mark wanted to reach me he’d never call my cell phone. Without his cell phone he wouldn’t know my number. Of course he’d call the landline and I had just canceled service on it, and how is my mom supposed to remember my husband is gone when even I can’t? And how is Mark supposed to let me know this whole being dead thing wasn’t working out like he thought and he needed me to pick him up?
Before I could comprehend any of it, a new round of redlines were handed to me for corrections because I forgot that a slim cone shade is a Slim Cone Shade and I looked down at them like they were the dumbest things I’d ever seen. Then I looked around my work space for some kind of answer to what had just happened and it was as blank as Mark’s side of the bed.
Landline. Landslide. Mirror in the sky what is love when I’ve built my life around you?
Early in Mark’s career, when he was an assistant professor with three small kids at home, he went to a conference and met a group of British scientists that he fell for big time. They were bawdy and outrageous, minced no words when calling out colleagues over crap science, and I think Mark felt that in an occupation filled with inflated egos he’d found his people.
He could not stop talking about a guy named, Tony, and somehow convinced me that he needed to go to England for three weeks to work with him to learn some cutting edge techniques. I don’t know how Mark always managed to get me on board with his ideas. I think he was good at presentation and excellent at enthusiasm, and by the end of his spiel could convince me that I was helping the cause and would be the lucky recipient of a Junior Ranger Science Badge, which was only steps below a Nobel Prize. But we were barely getting by on his salary, I would be left on my own with the kids and no family around to help me, and nobody was bankrolling this endeavor. But I bought into the plan and off he went to stay with Tony, his wife and, Binks, his young daughter. He’d call me every few days to tell me about the science and the delightful Brits he was staying with, and I’d roll my eyes on the other end, because unlike him I was not being stimulated and/or having fun.
When he got home he had all kinds of stories to tell of his adventures. Mark was a fantastic traveler. He embraced the culture of every place he went, didn’t complain, and could regroup on a dime when things went south. He incorporated his travel into our lives, and for months after that trip, would go around the house and say, “Mind the gap,” in a very British accent to the kids who had no idea what he was talking about. “The gap,” he’d explain like they were supposed to know. “When you go on the Tube you have to mind the gap between the platform and the train. That gap,” and they’d nod and go off into their world which was the backyard and halfway up the block and no further.
This holiday season wasn’t the worst I’ve had which is the barometer I use now. I have been working two jobs since August, and by December was hitting the wall and counting the days until the office was closed for a bit and I could get some time off. I spent Christmas Eve finishing things up and searching frantically for two misplaced gift cards until I decided to quit looking and sat down with my phone. Up popped a photo of Mark with our youngest daughter in California.
We had gone out to visit her, and after Mark took care of some business at UCLA, we asked Mal what she wanted to do. “It’s all on you, you decide and we’ll make it happen,” we told her like we were the Griswolds going to Wallyworld, and Mal said she wanted to go to the Channel Islands. The Channel Islands? Why that sounded charming and off we went, and as those things tend to go for us it was an epic shit show. We stood outside the closed, small building where one can buy a ticket for a boat ride to these channels that had left hours earlier, because we presumed these things were hourly. Half-ass planning was how we rolled. Mark paced a bit, looked around like there was supposed to be a dock manager to make this right, then waved his hand and said, “Back in the car,” which is how we ended up in Santa Barbara, and it was perfect and beautiful and one of the best days ever.
So on Christmas Eve that picture popped up on my phone and I started to cry and could not stop because WHERE IS HE? WHY ISN’T HE HERE? WHY ARE WE CELEBRATING ANOTHER CHRISTMAS WITHOUT HIM? I was never a crier but now I am, and there are things I’ve learned along the way, that sometimes fighting it is useless, that without being aware things are building up that need a release, that you just have to lean into it. Sometimes it’s like a brief afternoon shower when the sun quickly reappears and the skies are blue again, but not so on Christmas Eve. I leaned hard into that one until I fell asleep and later showered and dressed and went to a friend’s house like we had been doing for years. The next day the kids came over and we Zoomed with our California girl and her boyfriend and it was so good and so generous in love and spirit. Mark would have loved it and nothing about the day made me sad which was a gift in itself.
