A Speckled Trout

It has only been twice that I have vividly dreamt of Mark. He is often in my dreams, but always on the periphery where I can feel his presence but cannot see or hear him. In the early weeks after he died, I felt a constant panic to know that he was okay and would ask him every night to visit me in my dreams. It would be five months before he showed up to tell me I couldn’t be sad the rest of my life and needed to date. The second time he told me that searching for light was futile, that the light was in me. They were incredible dreams but didn’t answer what I most needed to know.

Are you okay?

I remember doing the same thing after my dad died. My sister and I were headed to a maternity shop for me to buy a dress for the funeral. When Mark and I initially went home to see my dad for the last time, the plan was to stay over Labor Day weekend and then fly back to Maryland. When we got there the situation was dire and my mom was trying to manage my dad’s care on her own. After two days I said to Mark, “I don’t think we can leave. My mom can’t do this on her own.” “I agree,” Mark said, and for the next ten days he sat beside my dad’s bed all day until my siblings arrived after work to take over. My dad took his last breath in the hospital, there was a wake and funeral to go to, and the four days of clothes we came with weren’t going to work for that. Mark borrowed dress clothes of my dad and brothers, but at nine months pregnant I had to go buy something. On the drive to the mall I was mesmerized by the clouds. It had stormed overnight and the clouds were fat and beautiful, the kind that looked like you could jump from one to the other. “Is that where you are now, Dad?,” I wondered because, like Mark, I was desperate to know that he was okay.

Last week I dreamt that Mark and I and our oldest daughter were going to go to the bar and grill in the shopping center near our house. We have been there countless times for dinner, happy hour, Easter brunch. It was where we met Maggie and her husband after Mark came back into town from a business trip, and they told him she was pregnant with Baby #2, news that made his fork stop mid-air. It’s where he and the kids had a surprise 60th birthday party for me. It’s where we met our neighbors one night during spring break every year for more than a decade since that was more in our price range than a family ski trip or vacationing in Mexico.

We can literally see the restaurant from our yard but in the dream Mark insisted on riding his bike. This was a point of friction between us many times. If we met at someone’s house after he got off work I’d ask him to put his bike in the back and come home with me but he always preferred to cycle. I liked walking up to the neighborhood restaurant, movie theatre, or grocery store with him, I liked walking home in the dark chatting about the night, I liked him so anywhere beside him was good. I sometimes wonder if those times I pushed back against his preference to ride alone rather than to drive or walk with me were a warning flare from the future telling me to spend all the time I could with him because he wasn’t going to be around as long as I thought. Probably not, but everything post-death gets turned over and over under a microscope.

Mark got his bike out of the garage and took off for the restaurant. When Maggie and I got there it was packed inside and we found a long table in the bar. Maggie decided to look for Mark, and while she went off to do that a group of overserved 20-somethings sat down to share the table with me. They introduced themselves and said they were there to celebrate a birthday. After a few friendly minutes they asked me if I could buy them some appetizers because they’d spent all their money on drinks. I decided this idea to grab some dinner was a bad idea all around and went to find Maggie. I finally spotted her on the patio and as soon as she saw me she said, “I found Dad.”

There in the parking lot surrounded by the guys he rode with every Saturday morning and wearing their matching jerseys, was Mark. They all wanted to know where he’d been, what he’d been doing, why he’d been gone so long. I watched for several minutes as he filled them in on everything in that animated way he had when he was excited to talk about something he found fascinating. Then he turned and looked at me and had the biggest smile on his face.

He is okay.

When our kids were little and wanted to play a board game, I could have it over and done in fifteen minutes. Chutes and Ladders? When they weren’t looking I’d move my piece to the start so they would always win and then I’d say incredulously, “Oh my goodness, you beat me again? How is it that you’re so good at this game and I’m so bad?”

Mark, on the other hand, could play any game forever. It would usually end when the kids were mad and crying and stomped off to their room because they lost. “Why do you do that,” I’d ask him, “just let them win and then you’re done with your parental duties in record time and can move on to something else.” He was shocked at the suggestion. “Let them win??!!! What is that supposed to teach them? That’s ridiculous. I can’t believe you actually do that,” he said. “I do,” I answered back, “because I’ve got twenty other things to do besides trying to beat an eight year old in a board game.” What Mark saw as opportunity for character building was time management for me, and since it was now confirmed that his wife was a slacker he had his work cut out for him.

This nature of his would rear its head often. When Maggie came home from 1st grade with instructions on making a bug with the family, the sky apparently was the limit. We were new to the area, new to the school, and long over group projects thank-you-very-much. When I skimmed the directions I thought this was something the kid actually made with input from their parents, and so on the 12 x 18 piece of construction paper Maggie was sent home with, we helped her to correctly draw the head, body, and thorax with pencil and then let her let loose with crayons. On Open House Night that spring, the bug projects were displayed on tables in the hallway and the Fisher Family contribution looked like it was made by drunk baboons. There were 3-D bugs, clay bugs mounted on construction paper covered in actual dirt, play-doh bugs, and my personal favorite, the bug made with real mink because that kid’s mom owned a fur shop.

I was mortified, Mark was livid. “You didn’t tell me the bugs were supposed to look like this,” he said. “Look at ours. It’s the worst bug on the table. We look like a bunch of amateurs.” There was no doubt that the Fisher Family Bug Project was a massive fail by an apparently uninvolved family, which in that school was the equivalent of being drug-addled, teeth missing, carnies living in an van down by the river. “I didn’t know,” I said. “Do you think I’d have let this mess leave the house if I knew there was going to be a mink beetle sitting next to it?” We left our first Open House Night in shame as the teacher yelled after us, “Don’t forget to take your bug project home!!”, which we took to mean TAKE YOUR TRASH BACK TO THE VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER.

