A Speckled Trout

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.

Merry Christmas.

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.

In the weeks prior to Mark’s death, we were figuring out the logistics of going to Denver for my nephew’s wedding. Because it was on a Sunday, Mark kept going back and forth on whether or not he was going to go because he had a class to teach that Monday morning. He would have to leave the reception early to get to the airport and with luck arrive home about midnight. Due to those obstacles he decided not to go, to ride the MS150 that weekend like he’d done for years, and to teach his class on Monday.

This seemed like the most logical solution until September 4th happened, and the best laid plans for the weekend of the wedding and the rest of our lives were thrown into chaos.

I planned a funeral, wrote a eulogy, talked extensively with the human resources department at the med center about Mark’s benefits and barely retained anything of what was being said to me, I kept my physical therapy appointments because my sciatica was off the charts, and moved robotically through my life doing what needed to be done. In the background of this painful reality was my nephew’s wedding, my nephew and his soon-to-be wife whom we all loved. I think everyone assumed the kids and I wouldn’t go, but the more I thought about it the more I wanted us to go. Some of it was practical. All this money on this celebration was being spent and canceling so close to the date didn’t seem fair to them, we were going to be with my family who were as shocked and heartbroken as we were, and I desperately needed out of our house where the trappings of Mark’s life before that day were everywhere.

The kids went in my daughter’s car, I rode with my sister and brother-in-law. I don’t remember much of the ride except stopping for lunch. The rest is a blank of me staring out the window for hours on end. We booked an AirBnd that we all agreed upon arrival was very weird which seemed appropriate for our circumstances. A few blocks away was a creek where people were swimming and tubing and I thought that if Mark were there he’d run down the stairs to check out the fish. I leaned over the railing, looked down at it all, and wanted to scream until there was nothing left in me. Instead I ended up at a boutique to buy a new dress because the one I brought with me was the same one I wore to the funeral and it was too much to put that on again.

We went to the wedding and were given so much grace it fills me with tears at the memory. My brother made a toast and said his extended family had recently taken some brutal losses, and in the midst of those events along with our celebrations, we should vow to make time to really check in with each other. When the bride danced with her father, the girlfriend of my nephew’s twin brother sobbed as her father had suddenly died that summer. The kids and I sobbed because their father had died twelve days earlier. Then the music came on and we all danced with our very broken selves and all the way home said we said we couldn’t believe we did it.

A few weeks ago, that nephew’s twin brother got married, and with the exception of my oldest daughter who opted not to go so as not to risk exposing her kids to Covid, we arrived back in Denver three years later for another wedding. This time was easier and I got to see most of my siblings who I have not seen under joyful circumstances for too long. The groom and his wife were adorable, the setting was gorgeous. When the bride danced with her brother in place of her deceased father, we all cried. We toasted, we ate, we danced, we roasted marshmallows on the wrap-around porch, we waved them off on their new life with glowsticks.

When I was recently looking through my phone, I came across the picture that was taken of us three years ago. It’s heartbreaking for me to look at it. We look as if we were trying so hard not to look broken yet we were exhausted and there was no escaping what was in our eyes. At the time I think everybody thought I was crazy for putting my foot down and insisting we go to that wedding. I wouldn’t argue with the crazy part as I certainly felt that way, but in hindsight it was a silent declaration that we still had to live our lives and that all along Mark wanted us to be there even if he couldn’t.

In the span of these three years, we have painfully moved forward with the grief and sorrow that will remain with us always. We have also made space for the beauty and joy that life delivers. Neither has been easy, but there could be no sadder fate for me than to see Mark on the other side and say to him that our lives stopped when his did. He was the most vibrant person I’d ever known and it is our job to carry that forward for him.

We have, we do, and I am so very proud of us.

