What Remains

When Mark and I had been married for more than two decades, he decided to become a Catholic. I’d long given up on that, and though I hoped it would happen one day, Mark was Mark and he did everything in his way and on his own time.

It came to be because I started going to a new church, one that was much more welcoming than the one the kids and I had been going to for years, and also one with a very charismatic priest. I’d come home and tell Mark about it, how every Sunday this guy managed to tap into current events and stun and surprise me with a message, and how my retelling of it could never do it justice. “You’ll just have to come one day and hear it for yourself,” I said, and to my surprise Mark announced one Sunday morning that he was coming to church with me and the kids. He kept coming, I got involved in the annual auction, he started riding with the newly formed bike team, and things evolved. After a week long ride across Kansas where he spent a lot of time cycling the flat terrain with Fr. Matt, he came home and said, “I’ve decided to become a Catholic,” and I was speechless. He asked a dear friend, a doctor at the med center and fellow biker, to be his sponsor and went through the RCIA program. Every Thursday night he’d come home and tell me something he’d learned that night, something he would ponder until the next week, and in all matters both academic and spiritual, Mark flourished most when he was a student.

He got baptized at the Easter vigil while me, the kids, and much of my family who flew in from Chicago sat in the front row. I looked at him getting drenched and coming out a few minutes later in his linen suit and thought, “Never say never because this is a damn miracle.” He stood to the side of the altar, I smiled at him, he winked at me. The next day we had our annual Easter open house – our little house full to the brim. Mark thanked everyone for being there, got very emotional, and it was one of those lovely days that feels good to return to over and over.

If there was any gift at the time of Mark’s death, it was that this priest was in the country on that horrible day. Fishing in Alaska but on his way back to Kansas City before returning to South America. Our dear friends, Mark’s sponsor and his wife, contacted him to see if he could preside over Mark’s funeral. There is much I could write about that day, but it often feels like a dream, or maybe like I’d told Mark years ago, you had to be there. I remember Fr. Matt talking about he and Mark riding side-by-side on those Kansas roads, how Mark turned to him and said, “I want to be a Catholic,” and then taking off on his bike leaving Matt in the dust. “He was a Catholic long before it was official,” he said to all of us brokenhearted, and that was true.

This Easter our table was full and lively, and even though I find that beautiful church I went to for so long to be weighted with emotional flashbacks, I still possess the Easter spirit of someone who was raised Catholic, who raised her kids in that faith, and then surprisingly saw her husband ride a bicycle down that path. The following day I felt awful – dizzy, nauseous, and a headache that lasted for a week. I assumed I’d picked up a bug somewhere until I remembered that like clockwork I get sick after every holiday. Though my head and heart move forward, my body fiercely remembers how it used to be and needs to shut down for a few days to catch up with reality.

The grass has turned green again, the lilacs have started to bloom, the peonies are budding. I’m outside constantly, even in the cold and rain, to watch it wake up, to see what rises from the dead and comes back to life. A thousand times since he died I’ve asked Mark the same thing. “Where are you?”

“I’m everywhere, Kath,” he answers, and it is in the spring that I know that to be true.