Intersection

Whenever we would go on road trips, Mark was constantly scanning the landscape for hawks and eagles. He’d point them out, and when I couldn’t see them he’d start yelling at me, “WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? HOW CAN YOU NOT SEE THAT??!!!” I’d tell him that’s just how it went with me and dodgey birds and go back to reading my book while he’d mutter under his breath. When we would be close to the Mississippi River on the way to Illinois, he’d put me on high alert. “Pay attention now, Kath. You always see the big birds near rivers,” and I’d kinda, sorta, half-ass pay attention and he’d point something out and I’d turn my head that away and say “OH MY GOD IT’S HUGE!!!”, which satisfied him and saved the marriage for another day.

On a Sunday morning many years ago, when Mark and Will were on a weekend camping trip with the Scouts, I went out to get the paper. As I was walking back to the house I looked up to see several huge birds lurking in my neighbor’s tree. I was so creeped out that I stood there staring at them and then looked up and down the street for someone, anyone, to witness what I was seeing. There was nobody and I went inside and got my camera. I snapped a few photos and kept going in and out of the house to check on them until they mysteriously left like they came.

When Mark got home I told him about it. “They were the biggest birds I’d ever seen,” I said and he was like okay, yeah, sure, you-who-never-can-spot-a-bird. Then I got my camera to show him and he said, “Holy shit, Kath, those are vultures.” There were six of them and you-know-who captured it on film like a boss and I said, “Try to top that, Fisher.”

Mark liked all birds (except “those goddamn grackles“) and could easily identify them, and while he took care of them all year round, I feel like taking care of me is about all I can manage since he’s been gone. For months I’ve had a bag of seed in the kitchen and I cannot seem to be able to open it and fill the feeders. It was never my job and it feels like even the birds are disappointed when I show up to do what Mark did better and more consistently.

My biggest fear in life was for someone I loved to die suddenly and violently and then it came to be. There are details of Mark’s death that I have never told anyone, and even though my kids are adults, I will do anything to protect them from knowing all that I know of that day. But those details will suddenly slam into my consciousness and they carry so much weight. Crushing, horrific weight, and so I have to constantly refocus my thoughts on every other day of Mark’s life except the last.

A couple of weeks ago I had come home from work, left everything in the car, and went to the curb to get the garbage can to take to the backyard. As I was approaching the gate, I saw a hawk sitting on the lawn. I ever so quietly went to my car, grabbed my phone, and snapped a pic. That bird kept his eyes on me and I kept my eyes on him. He hopped a few feet back to the fence and it seemed like he was sitting on something and I couldn’t figure out what it was. All of this happened over the span of 2-3 minutes and then he flapped his wings and flew off with a squirrel dangling from his talons. I screamed like I was about to be the next victim in a horror movie. Then I ran around to the front of the house to see where he went but he and his dinner disappeared, and just like those vultures I’d seen years earlier, I needed somebody, anybody, to witness this murder in my backyard. “That was Mark,” my sister said when I told her. “He would never come back as a cardinal. That’s way too lame and everybody knew how he hated squirrels,” and we both laughed at the thought of him with beefy bird thighs vigilantly securing the perimeter.

As the days went on and I kept picturing that squirrel flying in the air, it circled back to Mark’s last day like it always does, how his mind convinced him that he had to leave, and how it was so not like him to ever consider let alone do something like that. In the thousands of days he has been gone there has not been a single one that I am not stunned by his death. Not one single day.

A week later I was on my way to Lowe’s when I noticed a hawk flying overhead. I watched it, saw the tail, and thought oh my goodness, look at me. I actually know that’s a red-tailed hawk, the hubs would be so proud. It was gliding on the air and it was such a peaceful sight to see it letting the wind tip his wings this way and that.

At the intersection of Mark’s horrific death and the aftermath, the details often sit like lead in my lungs. I fight to breathe, I fight to remember how it used to be. But I also think that unburdened by everything that caused him so much pain for so long, Mark’s soul effortlessly glided on air to the other side of life where it was tenderly scooped up by love and light, where he could finally set it all down and rest.

At least that’s what I think a Cooper’s hawk and red-tailed hawk were trying to teach me.