Sometimes when Mark and I would wax poetic about the freedom we had as kids, how you could be gone on your bike for hours and nobody worried where you were as long as you were home for dinner, our kids would be envious. Often they would say, “I wish I lived back then,” and I would explain that those good old days were sometimes countered with especially awful days. Physical punishment was the norm then, and my brothers on many occasions would be hit across the backside with my Dad’s belt. I can remember their pleading, their I’m-sorry-I’ll-never-do-it-again, and ultimately their cries throughout the house. Those memories all these years later have not lost their power.

As those things go as you get older, the stories took on a life of their own. I don’t know why because I think for all involved it was traumatizing. Mark had his own stories but there was one in particular that I never could shake. His mom had made a cake and the next day, as it was sitting on the counter, he asked his dad if he could have a piece. He told him no and so he did what every kid does. He went outside, found his mom, and asked her if he could have a piece of cake. She said yes and as he stood in the kitchen eating it his dad walked in. As soon as he saw Mark he slapped him so hard across the face the cake flew out of his mouth. “When I tell you no it means no,” he said and walked out of the room. There were other stories far worse than that, but that one still rattles me. Getting slapped across the face is very much about rage, but it’s also about humiliation and who does that to a kid for eating a piece of cake?

On the weekend before Mark died, as we were out walking one night, he said to me, “Do you have any idea what it’s like to be an adult and realize that in the house you grew up in the kids were the prey?” I will always be without words to describe the pain and confusion I saw in his face at that moment.

Mark was born prematurely at 3.5# in 1954. The necessity of skin-to-skin contact or bonding like there is now was unheard of in those days whether you were a full-term infant or not. There was only a tiny baby fighting for life under fluorescent lights with a lot of wires hooked up to him. When his parents talked of that time it was never about the crushing worry you would expect the parent of any premature baby to have, but more that their decisions saved him. I don’t know. That may be true or maybe they got lucky and this infant made it when he probably shouldn’t have. It was a long time into my therapy before I talked about Mark being a preemie. My therapist dove deep into that information and said that the essential need of every newborn did not happen to him until months later when he was released from the hospital. By then it was likely too late and that forming a bond with me must have felt terrifying to him because he had no idea what to make of it.

I know he could tell me things he couldn’t tell anyone else. I know he trusted me. I also know that when he went to a few therapy sessions he never went there. After he died I was so mad at him for that, for not talking about the trauma he and his sister lived through, and how I blamed myself for all of it. How I should have forced the issue, how I treated it like it was “his” problem but his problem was very much our problem. Over and over I have brought this up in therapy, how it has wracked me with guilt until my therapist said to me, “It is one thing to go to a therapist for anxiety and depression or grief. It’s an entirely different thing to go for shame.” What Mark was ashamed of was not going to see the light of day if he could help it.

Then one morning he left the house and died by his own making because that’s how you kill shame once and for all. If I could beg anyone reading about my experiences these past few years, it would be to call a professional, to pull every painful thing out of the closet and from underneath the bed where The Memory Monsters sleep every night waiting to snatch your ankle if you dare brush past them. Because little boys whose souls were broken by abuse grow up to be broken men, and the bravest thing one can do is to tell every horrible detail to a licensed counselor and believe them when they look you in the eye and says, “None of it was your fault.”

None of it.

Then learn how to forgive yourself for the years of self-loathing, and by all means, enjoy a piece of cake.

When I was looking for a therapist, I contacted a friend who worked in the psychology department at the med center where Mark worked, which is how I met Eileen. I figured I’d meet with her a few times, she’d give me some handy dandy grief tips and I’d be just fine. At the end of each appointment she’d say, “Same time next week?” And I would think, same time next week? We have to do this again?

I hated every one of those first year appointments. I hated that she wasn’t fixing anything, I hated that I had to lay bare every piece of my life, Mark’s life, our marriage, his career, his sister, his parents, everything. More than once I said, “Every single person in his family is damaged, so tell me why I’m the one showing up for this gut wrenching work?” I already knew the answer. Now I was the one who was damaged and somebody had to stop the bleed before it seeped into the lives of those beautiful kids I made with the only guy I ever loved.

