A Speckled Trout

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.

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.