Tag: widow

Parallel

When Maggie was a mere six weeks old, Mark and I packed up the graduate student life and moved to Maryland where he had accepted a position with the National Institutes of Health as a post-doc. The whopping salary for this illustrious career move in 1987 was $24,000. When we arrived, Mark ended up moving nearly everything out of the truck himself until a new neighbor came along and helped him with the heavy stuff. That would be our first indication that this move and the neighborhood we landed in would be a good fit for our little family.

That night as Mark was breaking down boxes at the dumpster, he met Betty. Betty was the mother of one of our neighbors, one who had a baby that was three weeks old. “I saw you moving in earlier,” she said, “and I saw that you have a baby. See that house over there? That’s where my daughter and her husband and her baby live, and your wife needs to meet my daughter soon.” Mark nodded. “Soon,” she said. It wasn’t so much of a suggestion as an order.

“So am I just supposed to go over there and knock on the door?” I asked Mark when he told me about the conversation with Betty. He said he thought so and it all seemed kind of odd to me but I knew nobody and was already feeling lonely in this new city, so one morning I took my baby and walked a few doors down and knocked on the door. Betty, who had never met me, knew exactly who I was. “Oh, I’ve been waiting for you,” she said. “Come upstairs and meet Carla and Christopher.”

The rest, as they say, is history. Carla’s husband, Jim, was an OB/GYN at Bethesda Naval Hospital – across the street from the NIH. With no family close by and husbands who were always working, Carla and I and our babies spent a lot of time together. After a few years and another baby, Jim and Carla would move a few miles away to a rental house but we remained close. Sometimes meeting at the mall so our kids could run off some energy in the play area, a wading pool in their backyard, a weekend at the ocean with all of us, including our elusive husbands.

When I was pregnant the second time, ultrasounds were the exception and not the rule for prenatal care. My dad’s cancer had come back and I was under enormous stress, and despite begging my own doctor I was told I did not need a scan. I told Carla and she arranged for Jim to give me one at the Naval Hospital. We would sneak in after hours – me, my husband, my toddler, Carla, her toddler, and her baby boy so that Jim could give me an ultrasound. In that little, darkened exam room he would tell us that both mama and baby were healthy, and when he was done he opened the door and yelled, “It’s a boy.” Carla came in with all the kids she’d been wrangling on her own in the hallway and we were all so happy and excited – our own little reveal party before those were even a thing.

As the years went by, Jim and Carla had a third baby (this time a girl), moved to Italy, then back to Maryland and finally home to Cleveland when Jim left the navy and went into private practice. We would leave Maryland for a move to Kansas City where Mark had accepted a position at a university and a third baby (another girl) would come our way too. In different cities with our husbands and three kids, we bought houses and cars, weathered scouts and sports, ACT tests, injuries, boyfriends, girlfriends, break ups, and break downs. Through it all Carla and I would always say that we were living parallel lives.

Four years ago, Jim and Carla came to Kansas City for Jim to compete in a triathlon. It was the first time in all those years that it was just the four of us – no kids to corral as they were all on their own by then. We went out to dinner, an art museum, had margaritas, and fell into long-established patterns. Jim and Mark talking about science and medicine, Carla and I about being empty nesters and travel and what was next. Despite the time and miles that had been between us throughout our friendship, there was never any awkwardness to navigate. The bond that we had established in those early years in Maryland never wavered.

The summer of the following year, Carla texted me that they were on their way to Sloan-Kettering. Jim had been diagnosed with a cancer that did not respond to chemo or radiation, surgery was his only choice. During the time that they were there, Carla and I texted and talked many times throughout the day. Mark and I were so worried about Jim but another bombshell would drop a few weeks later. Carla was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Carla would fare better than Jim. I wouldn’t find this out until May when I texted her a cheery update on Mark and I and the kids and she texted back the news that Jim’s cancer had come back and there was nothing more to be done. When I told Mark his whole body slumped. This world without Jim, he said, not possible. I called her the next day and on every Friday after that I texted or called her to check up on how they were both doing.