By the time the third Fisher kid participated in the bug project, Mark had taken over. He decided that this one would be made of paper mache and he was down in the basement night after night, toiling away like Geppetto carving Pinocchio. I’d yell down that it was getting late and maybe he should come to bed, but under a single, dim light at his workbench he’d add another layer of paper dipped in glue and shape and mold and talk to himself like a prisoner in solitary. By the time it was done, he had to carry it into school because it was too heavy for our little Mallory. At that year’s spring open house, the Fisher bug wasn’t the worst but it wasn’t in the top ten either. That year was the dawn of the Swavorski crystals, and as Mark looked the other bugs over on the table in the hallway, he let out a deep sigh and whispered to me, “Who are these MFers putting crystals on bugs? Have you ever seen a goddamned crystal on a bug? NO. And you know why? Because bugs blend into their environment. They don’t draw attention to themselves.” I patted him on the back. I told him that he did a good job and we were so proud of him, that when we got home he was going to get an extra big bowl of ice cream before he went to bed because he was OUR FAVORITE BUG MAKER. Mark muttered to himself and waited for Mal’s teacher to be free so he could ask her if accuracy was no longer relevant in replicating bugs. I followed behind doing clean up in aisle storytime and said to her, “I’m sorry, he’s really tired. He’s been putting in a lot of late nights.”

The boy child would become Mark’s next priority when he got into Cub Scouts and the Pinewood Derby. Will came home with the kit and he and his dad talked it over. Will didn’t see the urgency in this car-making business like Mark did, and so he bailed pretty quick on the project. Mark, though, talked physics with everybody at the med center. He went from department to department to get the lowdown on the science and the secret to a winning Pinewood Derby car. “The weight goes in the back, Kath,” he said to me, “but you have to get it just right,” and like the bug project he’d be down in the basement tinkering away at it. Will would go down there now and then but he pretty much wasn’t interested in it, or maybe he’d seen that look in his dad’s eyes before. When Mark felt like he’d gotten the speed as perfect as possible he turned it over to Will to paint. It was by far the most butt ugly Pinewood Derby car ever but they took off to the races that Saturday morning. Twice I drove over to the competition to see how things were going and that ugly car kept winning and winning and they would place 2nd in the district. “How about that, buddy,” Mark said to Will. “You’d have done this with your mom and you know what you’d end up with? One of those participation ribbons which is what losers get.”

In high school, the kids did track and cross country and competitive dance competitions and Mark was there for all of it. Yelling from the bleachers, he’d beam when they’d push themselves and pump his fist when they placed. At the end of every 4×400 that Maggie ran, we’d watch from the stands as she hurled into a trash can afterwards. “That’s a good sign,” Mark would say to me, “that means she put it all out there.” He stayed competitive in everything with himself and his offspring, but once the kids grew up and left the house he had only the Mrs. by his side. The Mrs. he married who happened to be the least competitive person on the planet, and was the ball and chain to his ambitious drive.

A few years ago, on the weekend before St. Patrick’s Day, I told Mark I needed to go to Costco to get corned beef, specifically Sy Ginsburg corned beef which was the best you could buy. Mark loved Costco because he loved bulk. His first experiment in gardening was pumpkins, and he ended the season with 67 which was 64 more than we needed. We got in the car and drove downtown, and there in the refrigerated case where Sy was located every year, was an empty hole. There was not a single piece to be had, there wasn’t a label or sign where he should have been, there was nothing and we stood aghast as if one of our kids had been kidnapped. Mark took off for a different meat case where he was sure it had been moved. I found a butcher who told me, “Oh yeah, that’s gone. If you wanted Ginsburg corned beef you should have been here weeks ago. That stuff flies out of here.” Dejected, I looked for Mark who was cruising every sample table in the place and loading our cart with everything he taste tested. When I finally found him I told him we had a big problem because Sy was gone. “Gone???!!! Let’s go then. This isn’t the only Costco in town,” he said, and $200 later we loaded the trunk with everything we didn’t need and jumped on the highway to another zip code.

At that Costco they were sampling shepherd’s pie. “Step right up. Get yuuuuuuur shephard’s pie,” the taste tester yelled over and over. “Everything you need in a single dish. Perfect for St. Patrick’s Day. $17.99. Won’t last long. Get yuuuuuuur shephard’s pie.” While I was on the hunt for Sy Ginsburg, Mark was hanging around Shepherd Pie Man, getting sample after sample. “Out of luck,” I told him and he said maybe we should consider shepherd’s pie and I looked at him like he was crazy. “Are you kidding me? That’s not what me or my family have ever done for St. Patrick’s Day. We do corned beef and cabbage. Nobody does shepherd’s pie. It’s not even a pie. It’s got meat in it. It’s disgusting.” “Well, I disagree,” Mark said, “but if you want corned beef then you need to look at me. We are going to get in the car and GO TO THE LAST COSTCO, and when we get there we are going to run through the parking lot. We’re going to split up and head to the deli case on a reconn mission, and YOU ARE NOT GOING TO STOP AND LOOK AT THE BOOKS. If we are going to get some corned beef then you need to bring your “A” game. Are you with me?” I swallowed that Kool-Aid that Reverend Mark was hawking, yelled a mighty AMEN ALLELUIA PRAISE JESUS, and knew that this was what this man was born to do.

This would be such a great story if after several hours and three Costco’s we finally found Sy Ginsburg, but this one doesn’t have that kind of ending. The last Costco was sold out as well and they have never carried it since. On the way home we stopped at the grocery store and got a couple of pieces of corned beef, I cooked it the next day, and it was good but it wasn’t Sy good.

