A Speckled Trout

I recently went to a wedding for the daughter of some dear friends. It was three days before Mark’s birthday. I had very mixed feelings about going alone, but it seemed cowardly on my part to bail when they did the opposite when my life fell apart. On the spur of the moment that day I decide to buy a new dress. Not where I work and get a very generous discount, but at another store where I pay full price for something linen and embroidered and just my style. As the time got closer for me to leave the house, my oldest daughter starting texting me to fill my confidence tank. “You got this, Mom,” she said which was sweet and not the least bit accurate. I drive to the church. The church Mark and I went to for years, the one where his funeral was, the one I’ve been to twice since he died because all I see when I go there is a box in the center aisle with his ashes in it. Some friends ask me to join them which is a huge relief. I sit at the end of the pew, eyes on the center aisle and have an immediate flashback to the funeral and the box, the box, the box. The priest, and the reason Mark became Catholic after 25 years of marriage, talks about Covid, about us needing each other, about loving bigger and more generously. He has not lost his touch. I do not cry at this wedding like I usually do. Instead, my mind drifts back to Mark’s baptism at the Easter vigil, when he came back out in regular clothes and stood on the side of the altar. He is wearing a linen suit and a light blue shirt. Most of my family has flown in for this occasion, Joe from work comes, many friends are there. In the formality of that night, while the priest offers a prayer, Mark catches my eyes, winks, and then smiles. I am overwhelmed and grateful. It had been a long journey for him to believe in something bigger and he did it on his own terms like he did everything. Now I’m utterly confused by it all. My recurring thoughts about heaven are that it seems like Disneyworld for dead people.

The reception is in the parents’ backyard and absolutely lovely. I stay longer than I planned and when I do decide to leave I find the mother of the bride. “I had a good time,” I tell her. “I made it and I didn’t think I would.” “I know,” she says and we hug so hard and then both cry because we are very aware of what is missing. On the way down the driveway the father of the bride is sitting alone in the dark on a bench and tells me good night. I think about turning around and sitting next to him for a few minutes but decide against it. These momentous family occasions when everything is good and beautiful must be reflected on alone. To do otherwise would break the spell.

The next day I go to work. This job kicks my ass every which way to Sunday. It is never not busy or without a lot to do which means that it is perfect for me now. It gives me no time to think about my life. In passing, a coworker asks if I want to go next door after we get off and have margaritas. “I would love to,” I say and ask somebody else who asks somebody else. We are all running on fumes but it is the promise of margaritas and fajitas that carry us to the end of the day. We cram in a booth, gossip about work, have a hundred ideas to make the place better if we were the ones running it which none of us want to do. I go home. I’m exhausted. I fall asleep after three a.m.

I wake up to Father’s Day and am full to the brim with sadness. I don’t even know where to place it. It’s obese and fits into nothing. I have coffee, I give myself a pep talk, I get on Facebook and see post after post of gratitude for fathers. I want to rage at all of it. My father is dead, so is the father of my kids. But my son-in-law is a father and they are coming later for dinner so I go to the grocery store. I don’t know what to make. Every summer Sunday Mark grilled, now it’s me every week flying by the seat of my pants. I get groceries and stop at a local nursery on the way home. They are closing for the season in a few days. Their plants still look great and are cheap. I get begonias. Top hat begonias that grow 12″-16″ high. Begonias on steroids seems like a good idea. The color is called badabing. I smile. Mark used to go around all the time and say in a very heavy Italian accent, “Badabing badaboom,” which always made me laugh. The kids and grandkids arrive. Things get better. I perk up. I go to bed and fall asleep sometime after 3:30. Mark used to say sleep was the street sweeper for the brain, essential to keep away Alzheimer’s and dementia. My brain is as big a clogged mess as the bathroom sink upstairs. I don’t know how to unclog either.

That Monday is Mark’s birthday. I am not in despair. It ran out the day before. I have therapy. With her kind eyes and soft voice, my therapist asks me how I’m doing. “I’m okay,” I tell her, “better than yesterday which tried to kill me.” We talk about the usual baggage and I say that these hard days have a pattern. “The week before is crushing, the day less so, the after takes about a week to work itself through me. And during it I buy myself a bunch of shit to compensate.” She says, “Within reason, right?” “Of course,” I answer back, “nothing over the top,” and smile. Later I ask myself what is within reason in the aftermath of your husband’s suicide. The crocheted sweater that drapes oh so beautifully was over the top but it looked like something a writer would wear so I bought it.

After therapy I mow the lawn. The back is easy and always looks great when I’m done. The front and side are nothing but weeds which I never think about until I’m mowing. Mark didn’t believe in using chemicals and would spend hours digging them up. I’ve neither used chemicals nor dug them up and think that if he was so adamant about that kind of stuff on the lawn he should have stuck around. Then I think about dead bees and birds and know I could do without one more lifeless thing in my life. I consider the options and decide that at least the weeds are green so from a distance the lawn looks fine. Same as me. I have to stop mowing. There is something dark laying near the base of the tree inches from the sidewalk. I think maybe it’s a stick or a beer bottle flung from a car. It is neither. I gape at it in shock. I look up and down an empty street for some explanation. Where did this come from?

