When The Bough Breaks

On the day that Mark died, when I was frantically trying to find him, the police were frantically trying to find me. A close friend and neighbor of mine who was walking her dogs, told me later that she had seen them in front of my house about 10:30 that morning. When they couldn’t find me they drove to my daughter’s house, and thankfully both her and her husband were at work. Hours later they were able to contact me via my son who gave them my number.

The detective said he needed to talk to me right away. I told him I was leaving work and he offered to meet me at the house. I was terrified, shaking, and confused, but not so confused to know that I didn’t want them anywhere near my house. He said we could meet wherever I wanted and suggested a coffee shop. That seemed absurd to me which is how I ended up at the police station.

That summer I had been going to physical therapy for sciatica and was at an appointment the day after Mark’s funeral. The therapist, whom I barely knew, had heard what happened from another client who was friends with Mark, and hugged me long and hard. “Come here,” she said and led me into a back room. “I’m going to let you talk as much or as little as you want,” she said. “You can tell me anything or nothing at all and then I’ll work on your back.” I poured my broken heart out to her and will always be grateful that she was in my life at that moment. When I told her about the police wanting to come to my house to tell me what happened and that I refused she nodded. “I don’t even know why,” I said, “I just didn’t want them in my house.” She told me about her and her husband telling their kids that they were divorcing, that they all sat on the back deck, that it was such a hard conversation and everybody was crying. “I loved that deck,” she said. “We were out there all the time and from the moment I had that conversation with my kids I hated it. You did the right thing. You didn’t invite trauma into your house.”

Last week I was coming home from the grocery store, and as I turned right onto my street a patrol car was waiting to turn left. My stomach flipped, I felt sick. Police just don’t drive down our street for no reason so I pulled into my driveway and watched to make sure they were driving away. An hour later my neighbor stopped by with the awful news that our dear friend’s son had died, that the police car I saw was indeed delivering bad news, this time to a different house. Two hours later I walked into their house without a single word to offer to make anything better.

I have spent the last few years writing about grief, about the beautiful and awful things that have been said to me, and despite all of that I can tell you that there are deaths that leave you hollowed out, and that experience flies out the window in the reality of loss. Grief is pain, excruciating pain, and there is nobody who feels comfortable in it or around it. “I think I’m in shock,” my friend said as I stood beside her. “You are,” I said, “your brain is doing its job. It feels like you are going crazy. You’re not, you are being protected.”

Working through my shock and pain has been the fight of my life. I once read that trauma is the gateway drug and nothing could be more accurate. How easy it would be to pick an addiction to bury this, but instead I have paid thousands of dollars in therapy to prevent that from happening. But this death that landed on my street and to someone I care about so much has rocked that newly built foundation to its core. My therapist once told me, “All death will be about Mark because that left the deepest cut,” and the last week has proven that true. At my friend’s house and talking to her a few days ago, I saw the business card of the police officer on the table, his cell phone number on the back. “I have one of those cards,” I said to her, “I saved it.”

I don’t know why. It’s tucked in a drawer, and many times I have thought of calling him and telling him that I survived the worst day of my life and the days after, that my garden this year is the best it’s ever been, that I have a different job and out of the blue they offered me a raise because they like me and want to keep me around, that I’m even dating some. How odd to want this person to know those things when he delivered such devastating news, left my life, and then everything collapsed. Maybe it’s because if he were to deliver different news, news that it was a very unfortunate mix-up, that he was clearing things up and finishing the paperwork, I would want to overhear him say, “She says that when I bring you home things will look a little different, but not to worry, that you’ll still recognize her smile.”

And I would smile hearing that because if Mark thought he was responsible for breaking the bough of who I’ve always been, of causing the thing he most loved about me to go away, that would be unbearable.