Matter

When our oldest daughter was in third grade and her teacher knew her dad was a scientist, she asked Maggie to find out from him what the definition of matter was and report back to the class. That night after dinner with pencil and paper in hand she posed the question. Mark lived for this kind of stuff and launched into a science lesson that went far over the head of a nine year old. Maggie, in utter frustration, laid her head on the table and said, “Why couldn’t I have a dad that painted houses for a living?”

When Mark and I went house shopping for the one and only home we’d ever have, we were all over the map on what we wanted and where. He loved a house we looked at that was far south of Kansas City, a house that had a kitchen on the second floor overlooking the living room. I said that the idea of hauling groceries up to a second floor kitchen seemed stupid, let alone keeping a toddler from tumbling down the stairs while I was making dinner. Mark said I was being negative. We looked at another house that had gold flocked wallpaper everywhere. I said that stripping all that wallpaper sounded like a nightmare. Mark said he’d help. I said no thanks. He said I wasn’t seeing the possibilities, and when we went in the backyard and saw an above ground pool covered in green algae he said I might be right about that one.

Every Sunday I’d get the newspaper and look at the open houses. I found a four bedroom house in an area we hadn’t looked at before, and we put the two kids we had at the time into their car seats and drove over to have a look. It was a cape cod built in the 1940s, and the street was lined with trees in their fall glory. From the outside the house had its issues. It was painted an unflattering pale pink and had a deck on the front of the house that made no sense. Inside, though, it was well maintained, and as we made our way through the first floor I was deciding bedrooms in my head. In the hallway of the 2nd floor, I turned to Mark and said, “I love this house. This is the house. This is the one I think we should buy.” He loved it, too, and by December we were moving our family in.

The house had an old-fashioned charm about it that I felt in my bones. It had a lilac bush like my grandma had, a forsythia that bloomed every April, and peonies that burst open every May. We would meet a previous owner who lived in the house for many years with their three kids, and were so happy to know that a family of five occupied the house once again. One Saturday when I was in the middle of having the kitchen torn apart because I was painting the cabinets, a guy stopped by and asked if he could take some pictures. He had lived in the house years before and so I brought him through the inside and peppered him with questions about some odd things I couldn’t figure out. I always felt honored to be an occupant of this house and the keeper of new memories. If these walls could talk, I’d often think, what stories would they tell?

Since Mark died, these walls hold a flood of tears that if unleashed would seep through the drywall and spill onto the floor. Did another spouse lose the most important person in their life and then wander around this house as if a stranger? Did they look at the pumpkins on the front porch and a carpet of orange in the yard and have the most bittersweet memories of their husband burying their kids in the leaves and all of them howling with laughter? Did the clock stop for them one day and after that nothing seemed to mean very much?

In Maggie’s homework assignment, Mark simplified matter and told her it is the stuff that makes up the universe – atoms, protons, molecules. “The stuff all around us,” he said, “most of it you can see but some of it you can’t like the air we breathe.”

When I think about these decades old conversations, I wonder why they bubble to the top of so many entangled memories and emotions in this last year. It’s as if they are fighting for space in my head to be remembered so they can teach me an old lesson in a new way. All those years ago when I sat at the dining room table and listened as Mark was describing matter, maybe he was telling me that one day when I am alone in this house that we loved and raised our family in, that he will be close by. That with every breath I take and every one I exhale he won’t be as far away as I sometimes think.

That he will still be here.

Alive in the unseen.