I open my emails the next morning and there is something from Mark’s student. “A birthday present for him,” she writes me with a link to a paper on Mark’s work that has been published in Nature. “Nature, Kath,” he would say, “that’s the big guns.” I read the end. Mark Fisher is deceased. Why is that so brutal to read after all this time? We would probably go out for a big gun dinner that night but instead I go to work. I am working the register when a woman comes in with returns. We are supposed to ask why but I rarely do. She offers me an explanation anyways. “I paid extra for expedited shipping and it didn’t come in time for my daughter’s rehearsal dinner. I was heartbroken.” I look up. The heartbroken don’t say things like that. They don’t have to. It is their eyes that convey a sadness that can never be adequately expressed. I offer to refund her shipping. Her faux heartbroken eyes perk up. I come home and make popcorn for dinner. At 11:00 my neighbor texts me about her shitty life. I ask her if she’s outside. She is. I pour a bit of whiskey over ice and head down still wearing the dress I wore to work. We cry about how everything keeps going south in our lives on a regular basis, we talk about Bridgerton which I have just finished, we end up laughing uncontrollably about how we may have gone a bit overboard in gardening this year. She has bought her own badabing begonias and I imitate Mark. We repeat badabing badaboom over and over. She has spotlights in her backyard and I tell her if I had those I’d garden in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep. “I have,” she tells me. The conversation and whiskey have cleansed me of the heaviness of the last days and at 12:30 I decide to walk home. I fall asleep at 2:30.

The next day my friend invites some of us over for happy hour in her yard. It’s hot but beautiful. We discuss politics. I act normal except I’m so tired I could face plant on the table. A different set of friends is meeting for drinks the next night. I tell them I’ll be there, leave work, and in every direction there are orange cones. It takes me forever. I have lost my mojo for drinks and conversation but smile and talk and wish the earth would swallow me whole in slow motion like a parked car tipping into a sinkhole.

Some guy is hot on my trail on a dating site. We go back and forth with messages. He seems kind and funny in the absurd world of online dating. After several days he gives me his email and phone number. I talk this over with the women I work with. They are all much younger and more versed in this stuff. “Go for it,” they tell me. I decide that I need to put myself out there and call him up. He seems surprised. Maybe this was the wrong week to put myself out there. Five minutes into the conversation he’s talking about the Bush/Gore election and I’m confused. Is this small talk? He is talking so much and I feel like I’ve stumbled into a traveling preacher’s tent and there’s bodyguards blocking all the exits. I talk about Covid and how overwhelmed I am after a year of not doing much. He tells me he’s no conspiracy theorist but don’t I find it weird that people on meth, cocaine, and heroin don’t get Covid? I have no fucking idea what he’s talking about. I ask him if he’s been vaccinated. When he says no I tell him that (besides being batshit crazy) this wasn’t going to work for me. He says, “You’re not listening to the other side. What you’re doing, sweetie, is building blocks around yourself to keep out information and pretty soon you will be walled off in your own world where nobody can get in.” I don’t know what is more offensive – getting life advice from a complete stranger or being called sweetie by the same stranger. I think how the old me would have argued with this kind of stuff but instead I hang up on him mid-rant and block him from everything. I want to talk to Mark. We would laugh-cry at the whole I’m no conspiracy theorist. “You don’t want to peak too early in this, Kath,” he would tell me. “You do that and you have nowhere to go.” He said this all the time. People would talk to him about their kid’s interest in science. “Let them have fun,” he’d say. “Don’t meddle in their curiosity. You want them in it for the long haul and if they peak too early it’s over.” I should be grateful I’m not peaking too early. Instead I’m pissed at Mark for leaving me. I never stay pissed. I ask my therapist why that is. Why can’t I be raging mad that he left me alone in life? She tells me that the loss is so huge that it dwarfs everything else. “Yes,” I say quietly, “so huge.”

I try to unclog the sink. I research what to do about weeds that doesn’t involve Round Up. I go to work. I don’t sleep. I start packing up the kitchen for the reno that’s starting soon. I want to throw everything away. Every single thing. These kinds of weeks always threaten to sweep me out to sea if I don’t paddle furiously, but there is that thing that was at the base of the oak tree when I was mowing that caused me to stop in my tracks. I have no idea where it came from or how long it had been there. I drive by that tree many times a week when I’m going to and from work and never saw it, and now that I have I don’t know what to make of it.

I decide to not overthink this one. There are signs and then there is a sign.