“You should have seen Mom,” Mark told the kids over dinner the next day. “We went everywhere looking for corned beef like we were big game hunters and your mom did not disappoint. It took her awhile but she got into it and I actually saw her running. Have any of you guys ever seen that? No, because it never happens. She got a taste of victory and I might have turned her into a competitor.”

This, of course, was not true but watching Mark in action whenever he was in hot pursuit was a sight to behold. This year I went to one grocery store and didn’t marathon shop like Mark and I had done that Saturday years before. Three hours later in a pot on low boil and then an hour in the oven, I pulled our St. Patrick’s Day meal out and thought of Mark hovering over me to see how it turned out, how he cut it and sampled half of it in the interest of quality control, how I’d yell at him to stop eating it, and how he said he couldn’t help it because it was so good. There are so many times when I am transported to the past where I’d like to stay with such sweet memories, but then the smell of corned beef drifts through the house waiting for the kids to come over, and I am abruptly pulled back into reality and longing for that lucky charm of mine who one day just disappeared.

Mark frequently told me that I saved him. In the letter he left behind, he said it again and for the very last time, I was the light to his darkness. Mark was a gifted athlete, an innovative and passionate scientist, a fierce defender of his students and colleagues, a loved brother and friend, a father and husband who was cherished. What could I possibly save him from?

I recently was changing my closet over from my winter clothes to spring and summer. Neatly folded at the bottom of one of the plastic tubs, was the brown linen pants I was wearing the day Mark died. I haven’t worn them since but I keep them. I don’t know why. When I was putting them away that fall after his death, I remembered how focused I was on the pattern while I waited in the police station for a detective to come and get me. With it I wore a cream linen shirt, my watch and bracelet on my right hand. On my left hand, my wedding ring that I kept twisting round and round while my legs shook uncontrollably. Look at me, I remember thinking. I just drove here from work where I manage the finances of 200 student org accounts. I’ve got my shit together. Horrible things that land you in a police station in the middle of the afternoon don’t happen to people like me.

Except I couldn’t find my husband anywhere, they didn’t have the wrong person, and my vocabulary from that day forward would include suicide. When the funeral was over, when Mark’s bike was back in the garage, and I returned to work, I thought daily of my own death. Driving into a tree, falling and getting a fatal head injury, getting struck by lightning, and most often, to go to bed and not wake up. One night I got out of bed and grabbed a bottle of pills. I laid there and turned them up and down, listening to the pills rattle in the bottle while I thought of downing every one of them. I don’t know how long I was in that dark place, but it was scary and something I hope never happens again.

For months I told nobody until one day I talked about it with a friend. She was horrified and asked me how I could possibly think of doing that to my kids after what they’d been through. I wasn’t thinking of my kids, I told her, and from that moment on I knew that this was something I should not say out loud. It is unfathomable to most of us to think of being in such deep pain that death feels like the most logical solution until I saw it for myself. I also saw that talking about it means you may be met with judgement and shame.

I don’t know what the right answer is to someone who tells you they want to die. In the moment I had of wanting it all to end, it seemed easier to take a bunch of pills rather than get up and google the phone number for suicide prevention. Knowing Mark as I did, I am absolutely sure that never crossed his mind before his course was in motion. I do know that many people live with crippling depression, unbearable loss, trauma, loneliness, addiction, abuse, and unrelenting pain, and in those times making it end seems very logical. Maybe the better plan is to have a conversation from a young age about how that feels, how your brain is capable of telling you the most outrageous lies, that maybe if you find yourself in that place that screaming for help is what you most need to remember. That if you’re on the receiving end of that scream to stay calm, to listen, and to stay in that hard place with that person until you are certain that they are safe.

As I watched the interview this week with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, I did not expect to hear that she was in such despair that she wanted to end her life. I did recognize, though, the hopelessness she felt in her situation, the depression that slithers in and twists your thoughts into an unrecognizable distortion of your life. I recognized it because I’ve lived it.

At the end of the interview, Prince Harry was asked if it was his wife who saved him from a life he felt trapped in. “Yes,” he said, and I saw the same deep, piercing pain in his eyes that I’d seen many, many times in Mark’s eyes.

As I watched this couple who had so much thrown at them in their young marriage, whose lives were scrutinized by millions, I saw two people who firmly stood guard for each other, and for the first time I finally believed what Mark told me over and over. I was the gatekeeper to his hurt, I stepped in when he was triggered, I held his shaking hands when his memories tried to strangle him, I pulled him back when he drifted towards the shadows. I tried to meet the sorrow in his eyes with the hope in mine. I loved him, I could see what others couldn’t, that just below the surface he often felt like he wasn’t worthy of me, of our kids, of success, of happiness.

Walking into the house after driving home from the police station, when the pattern of my linen pants and the metal in my wedding ring weren’t a distraction from something I couldn’t believe or put words to, I prayed that better angels swooped Mark up and carried him away from all that pain he never deserved. Maybe they were the same ones who saw me with a bottle of pills in my hand and convinced me that my story wasn’t finished yet.

At this time last year, I had gone to Florida for a few days to see my mom and two of my siblings, had interviewed and gotten a part-time retail job to accompany my office job, and had booked a flight and hotel in Tampa for an early March weekend. My dear friend (who lost her husband right after Mark), and I were going to be my roommates for Camp Widow – something we were weirdly looking forward to. I had gone for orientation for my new job, celebrated my birthday with my kids and youngest daughter who came in from California, and kept going to work. Mallory flew back home, a few weeks later I got sent to work from home for my office job, and I didn’t work at the store until mid-August.