One of the hardest aspects of grief is the expectation to get through it and move on, that with some concentrated effort one could be less sad. Me and my credit card tried really hard to buy my way out of sadness. Sometimes I’d come home from work and there’d be a mound of packages on my doorstep of things I barely remembered liking let alone ordering. Turns out that didn’t work and so I’d drag my sad self into Eileen’s office and tell her I was sinking into the abyss and she would say, “Of course you are. Your entire life fell apart,” and it was such a relief to be with someone who understood that.

Things tend to return to normal fairly quickly after a death unless you are in the epicenter, and from that vantage point it feels like everything has been burned to the ground. I had no normal and am still trying to figure that out, so when I am having a hard day, when I am unable to fake any sort of positive attitude and somebody asks me what’s wrong I usually look at them in stunned silence. What’s wrong? Well my husband ended his life one morning which, believe it or not, still plays out for me every day. When Eileen and I talk about these conversations, I always ask her why there are people I thought I was close to who can’t go there. “Are these people you had deep conversations with before, people who could talk about pain?” I thought about that question for a long while and said, “Not necessarily,” and she told me that I was barking up the wrong tree. “But this is different,” I said, and she looked at me and said, “It isn’t for them,” which left me so infuriated I wanted a new therapist right then and there.

When Covid hit, Eileen and I did a year of tele-therapy, and when she said she could do office visits again, I jumped at the chance. I went once. That office held so much of my pain it felt like it was painted into the walls. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough so we switched back to tele-therapy every Monday afternoon. There are times when it is still hard, times when I start out okay but cry within minutes, but not always. Eileen has repeatedly told me I have to watch Schitt’s Creek. I told her she had to watch My Octopus Teacher. The week after I told her that she said, “Before we start anything we have to talk about the octopus because I can’t stop thinking about him.” We’ve talked about anti-aging products and mascara, my job, her daughter’s wedding. I told her about a room I was cleaning out and she said, “Oh how perfect. Now you can make it your writing studio.” This never occurred to me and it was such a brilliant idea it is all I’ve been able to think about since she said it. In a recent session, I asked her how some people seem to be able to move on from loss so quickly and here I am three years later only managing to pull a foot out of the quicksand. “Because you’re a digger,” she said, “it is your nature to search for the why and you aren’t satisfied until you understand it.”

There are people in my life that I wish I could open up to and tell them how painful this still is for me, that there is no such thing as closure, that every morning my husband is still dead and will be for the rest of my life. It can be better for me and the kids, though, if the entire topic isn’t avoided, if we heard stories about Mark so that for a few minutes he can come back to life for us instead of any mention of him being carefully avoided as if he never existed. It is the nature of most of us to offer advice to someone we see in pain, to fix the broken. How Mark’s life ended and the repercussions it has had on me, our kids, and the army of people who loved him cannot be fixed. It has to be carried, and I have learned that mixed with gratitude, beauty, humor, and compassionate conversations makes the weight of it so much more manageable.

I recently read that people can only go as deep with someone else as they go with themselves, and suddenly all the pieces of those awkward conversations that stayed on the surface made so much sense. I don’t understand that because in the deep is where things get sifted and sorted and understood, and so I keep showing up on Monday afternoons with Eileen to make sense of something that still feels surreal.

Not because I want to, but because I married into a family who dug their heels so deep into the surface that they failed to notice that their pain was slowly pulling them under.

Dear Mark,

In a few days another year will have passed without you here. The lead up to this day takes an emotional and physical toll on me that is difficult to describe other than I feel like I’ve been run over by one of those trucks that flatten new blacktop and need somebody to unpeel me from the road. In a perfect world I think there should be some kind of Mourner’s Park, a dark, quiet cave with a turnstyle at the entrance for the comings and goings of those who need to escape life for a few days. A place where you don’t have to be strong, where the Positivity Police aren’t posted at every entrance encouraging the brokenhearted to, for the love of God, just move on already. A place where staying present with loss and sadness is encouraged for its sheer bravery instead of slipping into some kind of addiction from what cannot be outrun.