I used to always joke with Mark that my mom liked him better than me. He got along with her from the start of our relationship, but after he helped her take care of my dad in the foxhole of the last stages of cancer, that relationship formed a close bond. Years after that, he started going to a conference every January in Chicago with his students – half would stay at my mom’s house, the other half a mile away at my sister’s house. Mom always looked forward to the company and would get the spare bedroom ready, make extra coffee in the morning, and have a coffee cake sitting on the counter so these hungry students would have something in their stomach before Mark hustled everyone out the door early for the drive downtown. They’d arrive back late after a dinner out with Mark’s colleagues and their students, and then get in the car to drive eight hours to Kansas City the next day. It was a whirlwind of a weekend and over the years my mom got to know Mark’s students well.

When I was home in April, my siblings and I were in a meeting with Mom’s care facility because of her multiple falls. Our mom has always been fiercely independent and so I imagine that relying on everyone around her for the basics was infuriating. “Are these falls because she’s trying to do these things on her own and can’t?,” I asked the nurse. “No,” she explained, “when we’re born we all get a ball of yarn that rolls forward with time and life and experience. When people get dementia their ball of yarn starts rolling backwards. It’s why your mom can vividly remember things from decades earlier but can’t remember that I was in her room thirty minutes ago. In her mind she’s a young woman and so of course she can do simple things herself.” I was taken aback by the clarity of that explanation because it made conversations with her seem so much more logical. It’s why when I got to see her all she wanted to talk about was her sister. When she’d been in the hospital days before, my sister heard her telling our dad, “Bill, you need to come and take care of this.”

Over and over I have thought of that analogy and how in many ways my ball of yarn stopped moving on the day Mark died. How frozen in time I was (and often still am), how getting my yarn to start unrolling has taken so much effort, and how I can never tell if it’s going in the right direction.

While I was home I texted my long time friend to see if she could meet for lunch. We have been friends since grade school, and she is one of the few people in my life that have known me with Mark from the beginning. Whenever we were in Chicago we tried to get together with Pat and her husband but were often booked solid with family obligations. A few years ago I called her and said, “We’ve got Saturday morning open for breakfast and that’s it.” “We’ll take it,” she said and the four of us got caught up on kids and jobs and current events, and Mark and I were always grateful when we could spend time with them. She is one of those people who will go where others are afraid, who genuinely misses Mark and I as a couple, who can say that out loud, and if the tears come for both of us so be it.

Over a very long lunch where Mark and my mom came up often in our conversation she said to me, “This must be hard for you. To see your mom like this and not have Mark here, to not be able to call him or have him to talk to or cry with when you get home,” and my eyes immediately welled up with tears. All around me life seems to unfairly go on without him, but to have someone acknowledge that shouldering additional loss alone takes a toll that has already cost me plenty meant more than I could ever express.

A few hours later we walked out of the restaurant into blinding sunlight. I felt so much lighter than when we walked in because a dear friend knew that she could neither fix nor ignore my sadness. She also knew that my ball of yarn was stuck on a steep hill and needed a little help to roll forward again.

When I was six years old, I entered 1st grade at St. Jude the Apostle school on the outskirts of Chicago. It was where me and my five siblings would spend eight years under the guidance of the nuns of the Congregation of Notre Dame. My first teacher was Mother St. Thomas, a gentle and kind woman who years later would leave the convent, marry, and have a family of her own. The classes in our school were big, often close to fifty kids, and I wanted nothing more each day than to leave and be home with my mom. That wasn’t an option and I was always placed in the front of the class where it wasn’t cool to be seen sucking my thumb.

I never liked 1st grade but over time I relied on Mother St. Thomas as my daytime alternate mom. She was often sick, though, and there was a steady stream of substitute teachers. As a result I didn’t know the basics of anything, especially reading. As the school year was winding down, it was suggested to my mom that I be held back to repeat first grade. This was common then, there’d always be several kids in a class held back and that were forever labeled “dumb.” Because I had a sister a year younger than me, my mom said, “Over my dead body are you going to be holding Kathy back. She will go on to second grade,” and so I did.

I don’t remember much of the next few years. In 2nd grade I had Mother St. Williams who was a tyrant and daily wacked kids with her ruler. Hearing the thwack of the wood hitting a hand and then muffled crying didn’t make for ideal learning conditions. In spite of that, most years I’d be awarded a certificate for perfect attendance, an honor for daily showing up at the place that scared the daylights out of me.

During the summer before 4th grade, my mom took me to the local library and enrolled me in the summer reading program. It came with my very own library card and a chart. Every time you read a book and returned it to the library you got a star. I think behind the scenes my mom talked to the librarian in the children’s section about me needing some help. That’s when I was introduced to Little House on the Prairie, and the reading switch suddenly lit up like a Christmas tree. I couldn’t get enough of Laura Ingalls and her adventures on the prairie and read every one of the books in the series. Back then you were either a Little House kid or a Nancy Drew kid. I was not only a card carrying member of the prairie camp, I wanted to be Laura Ingalls.

