The Tour

Many years ago (in the hey day of Lance Armstrong) when the Tour De France started being televised, Mark watched it avidly. He’d watch as much live coverage as he could early in the morning before he had to leave for work, and then the replay every night. He’d explain the stages and the yellow jersey to me, the teams and their support cars trailing behind, the drafting off each other to save energy. I was only interested because he was, and he’d often call for me to come look at the racers pumping up the mountains and say, “Can you believe this, Kath? The power in their legs to get up a damn mountain?” I preferred when the race went through small villages and everyone showed up along the side of the road, where bikers and fans were bottlenecked together through narrow and harrowing streets. Because Mark and I were dreamers, every year we’d watch and I’d say that we should go to France for a few weeks so that we could see the Tour De France in person.

For two years there was a professional, organized race in Kansas City that we watched. Mark was so excited and we went to the starting point to see them take off and then jumped in the car to catch up to them racing along a beautiful and scenic parkway only a few miles from our house. To watch professional racers on t.v. versus in person was a night and day difference. The speed at which they cycled was incredible, if you blinked you would have missed them whooshing by. It was an adrenaline rush, and for someone like Mark such a thrill to be so close to athletes that were at the top of their game. We stood along the road as they came by then ran to the other side to catch a glimpse of them as they circled back.

I was talking to a friend who mentioned the Tour De France was ending Sunday with the famous ride through Paris. I turned it on in the morning and only lasted thirty minutes before I had to turn it off. Like just about everything since Mark has been gone, it didn’t hold the excitement that he brought to it, and while I try to return to the things that mattered to him it never works. Sometimes that makes me so pissed off and other times sad. Can’t anything be the same?

The answer to that is no, nothing is the same, especially me. The hardest thing about Mark’s death in the early months was seeing a future that was completely blank. There was nothing there and it was terrifying, not a single plan, not a how-to book, not a map towards another place that while not where I wanted to go was at least a destination.

After growing up with five siblings, then getting married, then raising three kids, these last two years have been all about me and I am so sick of me. Tired of asking myself how I am doing, weighing in on how my anxiety is, meeting weekly with my therapist, managing my triggers so they don’t take me under. How small conversations with some people can set me back for days if I don’t redirect them away from personal questions I don’t want to answer, how exhausting it is to manage this life that is so foreign to me I don’t even recognize it, how keeping my head above water is never a certainty on any given day.

As I start another year without Mark you would think I’d stop imaging him coming home but sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and think he’s here, I see cyclist after cyclist ride by the house and beg one of them to round the corner and come up the driveway. I tolerate the days, I hate the nights, the nights where he is supposed to be next to me instead of God knows where. I don’t want to reinvent myself. I want my goddamn life back.

And I don’t get that.

Several years ago Mark and I were at a wedding for one of his colleagues and I was sitting next to a student I’d never met before. We were chatting and she said, “I love your blog. I read it all the time.” I was taken aback and said, “How do you even know about my blog?” “Oh,” she said, “Mark talks about it all the time. At the end of class, in the hallways, to anyone and everyone. He says you’re a great writer and we need to read it.” I looked over at Mark who was deep in conversation with someone else and thought, “You do? You tell everyone I’m a writer? I don’t even call myself that.”

When Mark was here there was a road map we drew together and it was surprising, unpredictable, and full of life and love. The destination never mattered because I got to do it all with him. Then he left and it’s taken me all this time to realize that he left a road map for me and every stop says the same thing.

Pay attention to this life because it all matters. Revel in the joy, laugh at the absurdity, sob when it breaks your heart, and celebrate the moments you manage to pull yourself out of the black hole of sad days.

Write, Specked Trout, write.