Signs

I get asked often if I get signs from the other side of Mark trying to reach me. Like everything else since this happened, the answer is I don’t know. His life and death never leave my mind so I’m unsure if spontaneous things that happen when I’m thinking about him are his spirit in synch with mine or coincidence. When I’m blankly staring out the window trying to figure out my life and a bird perches on a branch and turns its head to look at me, is that him? Or is it simply a bird that needs to rest for a minute? When I make Sunday dinner, something Mark and I always did together, and I cry because he’s not here to lend his effort or come up behind me to see what’s cooking on the stove, is that him or is it me remembering him?

For the living, a sign seems like a spiritual wink from above, a dry-your-tears-wifey-I’ve-been-right-here-all-along. For the living with unimaginable loss, it’s seems like a generic band-aid for heartache that wounds in new ways over and over. If gold stars were given in grief work, I should get at least one for no longer crying every day on the way to work. The star would be taken away on the way home, though, when alone in the car I can let go of the energy it takes to manage a job and a positive attitude that exhausts me.

While at work the other day, I had to take something over to a different building and the weight of fresh air was charged with a thousand losses. I do what I always do when that happens, I tell myself to get it together which rarely works. I sat on a bench in the shade and let the tears fall when I noticed something on the ground. I bent down to take a closer look and saw a pair of safety glasses. The kind of glasses that Mark had on him all the time when he was in graduate school and was doing bench work in the lab. The same kind he would wear when he cycled to keep the bugs from flying in his eyes and the wind from making him tear up. Was he trying to tell me something? Was he cycling the universe with Stephen Hawking and saw me crying and wanted me to know all was just fine on the other side? I picked them up and carried them back to my desk.

Two days later I was walking back from lunch and spotted a dead butterfly on the sidewalk. I touched it to make sure, then gently cupped it in my hands. I took the back stairs into my building so as to not run into anyone who might notice me cradling a dead butterfly and think I had totally gone bonkers. I did a google search to find out if there was a hidden meaning in this discovery, and like all things on the internet, it was a hotly debated topic. It was either a bad omen or a random occurrence as all living things die. I chose to believe the latter as I’d already been hit by the sledgehammer of a bad omen.

I would love for all of these things to be signs that Mark is continually reaching through the veil of here and there. I stare at the same photo of him from our trip to Portugal every night before I go to sleep. The photo of him in front of a fountain, so happy and content, and if it were possible to pray somebody out of a snapshot he would have been back months ago.

Five years ago this summer, Mark and I were in Missoula, Montana and I found a butterfly wing on the sidewalk. I preserved that one and put it in a small frame. Mark thought it was kind of nutty but there are a lot of nods to nature inside of our house and it seemed like a fitting addition to the collection of turtle shells, seashells, fossils, and bird nests. It seemed like us.

If there was some sign of finding those two things within days of each other I’m not sure what it was, but it made me wonder if Mark’s body was carefully and gently moved to the coroner’s office on that Tuesday? Could those that responded to the call know that this man’s death would shock a community? That nine months later his wife and children would still be in a state of disbelief? Would they be kind to the remains of a man who was brilliant, funny, and deeply caring? Would he be lighter because the shell of the demons on his back had finally been shed?

Those are painful things to wonder and like everything else without an answer. The signs I desperately want are nowhere and everywhere.

Life is fragile. So was my husband.