With so many kids and one car that my dad had five days a week, I now realize what a monumental feat this was for my mom. The three boys had their constant little league games and I had the library, and somehow Mom managed to pull off getting everyone where they needed to be. Sometimes her and I would go to the library after dinner, sometimes on Saturday. Mom would put on her pink Avon lipstick, a square of her blotted lips smiling from the toilet bowl, and we’d get in the car and come home with a pile of books for me to read. When summer was over and my chart was filled with 100 stars, Mom announced at the dinner table what I’d accomplished. I like to think that we were in cahoots with all those trips back and forth to the library, but it was Mom doing everything she could to push her kid over the reading mountain.

Every summer I think about those years I muddled my way through a sea of words that were such a mystery until the Ingalls family came along. Since Mark died, reading has been a challenge for me. In the first year my retention was so bad that I could read an entire book and not be able to tell you anything about it. I’ve burned through dozens of books on grief, some have been helpful, some a waste of time. I tend to read non-fiction as many people have lives far more interesting than could be imagined, but one summer I read Poisonwood Bible, a book about an overzealous preacher who moves his family to Africa to spread the word of God. Turns out they are ill-equipped to live in this environment and when the fire ants make their deadly march through the village I swear you can feel your skin crawling with every turn of the page. In a cottage in Washington I laughed so hard reading A Walk In The Woods that Mark wanted me to hurry up and finish it so he could read it. When we were pulled over on the side of the road in Idaho because an RV was on fire, I read the last pages of Tuesdays With Morrie. “How was it?”, Mark asked and I couldn’t talk. On the couch in Maryland bundled up in a blanket in July, I read Into Thin Air. A Tender Bar lives up to its title, a tender tale of a boy growing up to be a man under the guidance of the regulars at a bar in Boston. I cried on our back porch reading When Breath Becomes Air. I have read Bird By Bird more times than I could count. A few months before Mark died I read Educated, and every night told him he wouldn’t believe this woman’s story. I have deliberately slowed my reading on many a book because I didn’t want the story to end.

This summer I decided it’s time to ditch all the grief and self-help books to immerse myself in stories that take me far away from my regular life. Nine year old me will give herself a star for every book read, and profusely thank the universe for a very harried, young mom who fiercely believed that within the pages of a book her daughter could go on one adventure after another.

Months after Mark died, I was having a glass of wine with a friend and said to her, “I don’t know when the last time we had sex was. I can’t remember.” Her eyes teared up and she said, “Did you guys stop doing it? You know a lot of couples our age stop for all kinds of reasons.” “No,” I said, “it’s because I had no reason to believe it was going to be the last time and all I want is to be able to remember every detail and I can’t. So many other stupid things I don’t care about bubble to the top except that,” and then we both cried for another tally mark in the loss column.

I don’t think I realized how affectionate Mark was until after he died and was looking at photos. Always next to me, always with his arm around me. Sometimes I think he thought I was going to drift away from him and he needed to keep a tight hold on me, but then it turned out to be the reverse. He was the one who needed to hang on. His open love of the whole package of me – the wild hair, the clothes, and the creative vibe that spilled over onto the edges of everything was apparent to everyone around us. I didn’t know couples functioned without that because I never knew any different.

There is so much to miss about Mark but the biggest hole to fill is the intimacy of being connected to him. The quiet conversations in the dark where it was okay for me to say that I was scared or worried and he would pull me closer so I could fall asleep while he kept watch in the dark. The getting the results from a mammogram and saying I was okay for another year and him saying, “I knew it would turn out fine,” but seeing the relief in his eyes. The talking about life and science and writing and the kids and the little cottage by a lake that we always dreamed of buying. Where he could fish and I would watch from the porch with a book in my hand, and the sun would set on the day and all would be fine in the world.

It is okay for me to want all of those things again for myself, and I have never asked anyone for permission for that, but for reasons I will never understand not everyone in my life wants that for me. I’d like to say that after everything I’ve been through that I don’t care and that is usually true. As Brene Brown says, “Unless you’re in the arena also getting your ass kicked I’m not interested in your feedback.” But I often do get unsolicited feedback that starts out as “If it were me….” and oh to be on the receiving end of that. What I write is a screenshot of my life, a glimpse into the window of suicide and grief, what I allow to be known. There is so much more of this that is private and sacred to me that I will never share. Things that haunt me, that trigger me, that still can make me sob in an instant, things that keep me awake more nights than not. Sometimes I think I should take this whole collection of vulnerability offline and go live in a cave where there isn’t anyone with the audacity to tell me what they would do if they were me.

But the other day I was at work and a customer asked me if I was Will’s mom. I said I was and she said she was a rep and knew him from the interior design world and loved him. I don’t even know how she made the connection but then she told me that her father died unexpectedly and she found so much truth in what I write. “You get it,” she said and we had the most genuine conversation about life and loss. The real stuff that people feel comfortable talking to me about now because they know I won’t pass judgement on them for how they live with their pain.