Everyone has their story of regular life before Covid made its deadly march across the world. I am familiar with the habit of telling a story over and over when everything changes. I have told the story of Mark’s last days a thousand times. I learned that this is common when someone dies; you need to keep telling it because you can’t believe it. It is rare for me to do that now. Everyone has heard it, and despite the constant retelling it hasn’t changed a thing. I still can’t believe he’s gone.

In the early months when only essential businesses were open, the kids and I decided that our Sunday dinners needed to be put on hold until we saw how this played out. When I packed up my desk to work from home, I didn’t take any of the files from the annual audit I did every June as I thought the office would be open by then. I winged it from memory when it came to that, and we started our weekly dinners again because it was obvious that this wasn’t going to play out anytime soon. By the end of that month I was unemployed and Covid was claiming victims with a vengeance.

When Mark died, I constantly wondered how it was possible that life seemed to sail on so fluidly without him. I wanted to scream, “MY HUSBAND IS DEAD” at the grocery store, the hardware store, the bank. After awhile I realized I was in a club of one – the only person on earth who knew what it was to date, fall in love, be married, and have children with Mark Fisher. Life sails on because that’s what life does until it doesn’t.

This month marks one year since our worlds changed drastically due to a pandemic. The can-do spirit of the beginning when puzzles were passed around the neighborhood, and texts about venturing to the grocery store were sent with offers to pick up anything you may have forgotten, have been replaced by a weary resignation that despite multiple vaccinations at the ready, life is vastly different than it was just a short year ago and how it looks going forward is anybody’s guess.

This is grief.

It comes at you with a sledgehammer and a feather. The ache for a traditional Thanksgiving with a noisy, full table, the canceled weddings, the drive-by funerals that replaced our solemn gatherings to stop and honor the death of one, the dinner party, the birthday party, the prom pictures, the cap and gown, the first grader on day one with shiny hair and new shoes, the end of the big project celebrated with coworkers at the nearby bar. It is the inability to recognize a neighbor at Target because with a masked face they don’t look like anyone you know, it is shouting between plexiglass because every sound is muffled and difficult to hear, it is delivered packages of the basics and now knowing the UPS driver better than the cashier at the grocery store.

It is the constant uncertainty of how life looks moving forward and don’t we all function best on stability?

In the time since Mark has died, I am only now finding my stability. I dreamt for so long of him walking in the house and telling me he got lost and me running into his arms. If that were to happen now, if he were to pedal up the driveway, lift the garage door to put his bike away, and come through the front door, I think it would scare the daylights out of me. I am not at all fond of this new stability but I am grateful for it. It was hard earned and trying to find my footing in the muddy marshes of loss was exhausting and futile.

There will always be so many things I miss about Mark and the life we had. Memories pop up constantly that more often these days make me smile than cry. There are other things, though, that still knock the wind out of me. To remember those times when he’d cup my face and tenderly kiss me on the forehead still makes me cry as it should. He was my guy, he knew how to calm my roaring waves. Now when people tell me he is looking out for me from beyond or is riding his bike in heaven I nod and smile.

Maybe.

I don’t know.

He was no angel but the simple pleasures of doing life alongside of him was the holiest thing I ever knew.

After the holidays were over, I knew I was going to need to buckle up for the long and lonesome months of January and February. For the past two years I have gone to Florida for a few days for a reprieve from snow and cold, but because of Covid that wasn’t a possibility this year. I made a list of things to do around the house, things I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and so far I haven’t done a single one because I have neither the desire or energy for any of it.

I have struggled with too much time on my hands which leads to too much thinking, which leads me to feel as if I’ve been catapulted backwards into the early days of grief. Those days when crying and second guessing every word that came out of my mouth the weekend before Mark died was the only thing I did. In a recent week when I cried every day, my therapist suggested I needed to up my meds. I already knew I was sinking and what had been working was no longer effective, and so the next day I called my doctor. By that afternoon I had a new prescription, and my first thought when I looked at the bottle was shame. Shame that I couldn’t pull myself out of another hole, shame that I wasn’t trying hard enough, shame that I couldn’t exercise, meditate, pray, or organically eat my way to a better state of mind. Shame that I was broken.

Every year on the night before Valentine’s Day, Mark would jump up and say he needed to go to the store. I always knew he was going to get me a card. He’d be gone forever, come home, and say, “Since when did the drugstore up at the village close?” I’d tell him it was three years ago and didn’t he remember that from last year when he tried to buy a card there. He never could remember that or that the Hallmark store didn’t have the same hours as 7-11. He’d come home after driving all over to find a store that was still open, a card for me in a little brown, paper bag. The next morning, propped against the coffee pot was his signed card for me to open.

This year on Valentine’s Day, my sinking held off until I went to bed, when I terribly miss Mark’s warm body next to mine, and those quiet conversations in the dark when he would reach for my hand before he fell asleep. As it usually goes, I replay every minute of the weekend before he died. Every missed opportunity to stop what would happen a few days later, every time I believed I screwed up. This time, and for the first time, the replay was different. This time everything that bubbled up were the memories of what was right. The long walks, the time he lagged behind me and I stopped and asked him what was wrong. “It’s my hip,” he said, “my hip is bugging me.” Mark never complained about aches or pains and I said, “Then how about you take some ibuprofen when we get home and we walk a little slower. Will that help?” Or the time he talked about the inner demons he kept battling and I said, “Mark, aren’t you so tired of feeling ashamed? Don’t you think maybe it’s time to set that down and not keep carrying it?” “I’m trying,” he said, “I’m trying.” I looked at him and said, “Maybe you could use some help with the trying,” and he said that sounded like a good idea. The black koi he brought home from a friend’s pond to put in his own because the raccoons couldn’t see them as easily and maybe they wouldn’t be having them for dinner like the orange ones. When he called me over to the car and lifted the tailgate to show me the bucket of fish and how excited he was as he slowly put them in his pond. When he walked the creek on Saturday afternoon and sat at the dining room table pulling off everything stuck to his pants and I said, “You seem happy. You should do that more often, don’t you think? Just walk the creek and clear your head.”