On my daily walks this summer, I would think of things I could do for Carla in the future when all those lonely days set in. I decided that her and I would take a trip to Maine next summer. Mark and I had been there for only a day last year and loved it, and it seemed like something Carla would probably like as well. I told Mark my plan and he thought it was a great idea.

At the end of June, Jim, Carla, and the kids took a last vacation together at a resort in Missouri – about three hours from our house. Carla invited us down for a get-together. I had my doubts. This seemed intrusive on what had to be an emotional gathering for them but she insisted. Mark and I drove down with plenty of anxiety. We had not seen Jim in four years after competing in a triathlon. Would he be so thin and sick that the shock show on our face? Would we stick our foot in our mouths and say something stupid? Would both of us start crying?

We needn’t have worried. Jim looked exactly like Jim, Carla was beaming, and we had the best time with them and their kids. All three hours on the drive home and for the following weeks, we talked over and over about how great it was to see them. On the other end of Missouri and then back home in Cleveland, Carla would tell me they were saying the same thing.

After that visit I thought about this trip to Maine every day. How I had to make it happen, how I had to research the area for things for us to do, how her and I were going to get there come hell or high water. But every time I thought about this trip, every single time, Mark wasn’t there. I would start to walk and think about it and surmise that he would be home and going to work. The next day I would start thinking about it and when there was no Mark I would wonder why it mattered to me so much. He fully supported this week away with Carla that didn’t include him. The next day I would start walking and planning again, and when there was no Mark I thought maybe he would be gone on a work trip at the same time. This happened over and over and over until as soon as I started thinking it the same question popped up.

Where was Mark? I could not see him. I could not place where he was. He was gone and it bothered me so much I stopped thinking about this trip to Maine.

On the early morning hours of September 5th, I texted Carla the news about Mark. Her and Jim, like everyone else were stunned. A few days later she called me while sitting outside looking at a lake. Jim was being settled into hospice and I told her the heartbreaking details that were too much to share earlier. She told me the heartbreaking end days of life with her husband.

Eleven days after Mark died, Carla texted me that Jim had passed away that morning. The goofballs are together, she said.

Thirty one years and three months after we met we were both widows in a span of days.

Parallel again.

Ben

Dear Ben,

I saw you standing at the back of the church by yourself when it was still just family there. You looked uncomfortable, like you’d rather not be there. I could relate. I didn’t want to be there either. Before you even introduced yourself I knew who you were. Mark talked about you often when you rotated in his lab. He told me that you learned differently than the other grad students and that once he figured out your rhythm he was able to steer you in the right direction. In that short rotation time, he saw your progress and when you wanted to join his lab he was so excited.

It turned out that Mark already had a couple of grad students and so your #1 choice wasn’t going to happen. Mark was known to buck the system when he knew that students weren’t being served and he took that decision up the chain. He was turned down and months after the fact he’d still get riled up about it.

Before you came along Mark had another student that would need help. His name was Hiroo and he was from Japan. He and his girlfriend came to our house one year for Easter and when he was leaving he came into the kitchen to say goodbye to me. I said goodbye, hope you had a good time, it was great having you here, and they both stood there looking at me until Hiroo finally told me that Dr. Fisher said I should give them some leftovers because he was a starving graduate student. I thought that was so funny because I remember early in our marriage and those end of the month meals of ramen noodles.

Mark would say that Hiroo had magic hands when it came to working on the bench doing experiments. He was so close to graduating when the tsunami hit Japan. Here in the middle of this country with his family and girlfriend back in Japan, he became frantic with worry. He watched or listened to the news constantly. Even when he found out that everyone was safe he could not stop worrying. He wouldn’t show up in the lab for days on end so Mark would ride his bike over to his apartment. He’d bang and bang on the door and finally Hiroo would answer. Mark would tell him that he had to check into the lab regularly to show him his writing progress on his dissertation. He would say he would and he’d come in a few days and disappear again. This went on for months. His father once emailed Mark because he was so worried about him because he wasn’t answering his phone. After all those years of training, Hiroo eventually returned to Japan without his degree. Mark never heard from him again and would always refer to him as his lost soul. Isn’t it funny that Mark could see that Hiroo was a lost soul but he couldn’t see when his own soul was lost?