A few weeks ago when I saw my mom at her care facility, I knew it was the last time I would see her alive. My daughter and her husband got devastating news last month that nobody saw coming and their pain is so difficult to witness. Not a day goes by that I don’t desperately wish Mark were here to share this with so it didn’t always feel so heavy. That laying in bed next to him I could say, “Does it feel like life is taking so much more than it is giving or is it just me,” and he would pull me closer and keep watch in the dark.

That is intimacy. If you have it, I hope you cherish it. I did and then suddenly didn’t, and nobody knows better than me the risk in loving again. But it’s what I some day see for myself, along with my name as the author of a book, even the little cottage by the lake, our grandkids with their first fishing pole and a styrofoam cup of worms. It’s a choice I have made to stay true to who I am by not settling for a life of complacency, to not let loss define me, to still let my creativity spill over onto the edges of everything, to have faith that life can be full and rich and good again.

Maybe none of those things will ever happen, but in my younger years I dreamed a handsome, smart guy would come into my life and we would live happily ever after. On a hot August night he pulled up in a Chevy Nova and knocked on my door. My first thought when I saw those eyes of his was “Holy shit, this is way better than I imagined.” Now the dreams have changed because my life changed, and the only people allowed into this new arena of mine are the ones who steadfastly believe in the possibility of the unknown.

The kind like the last guy who threw caution to the wind, called a girl he’d never even seen, and then abracadabra’d his way into my life.

Mark’s closest friend at work was Joe. When he interviewed for an associate professor position in the department, Mark thought he was by far the best candidate and likely lobbied hard for him to be hired. Their friendship was signed, sealed and delivered a few years later when Joe put up posters around the med center on April Fool’s Day saying that Mark was retiring and the contents of his lab was up for grabs. Colleagues showed up saying they were surprised to hear “the news” and then kicked the tires of Mark’s equipment like it was a used car lot. It took hours for Mark to realize he’d been set up and he loved it.

After that he and Joe were joined at the hip. Whenever there was anything happening, course content, office gossip or otherwise, Mark and Joe discussed it. They talked every day, they’d grab lunch together, and as a couple we often went out to dinner with Joe and his wife. When it was announced that their department chair was retiring, the place was rife with all kinds of speculation and jockeying for the position. During that time Mark would come home and talk about it and say to me, “Well, Joe said…..” and I came to learn that whatever Joe said Mark took as gospel.

Because Joe is Joe and he loved Mark, he checks in on me and before Covid I went out to dinner a few times with he and his wife. At one point we talked about my dating and Joe said, “Whenever you decide to go for it you’ll be swept up in a minute. You’re a hot tamale,” which made me burst out laughing. But after that on the many days when nothing seemed to being going right and I needed a daily affirmation, I’d look in the mirror and say, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it Joe says I’m a hot tamale.”

This spring with a wee bit of confidence and lots of encouragement, I decided to dip my scared and shaky toe into the waters of online dating. It didn’t take long for the messages to start rolling into my inbox which seemed flattering until I read them.

*I work out six days a week because I’m ugly. Why would you….what???
*My favorite thing to do for date night is to play Scrabble. Only request is that you wear a short skirt and stilettos. Here’s my number. I’m ready, willing, and able to love you. Look at you bringing sexy back to board games.
*If you’re a cheater, scammer, or game player don’t bother me. What about Scrabble?
*Interested but not if you are clingy, vegetarian, bitchy, confrontational, drama queen, self-absorbed twatwaffle, introvert, alpha female, lunatic liberal. You seem nice.
*Covid dating is challenging with the six foot distance thing. Yet to figure out how oral sex works with a mask but willing to try with you. I…..you…..what????
*Sweetie, cutie, honey, babe….let’s get together. You look Italian. I’m neither Italian or your babe.
*Where do you work? I can come by this afternoon. No you can’t. Ever.
*I like to handle disagreements by making sweet, passionate love all night long until we both forget what we were arguing about. True story. The first year I was married I got in an argument with my husband, threw a frozen pot roast at him, and stormed out of the house. We made sweet, passionate love a thousand times after that but I never forgot the details of that day and that was 38 years ago.

I have talked with my therapist so many times about dating, that even when I was MUCH younger it was hard and how am I supposed to do this in my 60s. “Have you every entertained the thought,” she asked, “that maybe there’s men out there that feel the same way as you? That they don’t know what they’re doing either.” “No, never,” I said and she looked at me and said maybe I could try and I looked back and said my plate is full with too many trying things.

But because Joe is Joe and he loved Mark his words still resonate with me.

You’re a hot tamale.

Too bad he didn’t give me a heads up that it’s a Taco Bell world out there.

