The Sorrow Suitcase

In the aftermath of Mark’s death, every single day felt like I was lugging around a trunk of sadness like a first class passenger on the Titanic. Instead of being able to pass it off to a steward like a wealthy heiress, I had to carry it wherever I went. It was heavy, cumbersome, and impossible not to notice. It filled every room I entered and the size of it sucked the air out of everything.

Despite that there were many people who were able to walk around that trunk like it wasn’t even there. They would tell me that they knew things would get better, that I was so strong, that at least I had those grandchildren of mine, that thank goodness I had a job to go to, that I was young enough and vibrant enough to find another husband, that time would heal this because when their grandma died time healed them. A teller at my bank told me her husband died and that Jesus was her husband now and he could be mine, too, if I only asked him. I wondered how the sex part of the Jesus-is-my-husband worked and would have brought that up if only I didn’t feel like running out of there screaming.

In all of those instances I wanted to ask, “But can’t you see my sorrow? Can’t you see that big trunk with so much love and humor, the three beautiful kids, the adventures, the silliness and the profound, the talks over coffee and dinner, the celebrations of birthdays, anniversaries, the jumping for joy when the NIH approved a grant? Do you not see that all of that is weighted in sadness and I never get to put it down? That I’m so tired and it’s so heavy and it’s right there in front of you and you keep pretending it’s not. That if you could just pick up the handle on the side and help me carry it for just a minute it would be so much more helpful than trying to Dr. Phil me out of this grief.”

Six years ago when Mark and I went to Montana we stopped in Missoula on the way to Glacier National Park. We had just eaten breakfast and were walking to a bookstore when I noticed the wing of a butterfly on the sidewalk. I reacted like I’d won the lottery. That kind of stuff always confused the hell out of Mark, my excitement over such a dumb discovery. “Can you believe this,” I said to him. “That all these people have walked by this butterfly wing and not seen it? That it’s still intact?” I carefully picked it up, wrapped it in a Kleenex and put it in my purse. It felt like an omen to me and when I got home I put it in the tiniest frame. I loved looking at that thing, the colors, the perfectness of it, that it was on the sidewalk waiting to be acknowledged by the right person.

Two years later we would take a road trip to drive our youngest back to California and Mark wanted to stop at a meteor crater in Arizona. We spent quite awhile looking at it and then he and Mallory climbed some rickety steps to an observation deck. I didn’t trust those steps and went into the gift shop. I had never been much of a rock person until I set foot in there and suddenly wanted them all. I was balancing a few in my hand and trying to decide what I wanted when I dropped one. It broke in half and the sound made everyone stop and look at me. The person working there said it was fine and that I didn’t need to pay for it but I thought I did. It felt like the two halves of Mark and me that I could make whole with some glue, but I wondered if maybe that wasn’t an omen too, that brokenness might be my future. Seven months later Mark would be dead and broken has defined my life since then.

These days the trunk of sorrow has been reduced to a large suitcase. It’s less heavy and not so cumbersome, but there are many, many times I still ram my leg into it and it hurts as much as those early days. The sadness stays tightly rolled inside and will always be there but it doesn’t coat as much as it used to. Now when someone notices my suitcase, when they say Mark’s name or tell me a story about him, when I can trust that they won’t tell me to look on the bright side or advise me how to live my life, I will zip open one of the side pockets, carefully unwrap my treasures and say, “But look at these broken things I saved. Aren’t they beautiful?”

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