The chance of us crossing paths again is highly unlikely, but here’s what I wanted to tell you on that Wednesday morning; Dr. Fisher believed in you. He believed that you were capable of the work and that the med center owed you the chance to try, that their job was to work with your challenges to make you successful. I can’t even tell you how many times he told me that.

I hope you reach the goals you have set for yourself, and when you doubt your ability or your place in the field that you remember that from the very first day Mark saw your potential.

He would want me to tell you that. That science needs you, Ben, exactly as you are.

xo,

k.

Currency

Whenever Mark and I would go to a social event and someone would ask him what he did, he would say that he worked at KU Med Center. Then they would ask what he did there and he would say that he worked in the Biochemistry Department. Then they would ask what specifically he did in that department and he would say that he was a biochemistry professor. I watched this interaction dozens of times. Finally I asked him why it was that people had to drag that information out of him, why he didn’t just say what he did for a living. He said that people tended to think it was a bigger deal than it was and that he found it awkward. “If I say that right off,” he said, “then they would think that there wouldn’t be anything that we would have in common and I don’t want that.”

A few weeks after he died, his friend, Tom, called me. At one point in the conversation he said, “You know that Mark was world famous in his field, right? That everybody was hot on his tail to catch up to what he was doing?” Well, no, I didn’t know that. I knew that he was traveling a lot in the last two years, mostly in the U.S. but there was also a trip to London and Switzerland this year and Portugal last year. I only started to think he may have been a bigger deal than I thought when I got so many sympathy cards and emails from around the world. Mark was doing groundbreaking work in his professional life and it is among the many heartaches of his death to not see all those years of labor brought to fruition.

In a social media world that he didn’t have much use for, his likes were people he met along the way. A Holocaust survivor that once sat next to him on a plane, fellow bikers he would meet on the way to work, a young kid he met when he waited six hours at the DMV this summer to get his license renewed, the owner of a lawn care business that our neighbors used.

I was not prepared for the number of people outside of our family that came to his funeral. Everyone in his department, every department chair he ever worked for, friends, neighbors – current and past, fellow dads from Boy Scouts who he hadn’t seen in years. I would find out later that the med center chartered two busses so that all the graduate and medical students could attend. It was an overwhelming show of love.

After the service ended, I greeted people who I hadn’t had a chance to talk to during the visitation. A man came up to me and introduced himself. “You don’t know me,” he said. “I live on 42nd Street and your husband used to ride his bike down my street on his way back and forth to work. My dog used to hassle him whenever he rode by so one day I went out to yell at him to stop barking and your husband stopped to talk to me. After that, he’d always stop whenever I was outside and we’d talk. Your husband was a good man.”

Of all the people there……

How did he even know Mark’s last name? How did he know he died? How did he know where or when the funeral would be?

Despite the title of Mark’s occupation and the years of training it took to achieve that, more years than not were tough financially. We struggled to put our kids through college. I would often complain about things around the house that needed fixing or renovating that it seemed we could never afford. Mark would nod and agree and then say he thought we were just fine.

In a world that is more and more impoverished by money and fame, Mark Fisher’s currency was his connection to every living thing. I never saw him kill a bug that was in the house but rather scoop it in his hands and take it outside. The squirrels who ate his tomatoes all summer were trapped and transported to a park. We even argued over killing weeds.

Now he is gone and my reflections are forty years of memories that I play over and over in my head. My daily prayer that he always stays connected to me.

 

                 

 

Be Not Afraid

I pretty much have lived most of my life afraid. Afraid in grade school of never cracking the code to learn how to read, afraid in high school of never having anyone to eat lunch with in the cafeteria, afraid of never finding a partner in life, afraid I’d never get pregnant, afraid of being broke, afraid of a terminal illness, afraid, afraid, afraid.