Mark and I always kept a long wish list of things we wanted to do in the house. We both hated the thought of using a chunk of our savings that we had worked so hard to accumulate, and so we would put off improvements year after year, instead counting on a money tree to show up in the backyard. The number-one-and-never-changing item on the list was renovating the kitchen. The layout never functioned well, none of the drawers closed, it was a total gut job. A gut job we dreamed about for years. A year after Mark died, the kids suggested that maybe it was time to get this done. I loved them for that because I think they desperately wanted me to get excited about something. My son, who is an interior designer, came up with a design, we started looking at cabinets and I was immediately overwhelmed. They all looked fine, they were infinitely better than what I was used to, and I hated them.

I hated that I was doing this with my son and not my husband (although Mark would have gladly opted out of the whole thing and said whatever I wanted was fine) and felt like a deer in headlights. I couldn’t make a decision on anything and early in the process I bailed. Everyone told me I deserved a new kitchen and that was true. I cooked a lot of good meals over many years for the five of us in something that never worked well, and yet I wasn’t capable of changing any of it. What I felt most deserving of was to have my husband back and that I couldn’t have.

In the meantime, I was making small changes around the house. Painting rooms, refinishing dressers, changing up bedrooms, and all of that helped my mental health when little else did. Those were things I always did anyhow, and Mark never cared that this house and yard were my creative outlet. He knew I needed that to be me, and he’d show it off and say, “This is all Kath,” but the Kath Show was so much better and happier when Mark’s light filled up the spaces.

After the new year, and I’m sure with a strong suggestion from an older sister to her designer brother, the renovation of the kitchen was brought up again. This time it felt right and so Will and I started over. The cabinets have been decided, the appliances have been picked out and paid for, the countertop and tile have been chosen, the contractor has been secured. It’s probably the worst time to do all of this as so many things aren’t available or delayed due to Covid, but I’ve grown accustomed to operating in less than ideal circumstances.

In the time Mark has been gone, I have looked a thousand times from the dining room into the kitchen and pictured him at the counter making salsa with his homegrown tomatoes. He cooked very differently than I did. He usually had everything everywhere and by the end it looked like tomatoes had barfed on every inch of the kitchen. It made me so crazy that I usually left the house until it was done and cleaned up.

So what’s changed since the first time I attempted this reno?

The sadness within the walls of this house looks different from where it was nearly three years ago when every inch was coated in loss. The one place where it has remained firmly planted, though, is in the kitchen. In order for me to keep moving forward I have had to slowly let go of the things that keep me cemented in the before. I am a reluctant student of that lesson, but I have kept showing up for class even when I prefer to sit in the back row and pretend I’m not listening. If I could put something in the universe’s suggestion box, though, it would be that there should be an award for calmly picking out a new refrigerator and faucet and not taking it out on anyone around me for the unimaginable way my life turned out.

Last week my mom fell at her care facility which has been a regular occurrence lately. It was balance problems and falls two years ago that were the reason she couldn’t live alone anymore, as well as age related dementia which has progressed. This latest fall was more serious with other issues as well, and so she was admitted to the hospital. After a couple of days of her sleeping most of the time and not eating or drinking, I decided that I needed to go home before it was too late. An hour before I was supposed to leave for the airport, my brother called to say that she was being released and returned to the care facility, the care facility that was still closed to visitors due to active Covid cases. I was too far along in the process of getting there to cancel and so I got on a plane to Chicago.

My nephew picked me up at the airport and took me to her facility where I could not see her. My brother and sister were finishing up paperwork and meeting with hospice and the best I could do was look in her window where she was sleeping.

The next day my sister and I went to see Mom for a window visit where she was up and looking like she’d been on the losing end of a boxing match. “Oh,” she said smiling as she looked through the glass, “you brought Kathleen with you.” My mom has never called me Kathleen and I didn’t quite know what to make of that, but we chatted for a few minutes then went inside for a scheduled meeting with the staff regarding her care. After the meeting, I was able to gown and mask up and see her in her room where she was laying down. I laid down next to her and held her hand. She was really worried about “the merchandise” and kept saying her sister needed to take care of it. Her one and only sister who is no longer alive. “Mom,” I said, “Let me handle it. I’ll call her and tell her she needs to get that done. Will that work?” “Oh yes,” my mom said, “you need to call her,” and then her dark brown eyes intently stared at me for the longest time as if she’d never seen me before. She started dozing off and I told her I’d let her sleep and then it was me who intently stared at her before I left.

Two days later my sister and I went to the cemetery where our dad is buried. We got way off course trying to find his marker, there were fifty mile per hour wind gusts, and we were freezing. We gave up and went into the office to get more information and trekked back out there. After more wandering around I said, “Dad, it’s your daughters. One of us couldn’t find her way out of her underwear and I think you know which one it is so help me out because I’m not made for this Chicago weather anymore.” A few minutes later we found his final resting place under a tree where Mom wanted to be buried because she hated being in the sun. We told him he needed to come and get his wife, that she’s been ready for awhile but her body hasn’t given up the fight, and that he needed to intervene in this for his favorite girl.

