#38

Towards the end of spring during a counseling appointment, I told my therapist that I was dreading summer. “Both of the girls birthdays are in summer, Mark’s birthday, our anniversary, and then September will be here and already I feel the weight of it.” She asked me to consider looking at weeks of summer and not the whole season, which in theory seems reasonable, and which I have been unable to do successfully. Every day tick tocks ominously towards September 4th.

I can remember the smallest of details from our wedding, but neither Mark nor I could ever remember the exact date we got married. Every year it was the same conversation. Was it the 30th or 31st? We’d try to figure it out, some years I’d go rogue and say, “I’m pretty sure it’s the 29th,” and other years I’d get out our wedding certificate and yell down the stairs, “It’s the 30th!!!” Mark would yell up, “Okay, got it. Gonna store it in the vault,” and then we’d do the same dance the next year and the year after that.

When Mark died, the books in his office were put in the hallway for anyone in the med center to take. This was discussed with me as that was standard procedure, but in most cases due to retirement and not a death. Since I had no use for them I wanted them to go to anyone who needed them. Months later, I got an email from Mark’s colleague. One of his students had taken one of the books and tucked inside was Mark’s diploma from graduate school. Mark and I talked about this often. How I said he should frame it and hang it in his office like normal accomplished people do. He said, “Everybody knows I graduated. I don’t need to announce it,” and that was how things were with us when it came to our anniversary. We knew we were married at the end of July, give or take.

This year the end of the month came fast as I juggled my work schedule and the kitchen remodel, so when I opened my computer and saw a memory from eight years ago with a picture of Mark it took me by surprise. Even after all these years, even in the horrible ending, I couldn’t remember the exact date we got married which was classic Fisher style.

That night I went to hear a band where someone I met was playing. It was fun and a beautiful night to be outside. It was nice to talk to a guy, I have missed that. “Where do we go from here?” he asked which was a question I could not answer. I felt like telling him that if he heard the back story of how I ended up in a bar I never heard of, in a town I’d never been to, on what used to be my wedding anniversary he’d run for the hills as fast as he could.

“I don’t know,” I said, “and that’s as good of an answer as I can give.”

I talked about it with my therapist a few days later and made light of all of it until I described the photo of Mark that showed up that morning. Him at my sister’s wedding, wearing her hat with his usual grin and those bedroom eyes of his, and in the telling I lost it. Sobbed on a virtual appointment where not only did I get to feel all those feels, but with the added bonus of seeing myself crying on camera. I could not pull it together and kept apologizing because where did that come from?

From the dark and lonely places that nobody sees but me.

This life rebuilding balances precariously on a cheap hollow core door. When one door collapses another cheap one shows up to replace it. None of them ever feel solid enough to handle the weight of loss and years of memories, and I can feel September’s eyes on me.

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