People always say, “may their memory be a blessing,” when someone dies, and after Mark died I had the hardest time figuring out what that even meant. Memories are a very mixed bag for me – they are beautiful, funny, sweet, painful, and traumatic. They have their own operating system and can pop up out of nowhere, catching me off guard, and making me lose my balance. When that happens I swear I can hear Mark in his Brit accent pleading with me to “Mind the gap,” lest I slide down into that narrow space between here and there, light and dark, where he tripped one day and landed.
I always loved listening to you and Mark tell a story. It was like an episode of I love Lucy. – Ann (my younger sister)
I have no idea what you’re talking about. – me
When I was in my early forties, I went to my oby/gyn’s office for an annual routine appointment. During my exam, he kept asking me if I was feeling okay, if anything felt off, was I having any discomfort? I kept thinking, “Sheesh, dude, I’m fine. Let’s just get this over with,” only to be told that he was certain I had a cyst on my ovary, that he couldn’t believe I wasn’t in pain, and that I needed an ultrasound scheduled ASAP to confirm. It all sounded very urgent so I got the ultrasound and it was confirmed that I had a cyst the size of a lime and the Pain Train suddenly yelled, “Everybody onboard,” and I went from being just fine to not.
I had a simple, outpatient laproscopic surgery to remove the cyst and all should have been well. It wasn’t and the next few months were feeling like something was very wrong and return trips to the doctor. During that time, Mark decided we should get a tv in our room for me to watch when I wasn’t feeling great. This was some not-so-veiled bullshit because he’d been nagging me for years about putting a tv in the bedroom and finally broke me. He went out and bought one, set it up, and during the weekend when he was home to take care of things around the house, I’d go upstairs, lay down, and flip on the remote. There was no better station for me to watch during my Ovarian Rehabilitation than The Lifetime Channel, a cable channel devoted to movies of women being mistreated, abused, lied to, cheated on, and generally done wrong by men.
I’d immediately get engrossed in a movie, and when Mark would come upstairs to check on me, I’d say, “They were in love, but you could see the red flags right away. Get this. One night they have friends over, and she’s dressed up and wearing makeup and LOOKING ALL FINE FOR HIM BECAUSE SHE LOVES HIM SO MUCH, but when the friends leave, he goes crazy, tells her she looks like a whore with all that makeup on and he doesn’t need a whore in his life. And she’s like, ‘Honey, can’t you see I love you. I did this for you,’ and he’s not having it because he’s an abusive jerk just like his father which we know because of the flashbacks.” Mark would shake his head and say, “I don’t know how you can watch this shit every weekend.” I would counter that it was ABOUT LIFE, hence the name Lifetime Channel, and he said it should be called The Man Haters Channel, and from that day forward that’s the only thing he ever called it.
By the end of that summer when I couldn’t eat anything and had lost a bunch of weight, my doctor decided that he was going to go in and see what was going on. I was full of old blood because I’d been making and breaking cysts all summer and woke up to the news from Mark that because of that and other issues I had a hysterectomy. I blamed Mark for allowing that to happen even though he was merely the bearer of bad news, and suddenly I legit had a man to hate.
I was thrown into immediate menopause at the age of 44, and it was a full year before things got better. It was day after day of hot flashes, insomnia, and forgetting everything. It came to a head when I told Mark he had to go into work later one morning because we had a parent-teacher conference, he rearranged his schedule, and when we showed up the teacher looked at both of us and said, “Umm, that was yesterday.” Because the low fuel on Mark’s tank of empathy had been flashing for months he said, “Look, you’re the one that keeps the kids, me, and this house running. You need to get your shit together.” I responded by saying, “What a great idea except I haven’t slept in a year.”
That’s when I went back to the doctor with my raggedy self and said, “I cannot do this anymore. I never sleep and I DO MEAN NEVER,” and he prescribed Ambien and I started singing zippity do dah every morning because I finally was sleeping all night. Except for the wee, little problem that Ambien is meant to be a short-term solution and not something you took forever. He gave me a few refills and if I went to my regular doctor for any reason, I’d ask for a script there, too, because I could not sleep without it. I finally figured out that I could take half a one and it would work, and so I’d split my stash of pills and go off into LaLaLand every night.