Since Mark’s death, heartache and grief have been my constant companions along with depression and anxiety. In the after, I have come to know that there are tools available to manage these unwelcome boarders. Some tools that take so much work and staying in places where I’d rather run screaming out of, and easier tools like taking a pill every day. Quieting the voice that tells me I’m not trying hard enough, or that taking something to manage my mental health is a sign of weakness is a daily struggle, but I know better than most that a foundation built on shame can collapse in the blink of an eye.

As a scientist, Mark could be a brutal critic. He was outraged by laziness and shortcuts, and didn’t think anybody who half-assed their way through a lab should be in the business of science. He saved his harshest criticism, though, for anyone who he believed was not evolving in their research to keep up with a rapidly changing scientific world. He was highly competitive and pushed himself every day. He knew what everybody in his field was doing and was constantly trying to keep one step ahead of them. For those who he thought were skating by on their past accomplishments, or not getting out of the way for someone hungrier, he’d complain to me about them and then finish it off by singing Glory Days by Bruce Springsteen.

Glory days, well, they pass you by….

Mark had his own Glory Days in the years that he was a roofer, and it wasn’t due to it being some major feat, but because he survived and lived to tell the tale. During those physically hard blue-collar years, Mark worked for two different companies. I didn’t know him when he worked for the first one, but according to Mark the guy who owned it was a cheat. Cheated customers and cheated his employees, and when Mark had enough he went to a competitor and got hired on the spot. The owner of that company was named, Jimmy, a full-blooded Italian at 5′ tall, and what he didn’t have in height he made up for in rage. He could explode at the drop of a hat, the kind of rage that would have made someone like me cry and then quit, but Mark could perfectly imitate him with his frantic pacing, swearing, and arms flailing, so every meltdown gave him more material.

The roofers would report to the office by 7:00 a.m. Mark was a foreman so he’d lead a crew to the job, whether it be shingle roofing or hot tar, and over time Jimmy relied on Mark because of his experience and how he could help younger guys learn the ropes. It was with Jimmy’s company that Mark would learn how to spit nails. Long before automatic nail guns, he’d throw a handful of nails in his mouth, turn them around, spit one out and pound, spit one out and pound. One of his front teeth had a groove permanently worn into it from spitting nails. On our first date he showed it to me and said that he once swallowed a nail. On other dates, we’d drive around Chicago and he’d show me jobs he’d done. He’d pull over and talk about the pitch and how they had to nail narrow sticks to the side of it to stand on as they roofed, the bullet holes they’d sometimes find in tear-offs, how many bundles of shingles he’d pounded that day.

Much as Jimmy liked Mark, he cut him no slack. He constantly was on him about getting jobs finished on time, getting repairs and leaks figured out in one visit, making customers happy. One time we were invited to a family party at Jimmy’s house, and when Mark introduced me to him he asked, “What are you doing with this dumb sonofabitch? You can do way better than him.” Mark laughed and Jimmy slapped him on the shoulder, looked at me, and said, “I’m kidding you. I love this guy,” and it was mutual.

But the forklift story that Mark told would surpass the regular and frequent verbal abuse. Mark and the other roofers reported to the office to get their jobs for the day and Jimmy was in rare form. He was raging mad first thing in the morning and when he got that mad he’d tear off the job sheet, hand it to each crew, and then start pointing at trucks and yelling at everybody to get out of his face. In Mark’s case, he needed him to use the forklift to move shingles before he left and Mark knew to move fast and efficient before Jimmy exploded again. After moving a few loads of bundles, the chain on the forklift broke. I think that probably happened often to most of the equipment in the yard but it was the first time it happened to Mark and all five feet of Jimmy came running over. “What did you do, Fisher? Did you just break my forklift? Did you just do that to me?” Mark didn’t know what he did so he started trying to fix it and Jimmy said, “I swear to God, Fisher, if you don’t get out of here in two minutes I’m going to crush your nuts in that forklift. Do you want that? Do you want me to crush your nuts??!!!”

That night when Mark told me what happened my mouth hung open. “He said that? That he was going to crush your nuts? That’s bad, Mark, if he does that we’ll never have kids.” Mark laughed and said he didn’t mean that literally, but based on the stories I heard every day about Jimmy I didn’t believe that for a minute. Mark said he ran to the truck, jumped in, told the guy driving to hit it, and they peeled out of the yard with Jimmy screaming at him in the rearview mirror. By the end of the day when they got back all was fine. The forklift was fixed and Mark was back in Jimmy’s good graces.

Years after we moved away from Chicago and were home for the holidays, Mark said he was going to go to the yard and pay Jimmy a visit. He walked into the office and Jimmy jumped out of his chair and said, “Well, will you look who the cat dragged in.” Mark updated him on his life, told him he was a professor now, and that we had three kids. There was nothing more important to Jimmy than family and so the news that there were little Fishers made him happy for us. A crew came in during their conversation and Jimmy said to them, “Look at this guy, will you? He used to do the same thing as you and now he’s a professor. If you dumb sonofabitches applied yourself once in awhile maybe you could do that.”

