This Holy Thing

At this time last year, I had gone to Florida for a few days to see my mom and two of my siblings, had interviewed and gotten a part-time retail job to accompany my office job, and had booked a flight and hotel in Tampa for an early March weekend. My dear friend (who lost her husband right after Mark), and I were going to be my roommates for Camp Widow – something we were weirdly looking forward to. I had gone for orientation for my new job, celebrated my birthday with my kids and youngest daughter who came in from California, and kept going to work. Mallory flew back home, a few weeks later I got sent to work from home for my office job, and I didn’t work at the store until mid-August.

Everyone has their story of regular life before Covid made its deadly march across the world. I am familiar with the habit of telling a story over and over when everything changes. I have told the story of Mark’s last days a thousand times. I learned that this is common when someone dies; you need to keep telling it because you can’t believe it. It is rare for me to do that now. Everyone has heard it, and despite the constant retelling it hasn’t changed a thing. I still can’t believe he’s gone.

In the early months when only essential businesses were open, the kids and I decided that our Sunday dinners needed to be put on hold until we saw how this played out. When I packed up my desk to work from home, I didn’t take any of the files from the annual audit I did every June as I thought the office would be open by then. I winged it from memory when it came to that, and we started our weekly dinners again because it was obvious that this wasn’t going to play out anytime soon. By the end of that month I was unemployed and Covid was claiming victims with a vengeance.

When Mark died, I constantly wondered how it was possible that life seemed to sail on so fluidly without him. I wanted to scream, “MY HUSBAND IS DEAD” at the grocery store, the hardware store, the bank. After awhile I realized I was in a club of one – the only person on earth who knew what it was to date, fall in love, be married, and have children with Mark Fisher. Life sails on because that’s what life does until it doesn’t.

This month marks one year since our worlds changed drastically due to a pandemic. The can-do spirit of the beginning when puzzles were passed around the neighborhood, and texts about venturing to the grocery store were sent with offers to pick up anything you may have forgotten, have been replaced by a weary resignation that despite multiple vaccinations at the ready, life is vastly different than it was just a short year ago and how it looks going forward is anybody’s guess.

This is grief.

It comes at you with a sledgehammer and a feather. The ache for a traditional Thanksgiving with a noisy, full table, the canceled weddings, the drive-by funerals that replaced our solemn gatherings to stop and honor the death of one, the dinner party, the birthday party, the prom pictures, the cap and gown, the first grader on day one with shiny hair and new shoes, the end of the big project celebrated with coworkers at the nearby bar. It is the inability to recognize a neighbor at Target because with a masked face they don’t look like anyone you know, it is shouting between plexiglass because every sound is muffled and difficult to hear, it is delivered packages of the basics and now knowing the UPS driver better than the cashier at the grocery store.

It is the constant uncertainty of how life looks moving forward and don’t we all function best on stability?

In the time since Mark has died, I am only now finding my stability. I dreamt for so long of him walking in the house and telling me he got lost and me running into his arms. If that were to happen now, if he were to pedal up the driveway, lift the garage door to put his bike away, and come through the front door, I think it would scare the daylights out of me. I am not at all fond of this new stability but I am grateful for it. It was hard earned and trying to find my footing in the muddy marshes of loss was exhausting and futile.

There will always be so many things I miss about Mark and the life we had. Memories pop up constantly that more often these days make me smile than cry. There are other things, though, that still knock the wind out of me. To remember those times when he’d cup my face and tenderly kiss me on the forehead still makes me cry as it should. He was my guy, he knew how to calm my roaring waves. Now when people tell me he is looking out for me from beyond or is riding his bike in heaven I nod and smile.

Maybe.

I don’t know.

He was no angel but the simple pleasures of doing life alongside of him was the holiest thing I ever knew.