It was during this time that my friend called me very last minute to say that she had gotten four free tickets to see the Backstreet Boys and did we want to take our girls to go see them. I said, “Of course,” and an hour later she and her daughter picked up me and my daughter and we went to a concert full of middle-aged moms with screaming girls. We chatted above the noise the whole time until the Backstreet Boys came out and the screaming ratcheted up a few decibels. Turns out those Backstreet Boys were very easy on the eyes and Gayla leaned over to me and said, “Which one would you do?” She told me her pick and I said, “The drummer, I’d definitely do the drummer,” and she said I could have him all to myself, and like two high school girls we swooned over our picks from up in the rafters. We got home close to midnight and Maggie went right to sleep. I was too wound up and so I had a beer with a full Ambien chaser and went to bed.
The next morning, I took the kids to school, came home and was drinking my 3rd cup of coffee to wake up and Mark came downstairs dressed for work. As I stood at the counter pouring cream into my cup, he came behind me and was kissing my neck and asking me if I was tired after LAST NIGHT. “Yeah, kind of,” I said. “It was pretty late before I got to bed,” and he kept kissing my neck and then said, “I thought so with the concert and you getting home late and then us doing it you must be worn out this morning.” “Doing what?” I asked and he said, “It.” I was so confused and turned around and said, “I have no idea what the it is that you’re talking about?” He looked surprised and said, “The sex it.”
“The sex it??? I went upstairs and went to bed,” I said, and Mark said, “No you didn’t,” and it went back and forth like that for a long time until we both realized I had no recollection of something he had total recall of. We were both shocked, and after letting this information settle for a few minutes, I said on the down down down down low even though we were the only ones in the house, “Wow, I don’t know what happened last night but it’s going to be okay, Mark. I’ve seen this before in a Lifetime movie. I’m not accusing you of anything but there is a thing called marital rape which isn’t cool but I since I don’t remember any of it it’s no harm no foul, amiright?” He looked at me like I was batshit crazy and said, “Marital rape??!!! Oh no. Oh no you don’t. You’re not pulling that Man Haters Channel shit on me. Nope. Not having it. I would never do that to you and, guess what, Virgin Mary, I was sound asleep and next thing I know you’re naked on top of me,” and all that lovey-dovey morning stuff that had been going on just a few minutes before took a hard left. He was out the door and I was left alone with my thoughts which were blankety blank blank.
For the next few days, we gave each other a very wide berth like we were two drunks that met in a bar and had a quickie in the bathroom and then found ourselves seated next to each other at a wedding reception. Lots of side-eyes and, huh, this person looks familiar but I can figure out why. It was all I could think about and I’d look at Mark and start to say, “Did I….was there……do you think….” and there was no second part of the question because it was all a big nothing. From there I convinced myself that this was the unraveling of my brain and before long I would end up, as Mark would frequently say, “Sitting in the corner looking at the wall and humming one note over and over.”
Finally Mark asked me about the details of the night, and I gave him the Cliff Notes version of the concert and how I couldn’t wind down when I got home. When I got to the beer and Ambien part, he said, “Jesus Christ, Kath, you can’t be mixing that shit. That’s why you don’t remember anything,” and he kept shaking his head and looking at me like I was an absolute moron. “Oh, I said, “I knew about operating heavy equipment, but c’mon, a beer bottle isn’t heavy.” And then I laughed, hahahahahaha ha ha, which he who was accused of marital rape did not find funny. Eventually we went back to regularly scheduled programming until one day I brought up that night again. “Was I talking at all when this was going on?” I asked Mark. “Yeah,” he said, “I didn’t know what you were saying at first but you kept repeating the same thing over and over. You asked me if I was in the band.” “Oh my god,” I said, “what did you say?”
“I looked at you and said I am tonight, baby.”