Before Mark left, Jimmy said, “I’m glad you came by. I’m really proud of you.” It would take years of Mark keeping his own lab afloat, when money started to dry up and he’d panic, to see that he and Jimmy always had something in common. They stayed hungry less it all collapse while they were in charge, but even on his worst days at the med center, on days when it felt like everything was in freefall, Mark would come home, tell me about it, and then say, “But nobody threatened to crush my nuts today so I got that going for me.”

Last week I went on a job interview. While I love my little, bohemian retail gig with its assortment of the coolest women ever, there have never been enough hours and since the Christmas season ended even less so. I get a sweet discount and want to keep working there, but I need something else to add to it as being inside this house and my head all day and night is making me a little loco. I have been job hunting since last summer and sending off resumes, but since I got the Covid bounce last June, there are a whole lot of other people doing the same thing. The competition is fierce and I rarely hear back from anything I’ve applied for. Last week, though, the employment storks flew overhead and dropped a listing in my lap for an office position at a medical spa. I checked out their website (Skin resurfacing!! Botox!! Fillers!! What does all this stuff even do?? I don’t know but I think I need it!!!) and I was like, yep, that will work for my current needs.

I sent my resume, and a mighty fine cover letter if I do say so myself, and they contacted me two days later for a phone interview which I aced because I’ve sort of made a career of interviewing for jobs. The following day I was asked via email to interview in person for the position, and even though it was the coldest, rainiest day ever, I was glowing from the inside out in anticipation of all those employee discounted anti-aging procedures. Not really. I slept crappy the night before and wanted to stay home drinking coffee and look outside the window and say, “Thank God I don’t have anywhere to go today,” instead of dressing like Sinbad the Sailor in a Nor’easter to go sell my skill set.

But I sucked it up and put the directions in my phone even though I sort of knew where it was because of my crack navigation skills, and then it turned out it wasn’t where I thought it was. It wasn’t even close to there and Google Maps had me in and out of a residential area and turned around and then I was headed west and I didn’t want a job WAY OUT THERE so I was kind of annoyed because there was no indication in the phone interview that I would have to drive that far for discounted Botox. Finally I made it, stressed and ten minutes late which is a stellar start to an interview. I waited all of thirty seconds because they run a way tighter ship than my lost, underemployed self, when in came the doctor and owner of the center and yadda, yadda, yadda.

During the yadda, he told me he loved women, LOVED THEM. I mean who else can bring life into the world, amiright? But women, once they get to a certain age, tend to dry up and need help to feel better about themselves and give them back the youth of their twenty year old self. I looked down at my chapped hands that scream in agony as they get slathered in hand sanitizer a dozen times a day and nodded in agreement, but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the dry place he was talking about.

He asked about my experience and I gave him the Cliff notes version and he said, “That’s interesting,” with the same enthusiasm as me when someone tells me the details of their mother’s recipe for meatloaf. He told me that women come in for all kinds of treatments and quite often they don’t want anyone to know, not even their husbands, and what he’s learned from years of doing this is that women are deceitful. I sat up straighter. Did he just tell me that women are deceitful? Did he really just say that to me? Does he know that I’m a women or is he one of those people who don’t see gender? And then he said it again.

Moving right along, he also said it was important that the newest employee fit in because they were like family. He had, in fact, just treated the staff and their significant others to a little getaway in Mexico and that’s when my face gave up the goods. You go on vacation together? No no no. In the history of my working life I have never, and I MEAN NEVER, wanted to vacation with coworkers. Not even if it’s free. A vacation is for the sole purpose of getting away from everyone in the Department of Misfit Toys, not hanging out at a pool and having to suck everything in for five days. Besides that, a few months ago when I was in a hot tub I discovered that my bathing suit top gets big air pockets inside that sound like a gas explosion as they search for an exit point. Over wine and starlight and serious conversations about life, random bubbles would climb up my top and launch themselves out and I kept saying, You guys, it’s my suit!!!” and they said “Did you know it farted when you bought it?”

Dr. Doctor talked about his patients and how they range from their 30s all the way up to, heck, 60ish, and I said, “Oh 60s, hmmmm, interesting,” in my meatloaf voice. What about somebody, say, 65? Does that dried up fossil actually come in and think she can look better? I mean, what are you supposed to do with her? Sheesh, at that point she needs a miracle worker, amiright? Things were winding down and I was asked if I had any questions or anything to add. I had A LOT to add but I gave him a smile and said, “Well, this sounds like a very, very special place and I really appreciate the time you have taken to talk to me,” then went back out into the Nor’easter wiser than when I walked in.

The next day I woke up and thought, “Oh my gawd, what am I going to do if they actually offer me this job? What the heck….” which now seems comical to think they’d want somebody my age front and center in their business. Here’s the before before and then she got some treatments from us and now she looks like a regular before which was the best we could do considering what we had to work with, because pssssst, she’s in her 60s.. I sent a thank-you-so-much email and said it didn’t seem like the right fit for me and I sure hoped they found the perfect match. Two hours later I got an email from them saying that though they loved meeting me and learning more about me they were going to go in another direction.

Excuse me???

I read it three times. I checked to make sure my earlier email had been sent. I had chalked the whole thing up to a learning experience in the land of injectables, and now they were trying to reject my rejection with their own rejection?

I wrote all kinds of responses to them in my head, every one being adamant about who rejected who first, including a screenshot of my email with the time clearly indicated. I had therapy later that day and told my therapist the whole story which she found very entertaining until the end and said, “Wait, they sent you a not interested email after you sent them a not interested email?” “Exactly.” I said. “They can’t do that,” she said, “you were the breaker-upper.”

If Mark were here he would say that kind of job isn’t like me at all and he would be right, but I don’t have him as a guardrail in my life to careen against. I did imagine him saying, “Nobody puts Baby in the corner,” with his faux outrage and I’d giggle, he’d say it was their loss, and life would go on.