I have been afraid of heights for a very long time and yet went to the top of Mt. St. Helens. This was Mark’s idea on a trip back from Seattle after seeing some old grad school friends. I was terrified. It took us forever to get to the top, but there I was curled in a ball on the front seat Lamaze breathing my way up. As scared as I was the view was worth it. I have never seen anything like it in my life. According to the locals things were coming back to life in leaps and bounds, but to my eyes the devastation years after the top of that mountain blew off were beyond words.

Four years ago on a trip to Montana for a biochem meeting, we took a detour on the way home to Glacier National Park. The Road to the Sun is a steep climb up thousands of feet and on the way Mark drove and pointed everything out to me, not because I couldn’t see it for myself, but because he knew if he kept talking to me it would keep me calm. When we did reach the top he told me to relax in the car for a few minutes while he looked out on the gravel edge. It seemed like a reasonable suggestion for my phobia, but watching him taking that view in made me realize I was missing out and so I jumped out of the car and joined him. Not as close to the edge as him, but close enough to know that I’d always remember that stunning landscape.

There were many adventures with Mark. Wading in creeks looking for fish, trekking through knee high weeds along the roadside and leaping back when he’d flip a discarded piece of wood looking for snakes, hiking up the sand dunes along Lake Michigan, swatting mosquitos in a dense, humid nature center. Mark did not live small. He found adventure in his daily life and was on a near constant search for all signs of life.

With Mark by my side I was less afraid of everything. Even when I thought it was a bad idea, or in my anxious mind a highly dangerous one, I went along for the ride. Sometimes he made fun of me because even I knew I was often being ridiculous, sometimes I could feel his gentle hand on the small of my back, sometimes he would give me a lengthy explanation of how proteins fold for distraction.

In all these years of being afraid, there was no fear more terrifying to me than that of someone I love dying suddenly. Many times I read of those deaths, those come from nowhere accidents or the intentional ending of one’s life, and I could not fathom how anyone could recover from that.

My biggest fear is now my daily life. There was no goodbye, no I love you, no hey buddy don’t you even think of leaving me because you made everything better. No kiss, no wink, no hand reaching for mine before we both fell asleep, no please wait one day for things to get better before you think about ending your life. No but the kids, Mark, you know the kids and Mabel adore you.

One day he was here and the next he was gone and ever since I have looked for him everywhere. Two months later my heart still skips a beat when I see a cyclist. There you are, Mark. We’ve all been looking for you. I look in the cold, cloudy sky, in the wind, in the nearly barren trees, in the dark night. I never stop looking but I have always known that Mark was an explorer at heart. That given the chance to see it all he’d soak in every minute, every experience, every flutter of life. That he really is everywhere and trying to tell me that the universe, the goddamn universe, Kath, is blowing his mind. Everything has its season and so I have faith (very, very tenuous faith) that one of these days he’ll stop wandering and come back to rest in my soul where he belongs.

And when that day comes, that sweet, longed for day, my eyes will no longer see the devastation but the life.

 

Strong

The one thing I have heard daily since Mark died is…..

You are so strong.

I am not strong. I cry for that day, for the past, for a future that absent of Mark feels empty. I cry for my kids, for feisty, adorable Mabel that he was crazy about, and the new baby boy to come. I cry for his Saturday morning biking and breakfast buddies. I cry for his colleagues who continue to reach out to me. For his graduate school best buddy, Tom, who called me and said, “I didn’t call earlier because, frankly, I was too chicken to pick up the phone and talk to you.” I cry for his dear friend who knew him since middle school and found out a month after the fact, because in those shocking, early days I could not for the life of me recall his last name. When I think of his graduate students that he loved like they were his own, I cry. I cannot imagine what they are going through. Mark was their boss, the director of their future, the mentor they chose to work for and to get to the finish line of their PhD. He was demanding and had high expectations and they delivered in spades. “These kids,” he’d say with so much pride, “these kids are so smart.” Today I cried about a car repair that is NO BIG DEAL but it’s another weight piled on and there is so much piled on right now.

So strong I am not, but I might be brave because I have managed to push through. I have things I have to get done. Financial things that only I can take care of, and if you have ever dealt with the death of a loved one you would know that there is a ridiculous amount of stuff to do and none of it is easy. Today I called a business about an automatic charge to our credit card for a periodical that was posted to our account a month after Mark died. They told me they would refund it to the card and the credit would show up in 3-5 days. This is the first time something got taken care of with one call and without sending a death certificate. I cried when I hung up the phone because finally something was easy.