It was many years later before I told Gayla what happened the night of the concert. She listened, nodding every so often, and then said, “If I’m understanding this correctly, what you did was roofie yourself so you could bang Mark and pretend he was the drummer for the Backstreet Boys. Is that right?” I took a sip of my wine and said, “Sheesh, Gayla, when you put it like that it sounds kinda bad,” and then she took a sip of her wine, looked straight at me and said, “God, you’re such a whore,” and we laughed until we cried.
When Mark and I were dating, most weekends during the summer we would make a two hour drive to Michigan to spend the day at Warren Dunes. We both loved being near water, and back then a few daredevils would hang-glide from the top of the highest dune and sail over the lake and back onto the beach. We always stayed long past most people, and on our way back to the parking lot, would walk along the shore and let the water ripple over our feet one last time before we left. It always felt peaceful at that time of day, especially since Lake Michigan could often feel terrifying with waves and rip currents that claim many lives every summer.
A few weeks ago I had to have an MRI. I have always been claustrophobic so the idea of being rolled into a tunnel for forty minutes made my stomach flip every time I thought of it. I chickened out and changed one appointment, and when they called to tell me the machine wasn’t working that day and I’d have to reschedule again I was ecstatic. My day of reckoning finally came and for a few days before I doubled up on my anxiety meds, did an exercise I’d read about to calm my nerves, and showed up for my test. I was put on the bed and a very Hannabel Lecter like mask was put over my face, a panic button was placed in my right hand and I was rolled in. I opened my eyes and two inches from my face was the top of the machine. I said “holy shit”, closed my eyes and immediately traveled down memory lane and onto the shore of Lake Michigan.
The next day I went to work, ate a salad for lunch and got E. Coli which was a first and not the least bit fun. The following day I was getting ready for work when the familiar stab of a kidney stone barreled into me and I spent the next two hours throwing up from the pain until there was nothing left in me and I could keep a ten year old hydrocodone down. Two days later I tested positive for a UTI and given antibiotics.
That Friday I left work early to join a Zoom meeting where Mark’s last graduate student did his thesis defense. Like pretty much everything concerning Mark’s occupation, I didn’t understand any of it and was a poor substitute for the person who was supposed to be there. The guy who shepherded so many students to master’s degrees, but only had three that got PhDs and two of those were after he died. Pierce told me once that if he was on his way to the bathroom and saw Mark coming down the hall he would hightail it out of there because if Mark had his eyes on you because he had an idea for an experiment he’d keep on talking no matter how badly you needed to go. Alex told me that when Mark came in the lab to check on how things were going, he’d circle the lab bench over and over to get his steps in. Both of them were in the lab and talking to Mark on a Friday, on a Wednesday morning two professors came in, sat them down, and told them that Mark died and their worlds were turned upside down.
At the end of Pierce’s defense he thanked Mark and those who got him to the finish line without him. I stayed on for the questioning then closed my laptop, set my head down on top of it and sobbed. If Mark were here he’d come in the door that night on cloud nine and say, “These kids, and I know I’m not supposed to call them kids, are so goddamn smart. So much smarter than I was at that age,” and we’d probably go out for dinner and celebrate another wavemaker in the biochemistry field. Instead it’s me sending an email to both of his students who are now doctors and planning a lunch this week to celebrate.
The following day I worked my retail job, and in the frenzy of a store full of shoppers, I was chatting with a customer while I was ringing up his stuff. He was kind and full of the Christmas spirit and asked me how long I was working. “All day,” I said and he said “Woo boy that’s going to be long if it stays like this.” I laughed and said it would be like this every day until Christmas and it was mostly fun and only a little overwhelming. After I handed him his bag he touched my hand and said, “Then I hope the rest of your day is non-stresssful,” smiled and walked out the door. I wanted to cry from the kindness, for being seen for a moment by a stranger when it had been a week of kicking furiously away from crashing waves.