Life does go on, a lot harder and far less bright, but there are many things that have remained the same. Just like when Mark was here, I am still managing to get in my own way and failing to pay attention to what I know and what he told me a hundred times, “Just write, Kath, that’s what you’re supposed to do with your life. Write and somehow it will work out.”

A few months before Mark died, I took a yoga class. For eight weeks I’d leave the house on Tuesday night, and as I was walking out the door Mark would say, “Have a good class,” just like I’d tell him to have a good ride on Saturday mornings. On the second to last class, I was doing a pose and felt a slight muscle pull in my lower back. The rest of the week I babied my back so as not to make it worse, but during the last class I did a pose where you leaned over touching your fingertips to the floor while raising your opposite leg as high as you could against the wall. Should I have done this with my back already hurting? No, but as one of the older women in the class I wasn’t going to sit that one out while those younger seemed to be doing it easily.

It only took a few days for that pulled muscle in my lower back to morph into sciatica that lasted for months. I went to a chiropractor who said in six sessions I’d be back to my old self. After twenty, meeting a deductible, and a lot of copays, I quit. I went to two different physical therapists, had a steady diet of ibuprofen, and after five months without much success, I was finally given a referral to a pain specialist. That appointment was scheduled to take place two days after Mark died, and it wasn’t until January that I rescheduled it. The doctor recommended a steroid treatment and I was so desperate I agreed to it immediately. I was told it wasn’t necessary to bring anyone with me and arrived late in the afternoon on an overcast winter day to a full waiting room. One by one patients were called back, and at one point a nurse asked me my name, my appointment time, and how long I’d been waiting. I gave her the information and she said, “Okay, I just noticed you’ve been sitting here awhile and want to make sure I have you on my patient list.” She left the waiting room and a man sitting directly across from me looked at me and said, “She waltzes in here after all of us and gets priority treatment. Looks like we have reverse discrimination going on here, folks. Guess it pays to be a woman,” and then he snapped the pages of the newspaper he was reading to emphasize that he really was a toxic jerk. I was so taken aback and finding everything about being there too hard that the only defense I could muster was to curl up in my chair in a fetal position.

I did get called back when it was my turn and not a minute sooner, and while the waiting room felt accusatory and ugly, the other side of the doors were frantic and stressful. The portable xray machine for the department wasn’t working and they had spent the day having to share the ER machine making everything backed up. The doctor came in and gave me a two minute briefing before I was wheeled into the procedure room to get multiple shots into both sides of my lower back. I should have been able to go home soon after but my blood pressure was too high to release me and I had to hang around waiting for it to go down. When I got the okay from the nurse that I could leave, I couldn’t get out of that place fast enough.

The next morning I woke up and had no side affects from the shots and no pain, my sciatica was gone. I was so happy and told everyone at work that they’d seen the last of me hobbling around the office with my bad back, and that lasted less than a week before it came roaring back. The doctor had told me that sometimes these shots work with one treatment, sometimes it takes as many as three. It didn’t matter to me. I managed my first health hurdle without Mark while being harassed by a stranger in the waiting room and I had no intention of repeating that experience again.

After death everything is a first-time hurdle and it’s unpredictable what will knock you flat. There’s plenty of warning for the first holidays, the first birthday, the one year anniversary of death, but there are other firsts that don’t come with a warning label. Mark and I were both passionately political from a young age, we followed it all whether it was local or national politics and we loved watching election returns for state races and the presidency. We always voted together, standing outside in a snowstorm for two hours for a presidential election when we moved here because the county didn’t expect a heavy turnout and there weren’t enough voting machines. I expected voting this past November to be hard without Mark, but there were so many volunteers yelling Covid protocol every thirty seconds that it felt like the security line at the airport and I just wanted to cast my vote and leave.

When inauguration day arrived last week and I watched it all day long like I always do, when night fell and Mark should be coming home from work and celebrating with me, when all of a sudden absence was the loudest sound in the room, I felt like a bird that flew into a plate glass window and slid to the ground in a stunned and shaken heap. All the excitement and hope that I felt earlier in the day set with the sun and it turned into a lonely winter night that I didn’t see coming.

It would be days later before it felt like I was returning to myself in a way that I have learned to manage. A new day in a new week presented itself with an unrelenting cold rain which seemed especially fitting, and every unwritten word about Mark’s death remains firmly planted up one side of my spine and down the other.

When I moved bedrooms many months ago, I cleaned out Mark’s dresser. I had been dreading it but it wasn’t as hard as I thought it was going to be. It was mostly underwear and a lot of socks with no mates, bike shorts and jerseys. Mark’s drawers were always a mess, he would put everything together in whatever drawer had room, shove the drawer closed, and then stand for the longest time in front of the dresser in the morning looking for something. I’d be especially helpful and say, “You know, if you spent a few minutes organizing it this wouldn’t be such a big deal.” Then he’d imitate me in an annoying bitchy voice because 1) it turns out I wasn’t being helpful at all, and 2) he could not be shamed into caring about an underwear and sock drawer.

After days of looking at this dresser like it was a some kind of ticking time bomb about to go off, I pulled a drawer out and started sorting everything. Some things needed to be thrown out, others went into a bag to donate. When my son came by to help me move some furniture, he went through everything to see what he wanted. The bags then got moved to the downstairs bedroom where they sat for months. I decided it was crazy to keep walking around them and put the bags in my car to take to a donation center where they have sat in my trunk for a few more months. I didn’t want to look at these bags and I cannot seem to let them go.

This weekend I cleaned the front closet. It is tiny, I cannot believe the five of us squeezed winter coats, boots, hats and gloves into it when the kids were all at home. When it got to just Mark and I in the house, you would think it would have been less of a mess but that was not the case.

