Tu Me Manques

Dear Mark,

In a few days it will be two years since I’ve looked deep into your gorgeous eyes or seen that smile that always did me in. I don’t know what happened to you that day and I’ve never been the kind of girl that likes mysteries. I don’t know if you slept that night, I don’t know when you left the house, I don’t know how it could all break inside of you and I could not know.

Since that day there is nothing in my life that is the same. How or if I eat is different, the groceries I buy, the water, electric, and cell phone bill, the bank balance, the amount of laundry I do, the car I drive, the job I have, my social life, what side of the bed to sleep on which I have yet to figure out. I even took the dog back to the shelter. In the first week we had him I said I didn’t think he would work out but you said that we should keep him because somebody had abused him, that you two had that in common. After you died, I reached my limit of looking into the eyes of something else I could not save.

My whole life I have wondered how a person can survive the tragic, sudden death of someone they loved. I mostly worried about the kids, but every day when you left for work on your bike I worried about you until you rounded the corner at day’s end. You ending your life in the way you did was something I never saw coming and the cruelty of it will haunt me for the rest of mine. I used to love to lay in bed at night and listen to the sound of the trains as their horn blasts cut through the cold winter air. Then you ran in front of one and that sound unnerved me to the point that I thought I would go mad.

To lose you that way means that I replay that day over and over. How panicky I felt that you weren’t calling me back, how everything felt off kilter, the police station, the calling the kids to come home, the shock on their faces when I told them you were dead, the call to Mallory who answered so cheerfully and then I had to deliver the most devastating news of her young life, your sister who kept saying, “No, no, no, that’s not true,” your mentor from graduate school who called and said, “When I heard the news I said I wouldn’t believe one word of it unless Kathy told me herself.” Joe calling from work. Joe, who you talked about every day like he was your brother, and the two of us crying and barely able to choke out a single word.

So many people showed up at our door, each one repeating the same thing, “I don’t know what to say.” Over and over I told the story of that morning. I learned later that this is common. You have to keep repeating it so you can believe it yourself. Even now I am still shocked daily that you aren’t here, and every night when I go to bed I try to figure out how to save you. I know it’s impossible to save a dead man, and yet I keep thinking of that one magical thing I should have said that would have stopped you from leaving us.

You are deeply missed by more people than you can imagine, but it is the kids who have risen and faltered on every step of this journey alongside me. You should know that they are not mad at you, none of us ever have been. For a split second that weekend I saw a glimpse of the broken boy inside of you that never healed. How could I be angry at the sharp edges of wounds you tried to keep bandaged until you couldn’t? How hard you worked to keep them from overtaking you and still they grabbed hold and took you under? Since your death the kids and I have talked about how you might have fared if the situation had been reversed, if I was the one who went first. You had enough pain in your life and I’m okay with taking this for the team to have spared you. I wish, though, that the kids could have been spared. They have had to learn too soon about so many conflicting and difficult thoughts and emotions and were far from done needing you in their life. It would be impossible to imagine any of them being more empathetic than they already were, but they allow me and each other grace that stops me in my tracks. You would be so proud of them. We taught them well, and despite all you accomplished in your professional life, it was each of them that were our best experiment.

Remember when I would show you the numbers on my blog when I had a good response to something I’d written? I write now about what this road has been like and I have those kinds of numbers all the time. My story of grief has become public and there are good and bad things to that. I write hard stuff, mainly as a source of understanding and release for myself, so people often make assumptions about me that aren’t true. It’s odd and yet I don’t care because expending energy on that sort of thing seems pointless when the work before me is to not become a raging shell of who I used to be. That would be the second tragedy of this and I couldn’t face you again if I were to allow that to happen. For so long I knew what it was like to be loved, to be heard, to be respected and admired. I wanted so much more of you and that life, and then the story ended with a harshness that I never could have imagined.

While my story is public I have kept most of yours private. There have been so many times when I have been asked why you ended your life and it’s so layered and complex and something I still struggle to understand. That has come with a heavy, emotional price and I regularly talk about it with my therapist. She once asked who besides me you would confide in and I said, “Nobody.” “Then I think,” she said, “that’s your answer to who is entitled to know your husband’s breaking point.”

Carla and I have had many long talks about dating which is absurd to think that either one of us would even be in this position and at the same time. She asked me one day what kind of guy I thought we’d end up with and I said, “He’d have to be somebody who was divorced, who couldn’t stand his ex-wife because who wants to keep hearing about the perfect first spouse? Making lasagna and him saying that Barb used the kind of noodles you don’t cook first and thinking she didn’t know what she was doing but you can’t say that because Barb hangs over the place like an inflatable from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. No thank you. Besides one house isn’t big enough for two altars to dead spouses.” Then we both laughed until we literally cried because, Jesus, how did this happen that we were even talking about something so ludicrous as both of you guys being dead and us dating? When I mention meeting someone to anyone outside of the Widow’s Club, I get two reactions. “You absolutely deserve to be happy,” or “I don’t think you’re ready for that.” You would be surprised at the amount of people who feel it necessary to weigh in on my life, and every time I hear your voice saying, “Fuck ’em, Kath,” which always makes me smile. One of your friends told me that the world would be a richer place if I were to fall in love again and the generosity of that statement still takes my breath away.

When you died and people said to me, “May he rest in peace,” I thought it was absurd. I was going through the motions and didn’t believe for one minute, even at your funeral, that you were actually dead. Anybody that knew you knew that you were constant motion. For you to rest, either here or there, has always seemed unlikely but the emotional torment about your death often feels like a hand around my ankle coming from the other side. I can’t tell if it’s you or if I am the one that is preventing myself from moving past that September morning. Neither one of us could give up a good fight, but I do know that if I stay in this place of reliving that day over and over it will kill me. For 40 years we were a beautiful, passionate couple and there isn’t a single waking minute in the day that I don’t miss that. I miss being happy. I miss being your girl. I miss stability. I miss bad jokes, recycled jokes, and inside jokes. I miss dinners, movies, road trips, and wandering around the garden center with a cup of coffee and a million ideas. I miss being at a party and you finding me and saying we should go home and do something more fun.

This has been the most painful two years of my life and my daily prayer is that your tender soul rests knowing that you were the joy and love of my life, that the way you lived made a difference in this world, that we all try to be better versions of ourselves because of you, and that despite the constant ache for you to be with us, the kids and I still try to live our days with passion. Daily being shocked at your death has been an unwelcome gift, for we know better than most that the expiration date can come at any moment. Knowing that changes everything so we live accordingly and trust that wherever you are you are wildly cheering for us. That keeps us going in a world that has lost much of its brilliance.

Tu me manques, Mark Fisher, tu me manques.

You are missing from me. You are missing from us. You are missing.

Love,
Kath

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