Traces

Walking into the house after finding out that Mark had died, the first thing I noticed was his sandals under the buffet in the dining room. I found them in a hiking store in Maine and encouraged Mark to at least try them on even when he kept insisting he didn’t need them. He loved them the minute he slipped them onto his feet and wore them out of the store and for the entirety of two summers. He wore them so much he always kept them under the buffet so he didn’t have to dig through the closet for them.

That night when the kids had left and Mallory was home and in bed, I walked into every room like I’d never been in this house before. All of it suddenly felt foreign and lifeless. I went into the kitchen to get the coffee ready for the morning when I saw something on the counter. Every night when Mark went to bed he wore ear plugs and a black sock over his eyes. He was serious about sleep and at some point I got him an eye mask but he didn’t like the elastic and went back to his trusty black sock. He didn’t move much in his sleep and the sock would stay on his face throughout the night. To me this was an odd and amusing nightly ritual of his and when he laid that sock over his eyes it meant he was done talking until morning. There laying on the kitchen counter was his black sock with his ear plugs on top. That meant he had taken them downstairs when he tried to sleep and placed them on the counter before he left the house for good. For whatever reason I grabbed my phone and took a picture of it and his sandals. I don’t know why. Maybe to document that he was just here, maybe to document life and death in a span of hours.

There have been many moments like that. A bar of his half-used soap in the shower, his toothbrush in the drawer, a pair of his reading glasses that he would set on the gas meter while he was grilling and reading a paper at the same time, his garden shoes on the back porch, notebooks from his office with page after page of his handwriting, his business cards in my wallet. On my job if any student I dealt with had an interest in science I’d ask them what their future plans were. If they seemed uncertain or in need of advice I’d give them one of Mark’s cards and say, “Call him and tell him that you got his phone number from me and that I said he could give you some help.” The student would always be rather skeptical and I’d say, “Just call him. He’ll talk to you.”

Those traces of him always take me by surprise. How could he be here and then gone? Vanished from my life without a farewell, a bedside I love you as he lay dying, a parting with sweet sorrow. Instead I sat in an interrogation room in a police station with my legs shaking uncontrollably and heard that my husband was dead. It was traumatic to hear those words, it’s still traumatic to relive it. Yet in the two years since everything suddenly changed, there are still traces of Mark’s vibrant life tucked in drawers and closets, the garage, the backyard, the basement.

For my birthday the year Mark died, he and I went shopping for me to pick something out and then have lunch. Mark rarely shopped so he was always amazed at what was out there. I used to think that he should get out more so this retail stuff wasn’t such a wonder to him, but his idea of getting out involved a bike, the lab, a creek, or the woods and he was better off for it. We went into store after store and I wasn’t feeling any of it, but when we were wandering around J. Crew he found a bag for work. Mark used everything until it was literally falling apart and he had been having a hard time finding a replacement for the bag he had that was safety-pinned together. It had to sling over his shoulder and rest on his back for his bike ride in but he never wanted a backpack. He found the perfect bag that day and since he never bought himself much it was always sweet to see the excitement he got from finding something just right.

Three weeks after Mark died and his stuff was released from the police department, I went to pick it up and there was his blue work bag. I brought it home and opened it up to see pens and business cards from work trips he went on, notebooks, allergy meds, the usual kind of stuff. I set it on the chair where it stayed for the longest time. Every day I looked at it and thought the same thing. Remember when you got that bag, Mark? When we were out for my birthday? You loved that bag. How could you just leave it?

That bag sat on the chair for months and was bursting at the seams with our life – the happiness, the arguments, the joy and the frustration, the time I had something on my kidney that a doctor said was a suspicious mass. I fell asleep when we got home from the hospital and Mark went in the backyard and cried then came inside and laid down next to me. When I woke up he said, “This has to be okay. You cannot leave me, Kath, you just can’t.” It turned out to be no big deal and we breathed the biggest sigh of relief together and now here I am without my husband and every day I think the same thing.

You loved me. How could you ever believe that it was okay to leave me?

• 

•