I started by pulling everything out and it overflowed the hallway. Then I pulled the shoe basket out and saw a pair of Mark’s sandals. The dumbest sandals, they had a Velcro strap across them and didn’t fit him at all. Mark’s toes hung over the top and I always told him he should throw them away, but they were good for taking the trash out or running outside in the rain to unclog a downspout. Why in death shoes bring you to your knees is beyond me but they do every single time. I pictured him digging in the bottom of the closet to find them, slipping them on his feet, me seeing his toes hanging out, him running out the front door in them.

Him alive in his shoes.

It didn’t get much better after that. Biking gear, his favorite winter hat, his fleece jacket, gloves, the boots he would wear when he and Will went camping, the waterproof boots he wore when he shoveled snow, the gear of life. Like sorting through his drawers, I did the same thing with the contents of the closet, only this time I couldn’t stop crying. All of it was a heaping pile of loss.

Over these past two years I have read many grief books to make sense of this life and to confirm I am not crazy. Some have been good, others of no help at all. One of them said that when it came to going through your loved one’s belongings to use the barf test. If the thought of it makes you want to throw up you’re not ready. If it doesn’t then you are. But then what?

I often daydream of getting in the car and driving with no destination in mind, just leaving and along the way finding exits that say, 20 Miles to A Great Night’s Sleep, Welcome To Your New Life – No Reservations Required, Gas, Showers, and Bottomless Peace Next Exit. I have imagined so many things while harnessed into this rollercoaster, this being a huge misunderstanding and Mark coming back, or a horrible dream that I wake up from and he is asleep next to me. Or the possibility that it could be different and good once again, a different relationship, happier days where joy comes naturally to me like it used to.

It all churns over and over and over, but in every scenario I have yet to imagine giving away the remains of Mark’s life and not walking away feeling like I’ve lost everything.

Postscript: Like most things I’ve written since Mark died, this was an attempt to come to terms with the next step. After I wrote this I contacted one of my daughter’s friends who has worked with the homeless for years. She promises that these things are desperately needed and will be used immediately by people living on the street. I think Mark would be okay with that. I’m going to do my best to be okay with that too.

Every holiday season, Mark’s Saturday morning biking group would have a Christmas party that included spouses. I’m not sure when it started but it was our favorite party of the season as Mark talked about these guys all the time and it was a chance to get to know them and their significant others better. Between them, they would do a gift exchange that usually involved some kind of gear. If Mark seemed excited by what he got I’d say “Oh that’s great,” or “That will sure come in handy,” when most of the time I had no idea what it was.

The first year I went to the party after Mark died, I asked my son and son-in-law to go with me. I was going to attempt to be strong even if it required a couple of sidekicks, but all day I felt like throwing up. I was okay once I got there and everybody was very welcoming, but it was hard and as soon as I came home I went to bed and cried.

The following year the party was at the home of a couple I knew well and I decided I could manage this one on my own. After all, Mark had been dead for over a year. One of the bikers was moving back to Australia in the coming week, and instead of the normal gift exchange it was rigged that every gift was for him with mementos to remember his time in town and with the group. It was such a lovely and thoughtful gesture and I was so moved by it. I remember sitting there thinking that this was how you were supposed to leave a group, with a party and gifts, good wishes and a sweet goodbye. You don’t leave by ending your life so that your farewell is a funeral and your wife has to stand up and talk about how funny and passionate you were. I was barely holding it together when some guitars came out to sing a version of a Christmas song specific to the biking group. I lost it and kept telling myself TO GET IT TOGETHER but I couldn’t. I couldn’t stop crying, I couldn’t get out of the chair, I couldn’t do anything, and all I felt was shame for publicly falling apart like that.

The next thing I felt was an arm around me telling me it was okay. I didn’t even know who’s arm it was because my head was down and I thought that if I dared to lift it everyone could see that Mark’s wife shouldn’t have come because she makes everyone sad and has ruined the party. The arm stayed there, with a firm hold on me, whispering “it’s okay” over and over, and when the song was over I got up and saw it was the wife of one of Mark’s friends. I don’t remember if I hugged her or not but I do remember whispering, “thank you,” before I grabbed my stuff and ran out the door. Though it took place over mere minutes, it is seared into my mind because that woman literally stood next to my pain. She didn’t try to fix it or diminish it. She stood next to it and didn’t move until I did and there aren’t many people who can do that.

I have heard many, many times, “Call me if you need anything.” There are times that I am capable of asking for help outside of my son and son-in-law but mostly not. I have lived my entire adult life being fiercely independent and building a support system wherever we lived. Since Mark died it is a daily challenge to support myself, to not succumb to the depression that nips at my heels the minute I get out of bed, to quiet the voice that screams at me YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN YOU OF ALL PEOPLE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN. I don’t have the energy to pick up a phone and ask for help or to say it’s a really bad day because all I’m programmed to do is to try to keep my head above water.

A few months after Mark died, a friend and I went to hear Cheryl Strayed speak at a fundraiser for the library. Her book Wild has always been one of my favorites and her talk was so inspiring and exactly what both of us needed to hear. On the way home I was talking about the utter emptiness of my life and said, “You know, I’d just like to see a cardinal and think that it’s Mark’s spirit paying me a visit. Just one cardinal. Is that too much to ask?” When I got home there was a gift bag from a friend on my porch. Inside was a cardinal windchime.

While some put the burden on me to let them know when I needed something, others were able to figure it out while I tried to process the shock and horror of Mark’s death, when the light of my life was gone and weight fell off of me pound by pound because I didn’t even know I needed to eat.