A stone’s throw from where Dad is buried, and where one day soon Mom will be next to him, is the children’s cemetery. When picking out their grave sites, my parents wanted to be in close proximity to the children they lost, three girls who lived nine months inside my mom and not a single day outside. I share something in common with the oldest of the three, in block #31 grave #12 and born two years before me.

We are both Kathleen Ann.

The time between Mark’s death and his funeral was eight days. The reason for the delay was to allow time for our families, all of whom lived out of town, to get here, and for our favorite priest (who I desperately wanted to do Mark’s funeral) to arrive back in town from a fishing trip in Alaska. This priest had long left for an assignment in Belize, but came back to this area every September for some R & R. It was either a stroke of luck or something other worldly that he was able to be here when we most needed him.

In between those long and hard days I barely slept, lost a significant amount of weight, and was in shock. The night before the funeral I begged Mark to let me sleep, that I was exhausted and knew the next day was going to be brutal and I couldn’t do it unless he gave me a break. I did sleep that night but as soon as the alarm went off I felt sick to my stomach. I wanted to be able to speak at his funeral but had serious doubts I could pull if off. Anxiety wrapped around me like a snake and fear incessantly pounded within me. As soon as I walked into the church, though, I felt at peace. It was an odd sensation, my first exhale since our ordeal began.

Even though we arrived early, we were immediately overwhelmed with a line of people waiting to offer their condolences. The line stretched on and I spoke to as many people as I could before it had to be stopped to begin the funeral. I read the piece I wrote about Mark before the actual service started on the advice of the church liturgist who thought that I would be more emotionally in control in the beginning rather than the end. I have done some public speaking before and have always worn reading glasses. One is because I need them, but, secondly, when I look up and make eye contact I really can’t see anyone clearly which helps with my nerves. It especially helped that day and I got through that public tribute to Mark with the faintest crack in my voice and somehow managed to hold it together. When I finished, Mark’s dear friend, Joe, spoke and then the kids joined me at the back of the church to walk up the center aisle together.

When we did that and turned around to face everyone, I could finally take in how many people were there, and that exhale I took when I walked into the church immediately got sucked back in. All those distraught faces looking at us, so incredibly sad and sorry and in disbelief. Friends, family, and acquaintances who flew in, who drove for hours, who rented cars and hotel rooms, who cut their vacations short, who took off work and their obligations to spend time with us to mourn. I wanted to crouch to the ground and sob for this loss that was breaking all of us. Instead I put my head down and started to cry, my son put his arm around me and I distinctly remember saying to myself, “You cannot do this now. You cannot fall apart.”

I cannot fall apart at my husband’s funeral? Eight days earlier he ended his life and I tell myself I can’t sob with the dearest people in our lives at the shock and horror of it?

So began the journey of me being on that has replayed itself over and over. My “don’t you worry about me, I’m going to be okay, look at me sitting here good as before.” I could laugh and tell a great story and have a glass of wine and be just fine. It was eighteen months of that switch being flipped over and over until Covid hit and I didn’t have to be so on because that isn’t required when the only place you’re going is the grocery store, Target, or a Zoom work meeting. Behind a mask became the safest place in the world for me.

But now everyone is getting vaccinated and things are opening up. There is so much more traffic than a year ago, and every restaurant I pass looks packed. The idea of returning to normal feels threatening to me, like I am about to lose my safe place where being on wasn’t a self-imposed requirement I thought I had to maintain. Mark and I were great storytellers, we fed off each other’s energy, it was never work to be upbeat, positive, and funny when he was next to me. But now it is, and sometimes I want to be the observer, to give myself the grace to relax and not be on, to take in a conversation and for people to not assume that because I’m quiet I must be sad and need a boost up the rungs of the happiness ladder.

Very few people in my life have seen the side of me that is not okay. I can write it, I can put my thoughts and sentences together to show that this is what death looks like up close and personal, that this is what we have been conditioned to look away from as if it is never going to happen to us. This is not a gift, it is who I have always been, someone who is comfortable sifting through layers and words to figure things out, but doing that on a computer screen is far easier for me than out in the real world. In the real world, tears and sadness make everyone uncomfortable and so I hide that. I tuck it down deep and pray it doesn’t burst out and take me and everyone else by surprise. That takes a lot of energy and discipline, but in this past year there has been a mountain of losses for everyone and suddenly there is plenty of company in the grief department. Maybe Covid has become our great loss equalizer. That this very hard year we have been through is telling us that it’s okay to cry over the big and small things that have slipped away, that we get to evaluate what matters and redefine our normal, that with loss comes gratitude for what we failed to notice when we filled our lives with busy, and that being on is a contest for which there are no winners.

Five years ago, our youngest daughter went to New York City for two months over the summer for an intensive dance program. Her braveness at such a young age stunned me. She decided what she wanted, saved for it, and then flew to the largest city in the country by herself to chase her dream. If she was afraid she didn’t let it show while I was frantic with worry. The only thing we could agree on was for Mark and I to arrange private transportation from the airport to the dorm in Brooklyn where she was staying. It gave me the barest peace of mind and I didn’t let out a breath until I heard that she had safely made it to her destination.