“You must love to write,” someone recently said to me and I burst out laughing. “Oh geez, everything I write makes me cry so, no, I don’t love it. All I know is that I need to write.” This week we will celebrate our 4th holiday season without Mark. There has not been a single day since he died that I’m not stunned by his absence. I think that will always be the case and I am learning to live with that, but December and its long days of darkness make it much harder. While trying to make sense of something senseless, I tend to forget that we are promised light and days that will grow longer once again. And so I write and pay close attention to the ripples, because those, too, have the power to make a weary world rejoice.
Thanksgiving was Mark’s favorite holiday, and as it rolls around again next week, the clouds have moved in and stayed to blanket his absence. I try to focus on the dinner, what to make and how to make it special so it will be a good memory for all of us, but in the weeks prior to that it always feels like a daunting homework assignment. The kids and I were recently talking about the first Thanksgiving without Mark here, how people stopped by in the days ahead, called or sent flowers, and how it was so appreciated. But we cried a lot that day and many, many days since as we all ache with the loneliness of life without him.
Have the ones after that been better? I don’t know. I only know that somehow we make it through and that we will again this year.
Mark was an avid birder, and if you were to ask me what the one thing he spent the most money on it would be a toss up between biking gear and bird feeders, suet, and bird seed. He found delight in many things but the constant presence of birds were his favorite. One morning he walked me out to the car as I was headed to work, and as we were talking in the driveway the birds were screeching. “They’re so loud this morning,” Mark said. “That’s because it stormed last night,” I said. “They’re checking in on each other, yelling to their next door neighbors to see if the wife and kids are okay, if the walls of the nest held up, or if they need help finding Junior who got blown out of his bed during the night.” Mark thought that was so funny that from then on he’d make up his own bird conversations.
Then he died and it seemed as though the birds left en masse out of their own confusion over the absence of the guy who whistled while he worked and took care of them for years. At first I didn’t notice because there were so many other things going on, but then my daughter got me a new feeder and filled it and it sat untouched for months. I’d sit in neighbor’s yards that looked like a wildlife sanctuary with birds flying about and covet what they had. My yard looked like the barren and lifeless turf of an old lady who screams at every kid passing by to stop stepping on her perfectly lush lawn. I decided that the feeder must have gotten wet and the seed was stuck so I brought it in the house. It wasn’t wet and it wasn’t stuck, but I dumped it out and rinsed it like I’d seen Mark do many times. I dried every bit of it and filled it with seed, hung it in the backyard and forgot about it.
People assume that the holidays are especially hard after a loss and that is true, but there are many gut wrenching moments in the every day. Having to order checks with only one name on it, finding a forgotten pair of his reading glasses tucked alongside the gas meter near the grill. The pens in the junk drawer with the names of pharmaceutical companies that were freebies at a conference, unridden bikes that you see every time you open the garage door but cannot get rid of, the traces of a life that suddenly disappeared. There is no sadder, daily reminder for me than seeing the pathetic pot of coffee every morning. The full pot when there used to be two coffee lovers here, that had some heft to it when you picked it up, has been replaced by four measly cups that sit in wait for me before the sun rises. I don’t know how it’s possible for a coffee pot to piss me off every single day but it does.
On my day off a few weeks ago I decided that I needed to do something physical and exhausting for my mental health. I spent hours outside cleaning things up and mulching the grass, then worked on cutting down the Kiss-Me-Over-The-Garden-Gate. I bought this plant years ago and Mark hijacked it from me to conceal the compost pile. It grows tall, about eight feet, and every year Mark would cup one of the pink blooms in his hand and point out to me how delicate they were, how even in the worst storms they held fast. There are a lot of them in the furthest corner of the backyard and it took me awhile to cut and bag them, but that’s the kind of work I like to do -clearing the yard while clearing my head.
When I was almost done I looked up and noticed the bird feeder I had filled a few weeks prior. Alone in the backyard I screamed, I jumped up and down, I cried. The bird feeder was empty.
The next morning my sad pot of hot coffee was waiting for me when I came downstairs, but now something new had been tucked into the satin lining of the suitcase of death wisdom that I carry everywhere. Those delicate pink blooms hanging on for dear life and the familiar memory of a husband cupping me and them in his hands.
Blessed be the mourners on the big days and the ordinary ones for they shall be comforted when and where they least expect it.
