The Scent of Life

On a Saturday night last winter, Mark and I went out to dinner and then stopped by the med center for him to pick up something from his office that he wanted to work on over the weekend. Weeks before he had told me that he had been working on cleaning his office. “You would be so proud of me, Kath,” he said. “I just pick up stacks of paper and throw them right into recycling. I don’t even go through it. I put it right in the bins.” That’s good, I tell him like a professional organizer, they say a cluttered office equals a cluttered brain.

I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe a cleaned off desk or less coffee mugs or not the ever-present piles of paper, but when I walked in I was taken aback. Surveying the place like a judgey shrink on an episode of Hoarders, I moved a pile off one of the chairs to sit down. “I thought you said you were cleaning this place,” I say. “What did you even clean? It doesn’t look any different.”

He gave me the finger. I roared with laughter.

“I swear to god, Mark,” I tell him, “if you up and die and leave me with this mess I’m going to be so pissed off at you.” He imitates me in a high-pitched voice. “I swear to god, Mark…..,” and he keeps giving me the finger and I keep laughing and fast forward seven months and that’s exactly what happened.

I showed up in his building on a Saturday morning to meet his boss and a friend to go through his things and it felt like my chest was being split wide open. The sadness, the 26 years of his life there, flashbacks of the kids so little going to see daddy at work, the clothes he changed into from his biking gear, his notes, his box of change, coffee pods, his shoes, photos of me and the kids. I held it together to get the job done but when the last box was loaded in my car and I went back one more time to get my purse, I could not stop crying. That place was his life and then it was over and crammed into boxes, and the pain of that has not relented for a single minute.

The boxes were piled in an empty bedroom with all the other death related stuff and it would take weeks for me to open the door and figure out what to do with everything. I brought the box of clothes upstairs and sat on the floor near his closet to go through everything – making piles of what needed to be washed, what needed to be folded, what should be hung back in his closet. I picked up one of his tshirts and put my face in it and with sweet relief I could still smell Mark, so I put everything back in the box and taped it shut, hoping that the scent of my once beautiful life remains.

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