At the end of the training program was a recital and Mark and I counted the days until we could finally lay eyes on our girl. Our flight was delayed due to weather, our shuttle was long gone as we arrived four hours late, and we finally got to the hotel at 11:00. We dumped our bags and Mark said, “Let’s go explore.” He was an incredible traveler. He rarely let hiccups ruin his mood or his trip, and never wasted a minute of his time in any place new. We walked out of the hotel and within a few blocks were at The Lincoln Center, the Alvin Ailey dance studio, and Fordham University. We both had the same thought. Is this real? Are we really here?

On a Sunday morning over coffee when Mal had an all day dress rehearsal, I said to Mark that maybe we should have a day of no plans, grab our books, and head to Central Park to read and people watch. He loved the idea and we wandered around until we found a bench. As we were wandering, I noticed that many benches had plaques on them, sweet memorials to those who passed. I wanted to read all of them until I found the perfect bench to sit on that was dedicated to love lost. When we passed one that said, “For my darling, Hugh,” I knew that was the one. Darling Hugh became our home for a few hours while Mark read, and I imagined Hugh to be the kind of person who had dinner parties that nobody ever missed.

As the clock ticks towards three years since Mark’s death, I often feel pressure to get past this, to heal as if healing is The Golden Ticket I can’t claim because I’m not trying hard enough. Over and over I have asked myself why that word irritates me so much until I finally realized what it was. In our quick fix society, healing feels like winning. It’s losing 160# of sad, it’s a new life, moving on, having some fun, and how about a boyfriend? Wouldn’t that feel good? Somebody special to soften the hard edges of your life? That’s what you need.

Except I married what I needed and loss is knitted into my cells now, firmly planted on the park bench of my life. The loss can be fat, loud, and demanding and take up all of the space, it can be a resting spot and the perfect place to reflect, a place where I can recall Mark’s laugh and smile, his eyes and cry, his death and scream. But it’s also the nameplate on the back reminding everyone passing by that my Hugh was here too, that he was the best person to sit next to at a dinner party, that this hurts like hell because it’s supposed to, and if I agree to not run away from this loss that one day I can embrace something new and love this fragile life again and again.

When Mark took over the backyard to turn it into Green Acres, he dug up some daffodils of mine and replanted them in the front yard. When I saw what he had done I was so mad at him and asked why he couldn’t have just waited a few more weeks until after they had bloomed. “Ahhh, they’ll be fine” he said, “they know what to do.” Because Mark’s gardening style was fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants, he shoved them in random holes in the yard, and these non-daffodils forever remained confused and never bloomed again.

When it came to planting and tending his vegetables, Mark took particular pride in his dirt. He had a compost pile and when I was cooking would hover over me to get every scrap to put in the compost bucket. Everybody in the house knew to do that but I’m not sure he trusted us and eagle-eyed our every move in the kitchen like an overzealous hall monitor. It used to drive me crazy until I gave up. Who knows why any of us get fixated on something and cannot let it go? For him it was compost. He’d empty the bucket into the pile outside in the corner of the backyard and turn it and work it and I thought it was one of those odd things dads do to keep busy when all their birds have flown the nest. The summer after he died I had the backyard redone, all the gardening beds were dismantled and I had loads and loads of dirt to get rid of. I filled holes in the yard, added to beds around the house, and neighbors came with wheelbarrows and shovels and trucked it to their houses. The rest was spread to level the yard for sod. Mark thought grass was an utter waste of resources and I imagined every day that if he were to come back he’d shake his head in disappointment over what I’d done to his farm. I felt guilty the first year. The second year when I cut more beds, added more plants, and got to ramp up my creative mojo I let the guilt go. I liked how it was turning out. I liked hanging out back there. I understood the draw to that little piece of land he was constantly tinkering with in the summer evenings.

As it warms up and everything is starting to bloom again, I have been back working in the yard. I cleaned up the rest of the leaves, cut dried grasses, and got my favorite shovel out of the garage to carve clean edges on the beds. I didn’t think I’d get much accomplished as the ground looked dry, but a couple of shovelfuls in and that dirt underneath was as rich and black as could be. It was hard work and I only got half of it done, but in every scoop were worms, squiggling, surprised worms getting turned over and seeing sunlight.

I wished some neighbor had been passing by so I could show them that black dirt I uncovered. They probably wouldn’t share in my excitement that beneath the surface my husband created ideal conditions for plants to grow and flourish. That in order for that to happen he had to train everyone in the house to rethink what they considered garbage so he could take it outside, dump it, turn and turn and turn it, and then wait for life to do its thing.

It’s a hard thing to believe there is life and beauty in places I cannot see or imagine, but I cling tightly to the promise of spring and new life rising from the dead. Then I crouch down to take a closer look at that rich, fertile soil and the worms my spade unexpectedly startled from their work.