As signs from the universe go, I got a letter last week from a student you mentored who said she has sat with the news of your death for three years and could not articulate her thoughts. She wrote many things about your encouragement of her work and career path, but it was the last paragraph that stood out to me. She said that you were so supportive of her as a single mother, that she lived on a street you cycled on the way home from work and that if she were out with her young son that you would always stop and chat with both of them. Then I thought of all the times I’d say to you, “Mark, could you at least aim to get home by 7:00 so we’re not eating so late?” All those pissy back-and-forth conversations we had and now I find out you probably did leave work in enough time to get home earlier, but then saw a young mom and her kid outside and needed to give her a shove up the biochemistry ladder. Since you steadfastly believed there weren’t enough women in science I’m sure you weren’t going to allow one to fall off the radar on your watch.

In the last year, Maggie got her masters in library science, Will is crushing it in the interior design world, and Mallory just got accepted into a masters program for clinical psychology. I remember when we had a conversation about the kids a few years ago and you were lamenting the fact that none of them followed in your footsteps. At first I was speechless. You spent your entire career beating every bush for funds to keep your lab afloat and fought layers of administrative micromanaging for what was right. Why would you want that for your kids? I thought about that for a bit and then said to you, “Mark, we raised three kids who are passionate and curious about their interests not ours. We have done our job.” You let out a sigh and said, “I’ve never thought about it like that,” and then you explored their interests like the great dad that you were. Nevertheless, you still held all of us hostage at your computer to look at the anthrax pathogen you were working on like it was the last inning of the World Series and if we looked away for a second we’d miss the game winning hit.

As for me, that’s a whole other story. I recently met someone and on the way home from having drinks I had to pull over because I was sobbing so much I couldn’t drive. It was fun and I had a good time, but he wasn’t you and I cannot figure out if I like him or like the idea of a “him.” My therapist need not worry about job security. I work two part-time jobs now because I learned from you that there is salvation in work. Both jobs are fine but I know that neither are what I should be doing with the remainder of my life.

Writing is the only thing I have never given up on, and over and over I have been told I have a gift. I try not to be offended by that because a gift sounds like it was bestowed upon me and not from decades of hard work that nobody sees. You more than anyone understood that. I remember writing one time about a new post-doc of yours that came from India with nothing more than a single suitcase. I didn’t write that you foraged our house for anything extra we could give him, how you paid for his security deposit and first month’s rent from our checking account. I never told you when I posted anything new, I always wanted you to discover it on your own. You sat in front of the computer at the dining room table and looked up with tears in your eyes when I walked in. “It’s beautiful, Kath, really beautiful,” and you loving something I wrote was all I ever needed to keep going.

I recently read that death is like a wrecking ball. People think the actual death is the only swing, but that isn’t the case. The wrecking ball swung so wildly the first year that I constantly cowered in fear. It felt like every time I tried to get to my feet it came for me again. This year I set down the guilt of not being able to prevent what I never saw coming, and the wrecking ball slowed to the sway of a desktop pendulum. Not so in these last few weeks where I’m knocked off my feet again by the steady swing of loss.

Somehow life moves forward without you in it, and on this side of the moon I feel like I need somebody to summon the manager of the death department to explain this bullshit to me. It has been nearly impossible for me to fall in love with anything since you’ve been gone, but I’m amazed at all the monarchs that have showed up in my garden this year, the cicadas that scream all day and then collectively hush themselves as soon as it gets dark, the owls calling to each other outside the bedroom window at night. “Who cooks for you,” you would say in the dark and I never hear them without thinking that.

Only you know how passionate our love was for each other and the life we painstakingly built together. I pray that it’s enough of a foundation for me to build something new, that wherever you are you can figure out a way to give me a shove up the ladder of life so that finding things to love again doesn’t seem so painful and foreign.

Ars longa, vita brevis.

Art is long, life is brief.

And I go on for the both of us.

Love,
k.

