Grief & Gratitude

When news of Mark’s death traveled beyond our house, the kids and I were immediately blanketed in such tender love and help, from phone calls and visits to express tearful condolences, a steady stream of plant and flower deliveries, and all the food we could ever need for weeks. Three days after Mark’s death the coffeemaker stopped working. I said something to my daughter about needing to get a new one and the next morning there were two on my front porch. A neighbor who was worried about all the food in the house going bad bought clear containers and spent hours cleaning out my fridge to make room for everything. When one of my brothers called to check up on me, I told him how so many people had swooped in and were taking care of everything we could possibly need and I started to cry. “It’s so overwhelming,” I said. “That’s because everybody likes you guys, Kath. I guarantee you that won’t happen when I die,” which isn’t true at all but it made me laugh which was the earliest and faintest pilot light of hope in that dark time.

Though the caretaking has trailed off since those early months, I often still have dinner delivered to my porch, packages left at my door, an invitation extended for a glass of wine, coffee, or to walk in the park, a text to see how things are going. A few weeks after Mark died, his Saturday morning biking friends showed up at the house to rake my yard and clean my gutters. They came a few more times that fall and have returned often to help me with things around the house. I miss the stories Mark always told me about them so when they arrive to help me I’m thankful that the friendships he forged didn’t die with him. When they are done and go home to take care of their own yards, I walk around and admire their work and usually end up crying because I don’t know how to repay any of this.

My life in general and especially since I met Mark, has always been one of gratitude. I was grateful a friend saw something in him that she thought would match something in me, I was grateful I said yes to that blind date when I wanted to say no. I was grateful that his career allowed me to live in several different places and meet fascinating people. I was grateful to have been given healthy kids who were challenging, fun, kind and curious, and remain that way. I was grateful for our house and finding ourselves in a neighborhood that believes community means being present for the celebrations and the losses. I continue to be grateful for the relationships we both built over the years that have sustained me since Mark has been gone.

The early days of grief overpower every sense like a tsunami, while at the same time you are expected to make immediate decisions. Every waking minute feels like fight or flight so when someone comes along to take care of something you didn’t even know you needed, it feels like you are allowed to take a breath when even that seems to have been forgotten. In those moments, the gratitude gets knotted and intertwined with the sadness like two tangled necklaces, and it seems impossible to figure out where one begins and the other ends.

When we were dating I worked in Chicago, and for a few months Mark got an internship in a lab at a hospital on the same train route as me so we’d go to work together. Much of that route felt gritty and dark with garbage strewn along the tracks accompanied by the sound of screeching brakes on the rails. The train would then go underground and make its scheduled stop at the station. We’d climb the steps out of the darkness and arrive to early morning daylight in the Loop – Lake Michigan to the right and the city to the left. Mark would head south to begin his day, I’d go north. I have thought a lot about those commutes on the train that we took together so many years ago. I’ve thought about the garbage and the dark, and how despite that when you got your first glimpse of the lake, whether it was blue and calm in the summer or gray and biting with winter’s cold, it felt like you had been anointed for the challenges of the day ahead.

Ever since Mark’s death I have been curious and terrified to know of the place where he died. When I got the death certificate that showed the location, I looked it up on my computer at work and had barely focused in on it before I needed to log off and escape to the back stairwell. I’ve imagined it in so many ways and every time it is strewn with garbage, and the thought of his last moments being amongst that saddened and sickened me. Last month as the anniversary date of his death was breathing down my neck, on a day when I felt battered and raging and so over everything, I decided to drive to the place where he gave up on himself.

Tall grass grew along the side of the tracks that swayed in the hot summer wind. There was no garbage littering the sides, no gas station styrofoam cups, no empty beer bottles, no plastic bags wrapped around weeds. There was the most unexpected sense of quiet and peace beside the hard metal of those tracks, and for the first time I wondered if the final passageway through the tunnel of Mark’s darkness was calm.

It is a hard thing to explain that in the well of loss even gratitude can bleed and bleed and bleed.