Do Not Forward

In the weeks and months following Mark’s death, when I rarely slept more than a few hours every night, I would lay in bed and listen to the sounds of the trains. I decided that if I paid close attention to the time and the blast of their horns I could figure out their schedule and thus know the exact train that hit Mark. This never happened because at some point I’d fall asleep and then I’d have to start all over again the next night and the next until I ended up back again at Tuesday.

To say this was an exercise in insanity is an understatement but that’s where I was in those days.

A few months later I started going to therapy every Monday. I was working close to the therapist’s office and would leave work a bit early and talk about train schedules and last day walks in the park, about the summer of foreboding I could not figure out, and all the other things that go with a traumatic loss. One week I told her that the staff in our office received an email about a student who was kicked out and had his eyes set on making things right, specifically with our office. His picture was included in the email. An hour later the building services manager went desk to desk to show his photo to all of us with instructions on what to do if we encountered him, and that’s when it occurred to me that this was some serious shit.

Campus security showed up to patrol our floor and that’s when the wheels of my fragile state of mind came apart. I walked out the doors of the office to go deliver something and approaching me was an officer, his hand resting on a weapon. As soon as I saw his uniform I panicked. I made a beeline to the bathroom where I hid in a stall until my heart stopped pounding. The rest of the week I went up and down the stairwell at the back of our office so I didn’t have to see him because if he couldn’t find me he couldn’t tell me my husband was dead.

This is how a traumatic death leaves its calling card.

When I talk about therapy, it often feels like it’s met with a “Oh, that’s nice you have someone to talk to about your feelings.” And that is true, but it’s also about managing trauma that resurfaces over and over. Working through scenarios where every police officer who happens to cross my path isn’t there to deliver devastating news, stopping the movie in my head that says I did something wrong and made this all happen, letting go of train schedules, of learning to live daily with the sound of their long, urgent blasts day and night.

On three different occasions since Mark has been gone, I have received a text with news that someone had committed suicide. Committed suicide is a gut punch and I never word Mark’s death like that so to read it in a text is even worse. Because I did not know any of these people there was no reason for me to be informed. In one case it was to cover a work shift and since I was on a leave I couldn’t work it anyways. That one went on and on until the point I had to turn my phone off. “If you’re ever thinking of ending your life call me even if it’s in the middle of the night….” it said. That night I was in a terrifying loop of memories of the days before Mark died, that day, the days after.

Reliving. Reliving. Reliving.

That took weeks to shed and several therapy appointments, and in retrospect it now seems funny in a ludicrous way. Like you are on the precipice of life and death and suddenly remember that you and Angela worked stock that one time and she seemed kind of nice so maybe you’ll give her a ring-a-roo so she can talk you off the cliff.

I no longer have the job I did when Mark died and have since moved my therapy appointment to earlier in the day since I am off on Mondays. They are often still surprisingly hard, and as I told my daughter recently, it is talking about how Mark the boy grappled with his childhood that does me in. “You know, Mom,” she said, “you gave him everything he needed. You gave him your big family, the three of us, security and safety.” I can remember so many times watching Mark interacting with my family and looking so happy, Mark with his colleagues and biking friends, Mark at Thanksgiving with our friends and her siblings deciding he was to be named an honorary brother, Mark when our house was full and the table overflowed. He loved that.

Those things have taken me a long time to take credit for, to acknowledge that maybe he’d have been gone sooner if not for me. But the anguish of death lurks around corners and surfaces with no warning flares, so I am begging you to not share your devastating news with someone who deals with the long-term effects of a traumatic death in ways you will never know. Because though she may look the same on the outside, on the inside there hasn’t been a single day that she doesn’t remember how it used to be, and how she must make peace with the weight of an untimely and violent death that has settled deep inside her bones.