Don’t Look Down

On our first big family road trip, Mark, me, and the kids drove for three days from the midwest to Spokane, Washington to see Mark’s mom. After we had been there a few days, we left our two little ones with her while we took Maggie and drove to Seattle to see some of Mark’s friends from graduate school. It was a quick trip, and on the way back to Spokane, Mark noted that we weren’t far from Mt. St. Helens. “It sure would be a shame to be that close and not go see it,” he said. In reality it was a few hours away in a different direction but we decided to go for it.

I don’t think either one of us had any idea how long it took to drive up that mountain with the blown off top, but it took a long time and for me it was harrowing as we climbed higher and higher on the narrowest of roads. Mark would point things out and I would scream for him TO NOT TAKE HIS EYES OFF THE ROAD while Maggie giggled in the back seat at her panicking mom.

Before we headed up, one of the locals asked if we’d been there before and we said that we hadn’t seen anything but the news reports when it erupted. “Oh,” he said, “then you’ll be surprised at all the new life that’s sprung up.” By that point it had been fifteen years so we were expecting something vastly different than what we saw. As far as the eyes could see was tens of thousands of dead, flattened trees in every direction, stripped bare and laying like oversized toothpicks. “This is coming back?” I asked Mark. “I guess so,” he said as we stood in awe at the destruction before us.

As harrowing as the drive up had been, coming down was even more so as we hugged the paved road with barely a foot of gravel next to it, and a descent to certain death if you failed to pay attention for a second. Mark didn’t need me freaking out and said, “I’m going to tell you this and I need you to listen. Don’t look down, okay? Don’t look down and we’ll be fine,” and that’s what I did. I looked out, I looked in the backseat at Maggie, I looked at the pages of the visitor’s guide over and over, but not once did I look down.

Mark would say that to me another time when we were in Spain. While the entirety of his day was at a science conference, mine was hanging out with spouses I barely knew and that wasn’t going well. There was complaining about everything and it was spoiling the trip for me. After two days of that, I ended up doing things on my own, exploring the city and the beach every day after breakfast, meeting Mark back at the hotel for lunch, hanging out at the pool in the afternoon, and then meeting up again for dinner. One of the complaints that was valid was that the back staircase to the dining room always had dead roaches on it. Every day they were there and you’d think somebody would make sure they got swept up before meals but they never were. Mark never noticed them and when I said something about it he said, “Then just don’t look down.” I thought that was really dumb advice but I took it. We’d meet with friends in the dining room for dinner and drinks, followed by star gazing on the patio until midnight. We’d repeat it the next night and the one after that, me never looking down when we descended the stairs, and that dumb advice made for the most magical trip of our lives.

Recently, I was given some grieving advice. It caught me off guard because people just don’t do that anymore. As it goes when it comes to that sort of thing, I got defensive, and I hate when I get defensive. It sounds to me like I am bordering on hysteria and that is not who I am. One of the things that Mark appreciated in me was my calmness (sans the height thing) in most situations. But when it comes to being told what I should do about my life since the top of it blew off I push back hard.

We live in a society that tends to want grief to be like the express checkout lane at the grocery store, twelve items or less, move along, see you next time, don’t forget your detergent. Better yet, check yourself out so we don’t have to keep dealing with that sad vibe thing you’ve got going on. The weird thing about that encounter was that I wasn’t the least bit sad. I was fine, so when someone tells me what they think I need to do I want to shout THAT I AM DOING ALL THE THINGS and I’m here for yogurt and paper towels not life advice.

In the days leading up to Mark’s death, it felt like everything was unraveling in slow motion. When I told my therapist this week about something he told me years ago about his childhood, she said to me, “You know that’s just the tip of the iceberg, right? That’s what he could talk about. Imagine what he couldn’t,” and after forty years of knowing and loving him, I am still brought to my knees by the layers of loss he endured before he even met me.

And the oddest thing of all? He couldn’t look down because he couldn’t bear to see what was on fire all around him and I have to look down to see what’s growing from the ashes.