I don’t even know what being strong looks like from the outside looking in but I do know what it looks like to me since this happened.

It looks like you.

It looked like you coming to our door with stunned grief and ringing the doorbell. It looked like you with a catch in your throat telling me, “I don’t know what to say.” It looked like you with the weight of your own sadness and fear and nothing in the adult toolbox to fix any of this. It looks like you sitting in the uncomfortable silence when I stop mid-sentence because loss has choked the words out of my mouth. It looks like you with the cards and messages and flowers and plants and food that keep coming. It looks like you showing up when you have nothing to gain, nothing to offer, no words to break the unbroken.

In these days that overwhelm me at every turn, it looks like love and there will never be enough days in my life to thank you for choosing to walk this path with me.

We are brave in numbers and empathy. We are going to be okay.

Nomad

It is an unsettling thing, this grief. It feels like it’s going to strangle me every night, but sleep keeps it at bay until the alarm goes off. As soon as I roll over to stop the beeping it grabs me by the throat as if to say don’t you dare mistake today for an ordinary Monday. No, honey, daybreak likes to remind me, this is another day where you are here, and he is God knows where.

Since going back to work after Mark’s funeral, I find myself feeling resentful on the drive there. A drive anywhere makes me cry so by the time I get to my desk I look and feel exhausted. Would staying at home be better? This home that we’ve had for twenty-six years, the only home we have ever owned, doesn’t fit me very well these days. For years it was too small for us and the kids, the cats, and a dog. Now it is too big, too empty, too quiet. It unnerves me at night. The constant drone of cable news that Mark could watch for hours irritates me and so I accept most offers for drinks, for dinner, for any distraction in order to not come home. Very rarely does it work, more often I feel sad and lonely midway through and want to bail, so I leave and drive and cry, and then sit in the driveway wondering what the rush was to leave friends and food and conversation for a dark, empty house.

A few days before Mark died, I went to Target. I texted him while I was there to see if we needed dog food. He never answered. When I talk of his last day and say he left his phone at home, people gasp. A sign they say that he had made up his mind and didn’t want me or anyone else to call him and divert his intentions. Maybe, but Mark always left his phone, wallet, or keys at home on a daily basis. He was in every way the absent-minded professor so when I texted him and he never texted back that was not at all unusual. It turns out that while I was at Target he decided to walk the creek near the house and see what was living along the muddy bank.

There is some comfort in going to Target. When I am there my life feels normal so long as I avoid the aisle with LaCroix, the refrigerated case with the flavored creamer, the menswear department. I get dog food and toothpaste and long sleeved tshirts to layer for the approaching cold weather. I look at sheets and throw pillows and blankets. Sometimes I end up buying them and more often than not they get returned. I load the car and drive home and if it’s like that Saturday in September, Mark will come in the door a few minutes later with a big smile on his face and say, “I was down by the creek.” He will sit at the dining room table and pick seed pods that cover the front of his pants and dump them into the trash can. I will smile back and say, “I think it’s great that you did that. You need to do that more often like you used to do before you got so busy with work.” He will say he thinks you’re right and you will unpack the bags and put things away and show him the new flavor of creamer you got. He will tell you that one looks good and weeks later you’ll try to remember if his eyes seemed sad.

But it’s not September anymore and the house is empty when I pull in the driveway. The pants he wore that day have been washed and folded and put in a drawer I don’t open because those are the pants he wore whenever he worked in the yard. The same ones that he wore to the creek that day and the sight of them would send me down even further and that seems too risky.

Whenever I have told the story of how Mark and I met I say that I knew on the first date that I was going to marry him. After looking at dozens of houses, I knew the minute I saw this one that this is where we would raise our family. For all these many years, it was this sweet, old, cape cod on the corner that felt like my refuge from the world.

It’s a beautiful house and I am grateful to have it, but it was always Mark who was my home.