Evolution

When Mark finished graduate school, he got a post-doc from the National Institutes of Health. He flew out for the interview and was hired, then kept working in the the lab of his mentor while I worked at a bank as we waited for our firstborn to arrive. Six weeks after Maggie’s birth, we packed up our life and drove a U-Haul from Illinois to Maryland.

While he was excited to start his career and prove himself in the big leagues, it was a hard move. We were moving across the country with a newborn and no family support, no friends, no job for me, and Mark’s starting salary of $26,000. Even in 1987 that was dismal. You would think all of that would be plenty to make a new mother cry and it did, but I also had to find a new home for our dog, Clem. We couldn’t afford a rental that allowed pets because it required a higher security deposit and we didn’t have the money.

Mark was aware of how hard this was on me (especially the dog part), and three days after we arrived, with a townhouse filled with unpacked boxes and a million things to do, he told me we could go wherever I wanted. I said I wanted to see the White House. He figured out the Metro system and we packed Maggie and the stroller and the diaper bag and got on the train.

When we arrived at our stop and carried the stroller up the steps, the first thing we saw was the Capitol Building. I couldn’t stop staring at it. I’d seen it in photos and on the news so many times but to see it in person felt surreal, almost like it was a mirage. We walked all over that day, eventually finding our way to the White House, and over the years we would go to the National Mall often. We went to the inauguration parade of George Bush, we decided at the last minute to hop on a train and watch fireworks on the 4th of July at Lafayette Park. We went to Arlington National Cemetery many times, Ford’s Theatre, civil war battlefields, Harper’s Ferry, Annapolis, Monticello, Mt. Vernon, Williamsburg, Andrews AFB, the National Zoo, the Air & Space Museum, the Natural History Museum. We drove to Rehoboth Beach in Delaware most weekends in the summer, we went several times to Chincoteague Island in Virginia where it was not unusual to see wild horses walking along the surf. The entire five years that we lived there we never stopped being tourists.

We often had visitors come to town and the first thing everyone wanted to see was the monuments. We never got tired of showing them around, but Maryland summers are brutally hot and humid. When a friend of Mark’s was visiting and at the lab with him all day, the only time we could squeeze in a trip to the National Mall was at night. From that moment on it was my favorite time of day to go there. It was quieter, cooler, and so much more reverent at night. The Lincoln Memorial was awe inspiring, the Vietnam Memorial so solemn.

To make ends meet, Mark started working on Saturdays with another NIH friend and colleague who delivered antiques. Dave’s wife worked for the store that was selling these high-end pieces and Dave needed somebody to help him with deliveries. Mark was all for it as it was strictly cash and we needed the money. They delivered across the DC, Maryland, and Virginia area, often going into the service entrance of multi-million dollar homes in Potomac. They delivered pieces with price tags that were more than their combined salaries, and held their breaths until they got it in place. They banged up their knees, their shins, their elbows. On a miserable, cold day they delivered a piece to David Gergen, long before he was a staple on CNN, and he insisted they stay for a bowl of chili.

For both of us, the years and our many experiences in Maryland held such fond memories. We made many friends there as everyone was from somewhere else, and without any of us having family close by we found our community. It was a neighbor who came and got Maggie at midnight while Mark and I headed to the hospital to deliver Will. It was a neighbor who became one of my dearest friends and who has been on this widow journey alongside of me from the beginning. It was neighbors who made it feel like home.

On our last trip to DC and the National Mall, I said to Mark as we were going up the stairs from the Metro, this time with two kids, “I never get tired of seeing the Capitol. It still takes my breath away.” He looked at me and said, “I know, Kath. I’m really going to miss that sight.”

To watch the Capitol being overtaken on Wednesday by terrorists shocked and sickened me. I had the tv on and was half paying attention to it to watch coverage of the Electoral College vote and suddenly there were thousands of people mobbing our Capitol. I watched well into the night, and the next morning woke up thinking that it really couldn’t have happened. Citizens of our own country wouldn’t have violently desecrated the Capitol in the manner that they did. Nobody could have that little respect for what that building represents to do that and yet it was true.

The thing about living in that part of the country is that it is surrounded with our nation’s history. You can feel it in your bones – the blood, the struggle, the death, the rows and rows of headstones all in an effort to become and sustain a democracy. It was hard fought and the struggle continues and always will. In that place the evidence of the struggle is everywhere.

As a scientist, Mark talked about evolution all the time, mostly in regards to diseases, but since when are we not required to evolve, to examine our lives, to open ourselves up to new ideas and new ways of thinking? On that awful day last week I saw a group of people who have stopped evolving, whose lives feel so insignificant to them that they destroy history to feel important, who wear violence and woeful ignorance like a badge of honor, who call themselves patriots as they pillaged their own country and beat a police officer to death.

I often think about what Mark would have to say about all that has happened in the last year, but it’s too painful to consider for very long. The denial of scientific evidence, the denial of the effectiveness of mask wearing, the denial of the validity of a vaccine, the denial of the results of an election. At the start of every semester, he’d often have a student who would challenge him in class about evolution, who would ask him why he didn’t teach creation as well. “If you want to learn about creation,” he’d say, “I encourage you to take a religion class. I teach science. If you don’t believe in evolution you cannot make it in this field and you cannot make it in my class. Any other questions?”

One time when we were at someone’s house for dinner, the host confronted Mark about cancer and how it was a pharmaceutical cash cow that the government was aiding to make money. Those claims have always been difficult for me and still are. Like everyone else, Mark and I have lost many friends and family to cancer including our own fathers. The idea that scientists are willfully participating in some vast conspiracy to not find a cure for cancer is antithetical to everything they do. While I did a slow burn at the audacity of the allegation, Mark calmly explained that cancer cells are constantly evolving, that protocols work until the cells adapt and change because that is their job. I loved to listen to him talk about evolution because unlike everything else he talked about I understood that, and when it came to conspiracy theories he would listen and then calmly destroy every facet of the argument with a deluge of facts that he could rattle off as easily as a grocery shopping list. He was such a bad ass when it came to that kind of stuff.

In these last two years I have been going through my own evolution. I would love to wake up one day and have this grief magically vanish and turn into a beautiful butterfly, yet life often deals cards that are anything but beautiful and that we’d rather not hold. But you cannot be married to a scientist for decades and not understand that life constantly grows and changes. The only thing I have known from the beginning is that I had a choice to make when it came to a future without Mark, and living in the stagnant waters of loss would only breed disease.

So, too, is the case for democracy.

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