Solstice

It is rather fitting that Mark was born on June 21st, the summer solstice and longest day of the year. For as long as I knew him he never wasted a minute of daylight. I’m sure that started when he was a little boy, maybe even earlier. When our kids were babies and nothing would calm them down, I’d take them outside and tell them to listen to the birds talking to them, the leaves in the trees blowing, the drum of the cicadas. Since they are 50% their dad, it would do the trick and they would be ever so attentive to the outdoor sounds. It works now, too, for the newest grandbaby who will stop crying in seconds if you take him outside.

These days I have found that being outside is about the only thing that gives me some peace. I am on a constant tilt-a-whirl of thoughts of Mark’s life and death, which does nothing but cause me to spin my wheels and go nowhere. When I walk out the door the spinning ceases, as if I am the crying baby that needs the sound of birds and leaves to calm my head and heart. Even so, I still turn my head whenever I hear the sound of a cyclist riding by (a constant occurrence in this neighborhood), hoping that one of them will round the corner at 7:00 like the old days and my handsome husband would say, “Sorry I’m late. I was ready to leave and forgot I needed to send an email, then I ran into somebody on the way out, then I cycled home with this guy I met a few times and he’s kind of a slow rider.”

Once when my sister was here and I had hung up the phone with Mark she asked me when he was going to be home so we would know when to start dinner. “He says he’ll be home in an hour,” I told her, ” but if you double that and add twenty minutes you’ll be close to when he’ll actually be home.” She didn’t believe me but my estimations were usually spot on. The guy was easily sidetracked.

I always worried about Mark riding home on his bike. Sometimes he would go to a dinner meeting or stay late into the night because a paper or grant was due. I never liked when he did that but he told me it was safer then because there were fewer cars on the road at that hour. He had a light on the front and back of his bike, a light reflecting jacket, and a light on his helmet. He never took chances with motorists as he had a few close calls.

After Mark died a retired colleague and friend of his was riding past our house and stopped by to talk to me. “When I heard the news,” he said, “I knew it wasn’t an accident. Mark was far too careful a rider for something like that to happen.” Oddly, that gave me a great deal of comfort. To know that the thousands of days he rode back and forth to work and early on Saturday mornings with his biking friends, that he was careful. That he knew I worried about him, that he knew he was supposed to return home to me.

That’s not what happened on the last day Mark set off on his bike and it casts a long shadow over all the other days. I pray the searing burn of this wound will lessen, but in this first summer without him he feels so far away and the hours of sunlight too long.