***I don’t like to share videos of Mark as I hold on to those dearly for me and the kids. I ran into an old biking friend of Mark’s who didn’t know he had died and he sent me this that he recorded ten years ago. It captures so much of his essence.***

https://carfreeamerican.blogspot.com/2011/06/bike-commuter-profile-mark-fisher.html?m=1&fbclid=IwAR2ew_VcspsbM89xh4LcVx5sV3bs1S0rBRAeCBI08doft8lU–gnbdEpbCk

Towards the end of spring during a counseling appointment, I told my therapist that I was dreading summer. “Both of the girls birthdays are in summer, Mark’s birthday, our anniversary, and then September will be here and already I feel the weight of it.” She asked me to consider looking at weeks of summer and not the whole season, which in theory seems reasonable, and which I have been unable to do successfully. Every day tick tocks ominously towards September 4th.

I can remember the smallest of details from our wedding, but neither Mark nor I could ever remember the exact date we got married. Every year it was the same conversation. Was it the 30th or 31st? We’d try to figure it out, some years I’d go rogue and say, “I’m pretty sure it’s the 29th,” and other years I’d get out our wedding certificate and yell down the stairs, “It’s the 30th!!!” Mark would yell up, “Okay, got it. Gonna store it in the vault,” and then we’d do the same dance the next year and the year after that.

When Mark died, the books in his office were put in the hallway for anyone in the med center to take. This was discussed with me as that was standard procedure, but in most cases due to retirement and not a death. Since I had no use for them I wanted them to go to anyone who needed them. Months later, I got an email from Mark’s colleague. One of his students had taken one of the books and tucked inside was Mark’s diploma from graduate school. Mark and I talked about this often. How I said he should frame it and hang it in his office like normal accomplished people do. He said, “Everybody knows I graduated. I don’t need to announce it,” and that was how things were with us when it came to our anniversary. We knew we were married at the end of July, give or take.

This year the end of the month came fast as I juggled my work schedule and the kitchen remodel, so when I opened my computer and saw a memory from eight years ago with a picture of Mark it took me by surprise. Even after all these years, even in the horrible ending, I couldn’t remember the exact date we got married which was classic Fisher style.

That night I went to hear a band where someone I met was playing. It was fun and a beautiful night to be outside. It was nice to talk to a guy, I have missed that. “Where do we go from here?” he asked which was a question I could not answer. I felt like telling him that if he heard the back story of how I ended up in a bar I never heard of, in a town I’d never been to, on what used to be my wedding anniversary he’d run for the hills as fast as he could.

“I don’t know,” I said, “and that’s as good of an answer as I can give.”

I talked about it with my therapist a few days later and made light of all of it until I described the photo of Mark that showed up that morning. Him at my sister’s wedding, wearing her hat with his usual grin and those bedroom eyes of his, and in the telling I lost it. Sobbed on a virtual appointment where not only did I get to feel all those feels, but with the added bonus of seeing myself crying on camera. I could not pull it together and kept apologizing because where did that come from?

From the dark and lonely places that nobody sees but me.

This life rebuilding balances precariously on a cheap hollow core door. When one door collapses another cheap one shows up to replace it. None of them ever feel solid enough to handle the weight of loss and years of memories, and I can feel September’s eyes on me.

Last weekend I was invited to two dinner parties. The one on Friday night was at the home of good friends who have fed me many times over these last few years. Their son was in town for his 30th birthday and my son was also invited. Mark and I did things with this couple often, and they feel Mark’s loss acutely. They are easy for me to be around because they miss Mark and his name comes up often. They also don’t make me feel like a sad ball and chain. To be at that dinner party was easy and felt good.

The next night was a dinner party at the home of Mark’s old boss and his wife. I had been to their house in late spring to split some plants from Susan’s garden, and the three of us got caught up over wine before we traipsed in the garden with our shovels. Gerry called me weeks ago to invite me to this party with their neighbors, one of whom had written a few books of poetry. She was going to read some of her poems and Gerry thought I’d be interested.

I immediately said “yes” and was looking forward to it until that day. I still have a hard time meeting new people, and freeze at the thought of talking about myself in anything but the most generic way. The thought of meeting seven strangers over dinner sent me into a panic, and I debated with myself all day whether to go or not. But Gerry and Susan had been part of mine and Mark’s lives for so long that I decided to trust that they knew what they were doing by inviting me even if I didn’t know what I was doing by going.

Over prosecco and appetizers, I felt like making a run for the door. Everyone was friendly and comfortable with each other while I felt awkward and flung out of my comfort zone. Then a woman started talking to me and it turns out we worked at the same university. Since neither of us were no longer working there, we had all kinds of gossip to share about our experiences.

Soon it was time to sit down for dinner and between soup and the main course, Susan said, “Kathy writes a wonderful blog,” and all eyes turned to me. Someone asked me what I write about and I took a deep breath and said, “I’ve been writing this blog for ten years and it has mostly been a light-hearted look at life and marriage and raising kids, but then my husband died suddenly three years ago and now I write about grief.” Usually this is met with silence but that was not the case this time. There was genuine interest in the subject of grief, what is not helpful and what is, a curiosity about what all of us go through in the course of our life. “The expectation that our sadness should be over and done after a year is not the least bit accurate,” I said. “I am trying to move forward but it is with a complicated mixture of gratitude for life and tremendous loss that will always be part of my life.” From the other end of the table, the same woman I had been talking to earlier said, “That also goes for life-changing health scares,” and I said that is absolutely true. I felt validated for what I knew about the subject of losing one’s spouse, and maybe that’s because everyone there knew they had a 50% chance of being in my shoes one day.

Over dinner I was talking to the guy next to me who happened to be the spouse of the woman I had been talking to before dinner. He told me that she was diagnosed with cancer twelve years earlier, a cancer that was not supposed to give her much longevity. After much research, they found an NIH study for this kind of cancer and she was able to be successfully treated. “I imagine there was a lot of trauma from that time in your life,” I said. “So much,” he said, “it was such a scary time for us. Every day is a gift because you have no idea when it will end,” and then he did something that in these past three years has never happened to me before. He grabbed my hand, squeezed it and said, “You’re doing really good tonight.” Because I was not expecting that, I downplayed it and said that I can rally when I’m out and turn it on. “No,” he said, “you’re engaging and interesting and you’re doing good tonight when this can’t be easy for you,” and I don’t think there is a more affirming thing to say to someone who is working so hard at something that used to come so naturally.

A bit after dessert, I could feel myself hitting the wall and told Susan I needed to get going. Thankfully, neither she nor Gerry tried to convince me to stay later. They walked me to the door and as soon as it closed behind me, I started crying. I have no idea why, I was fine when I was there, but I am always so tired that any energy I expend being social takes its toll. As I was walking down the sidewalk to my car, I heard the door open and someone yelling my name. I turned around and it was the woman who had been sitting across from me at dinner. “Oh Kathy, wait,” she said, “I need to talk to you. When you said your husband died suddenly my heart broke for you. I was with someone for ten years and I know that’s not as long as you were with your husband but he died in a car accident and I want you to know that you are going to be okay.” And she was crying and I was crying and she hugged me so tight I could feel her compassion seep into my bones. “I’m so tired and this summer has been so hard,” I said. “I know,” she said, “but you’re going to get better. I promise you.”

When Mark died, my mom told me to say “yes” as much as possible. “Say yes to help however it looks, say yes even when you want to say no, and especially say yes to invitations. If you don’t people will stop asking you,” and I wished I could call her back at her old house before she had to go to assisted living. When her wit was outrageous and quick, while she watched QVC with her glass of wine, when she’d tell me to turn it on because “This old lady hawking skincare is trying to make everyone believe she hasn’t had plastic surgery and her face hasn’t moved in the last hour.” I’d ask, “Is she the same one whose products are based on the lights captured from the Aurora Borealis?” Mom would say, “Yes, that one. She’s such an idiot,” and we’d laugh and I’d tell her she was right about that and everything else.