Author: Kathleen Fisher

At this time last year, I had gone to Florida for a few days to see my mom and two of my siblings, had interviewed and gotten a part-time retail job to accompany my office job, and had booked a flight and hotel in Tampa for an early March weekend. My dear friend (who lost her husband right after Mark), and I were going to be my roommates for Camp Widow – something we were weirdly looking forward to. I had gone for orientation for my new job, celebrated my birthday with my kids and youngest daughter who came in from California, and kept going to work. Mallory flew back home, a few weeks later I got sent to work from home for my office job, and I didn’t work at the store until mid-August.

Everyone has their story of regular life before Covid made its deadly march across the world. I am familiar with the habit of telling a story over and over when everything changes. I have told the story of Mark’s last days a thousand times. I learned that this is common when someone dies; you need to keep telling it because you can’t believe it. It is rare for me to do that now. Everyone has heard it, and despite the constant retelling it hasn’t changed a thing. I still can’t believe he’s gone.

In the early months when only essential businesses were open, the kids and I decided that our Sunday dinners needed to be put on hold until we saw how this played out. When I packed up my desk to work from home, I didn’t take any of the files from the annual audit I did every June as I thought the office would be open by then. I winged it from memory when it came to that, and we started our weekly dinners again because it was obvious that this wasn’t going to play out anytime soon. By the end of that month I was unemployed and Covid was claiming victims with a vengeance.

When Mark died, I constantly wondered how it was possible that life seemed to sail on so fluidly without him. I wanted to scream, “MY HUSBAND IS DEAD” at the grocery store, the hardware store, the bank. After awhile I realized I was in a club of one – the only person on earth who knew what it was to date, fall in love, be married, and have children with Mark Fisher. Life sails on because that’s what life does until it doesn’t.

This month marks one year since our worlds changed drastically due to a pandemic. The can-do spirit of the beginning when puzzles were passed around the neighborhood, and texts about venturing to the grocery store were sent with offers to pick up anything you may have forgotten, have been replaced by a weary resignation that despite multiple vaccinations at the ready, life is vastly different than it was just a short year ago and how it looks going forward is anybody’s guess.

This is grief.

It comes at you with a sledgehammer and a feather. The ache for a traditional Thanksgiving with a noisy, full table, the canceled weddings, the drive-by funerals that replaced our solemn gatherings to stop and honor the death of one, the dinner party, the birthday party, the prom pictures, the cap and gown, the first grader on day one with shiny hair and new shoes, the end of the big project celebrated with coworkers at the nearby bar. It is the inability to recognize a neighbor at Target because with a masked face they don’t look like anyone you know, it is shouting between plexiglass because every sound is muffled and difficult to hear, it is delivered packages of the basics and now knowing the UPS driver better than the cashier at the grocery store.

It is the constant uncertainty of how life looks moving forward and don’t we all function best on stability?

In the time since Mark has died, I am only now finding my stability. I dreamt for so long of him walking in the house and telling me he got lost and me running into his arms. If that were to happen now, if he were to pedal up the driveway, lift the garage door to put his bike away, and come through the front door, I think it would scare the daylights out of me. I am not at all fond of this new stability but I am grateful for it. It was hard earned and trying to find my footing in the muddy marshes of loss was exhausting and futile.

There will always be so many things I miss about Mark and the life we had. Memories pop up constantly that more often these days make me smile than cry. There are other things, though, that still knock the wind out of me. To remember those times when he’d cup my face and tenderly kiss me on the forehead still makes me cry as it should. He was my guy, he knew how to calm my roaring waves. Now when people tell me he is looking out for me from beyond or is riding his bike in heaven I nod and smile.

Maybe.

I don’t know.

He was no angel but the simple pleasures of doing life alongside of him was the holiest thing I ever knew.

After the holidays were over, I knew I was going to need to buckle up for the long and lonesome months of January and February. For the past two years I have gone to Florida for a few days for a reprieve from snow and cold, but because of Covid that wasn’t a possibility this year. I made a list of things to do around the house, things I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and so far I haven’t done a single one because I have neither the desire or energy for any of it.

I have struggled with too much time on my hands which leads to too much thinking, which leads me to feel as if I’ve been catapulted backwards into the early days of grief. Those days when crying and second guessing every word that came out of my mouth the weekend before Mark died was the only thing I did. In a recent week when I cried every day, my therapist suggested I needed to up my meds. I already knew I was sinking and what had been working was no longer effective, and so the next day I called my doctor. By that afternoon I had a new prescription, and my first thought when I looked at the bottle was shame. Shame that I couldn’t pull myself out of another hole, shame that I wasn’t trying hard enough, shame that I couldn’t exercise, meditate, pray, or organically eat my way to a better state of mind. Shame that I was broken.

Every year on the night before Valentine’s Day, Mark would jump up and say he needed to go to the store. I always knew he was going to get me a card. He’d be gone forever, come home, and say, “Since when did the drugstore up at the village close?” I’d tell him it was three years ago and didn’t he remember that from last year when he tried to buy a card there. He never could remember that or that the Hallmark store didn’t have the same hours as 7-11. He’d come home after driving all over to find a store that was still open, a card for me in a little brown, paper bag. The next morning, propped against the coffee pot was his signed card for me to open.

This year on Valentine’s Day, my sinking held off until I went to bed, when I terribly miss Mark’s warm body next to mine, and those quiet conversations in the dark when he would reach for my hand before he fell asleep. As it usually goes, I replay every minute of the weekend before he died. Every missed opportunity to stop what would happen a few days later, every time I believed I screwed up. This time, and for the first time, the replay was different. This time everything that bubbled up were the memories of what was right. The long walks, the time he lagged behind me and I stopped and asked him what was wrong. “It’s my hip,” he said, “my hip is bugging me.” Mark never complained about aches or pains and I said, “Then how about you take some ibuprofen when we get home and we walk a little slower. Will that help?” Or the time he talked about the inner demons he kept battling and I said, “Mark, aren’t you so tired of feeling ashamed? Don’t you think maybe it’s time to set that down and not keep carrying it?” “I’m trying,” he said, “I’m trying.” I looked at him and said, “Maybe you could use some help with the trying,” and he said that sounded like a good idea. The black koi he brought home from a friend’s pond to put in his own because the raccoons couldn’t see them as easily and maybe they wouldn’t be having them for dinner like the orange ones. When he called me over to the car and lifted the tailgate to show me the bucket of fish and how excited he was as he slowly put them in his pond. When he walked the creek on Saturday afternoon and sat at the dining room table pulling off everything stuck to his pants and I said, “You seem happy. You should do that more often, don’t you think? Just walk the creek and clear your head.”

Since Mark’s death, heartache and grief have been my constant companions along with depression and anxiety. In the after, I have come to know that there are tools available to manage these unwelcome boarders. Some tools that take so much work and staying in places where I’d rather run screaming out of, and easier tools like taking a pill every day. Quieting the voice that tells me I’m not trying hard enough, or that taking something to manage my mental health is a sign of weakness is a daily struggle, but I know better than most that a foundation built on shame can collapse in the blink of an eye.

As a scientist, Mark could be a brutal critic. He was outraged by laziness and shortcuts, and didn’t think anybody who half-assed their way through a lab should be in the business of science. He saved his harshest criticism, though, for anyone who he believed was not evolving in their research to keep up with a rapidly changing scientific world. He was highly competitive and pushed himself every day. He knew what everybody in his field was doing and was constantly trying to keep one step ahead of them. For those who he thought were skating by on their past accomplishments, or not getting out of the way for someone hungrier, he’d complain to me about them and then finish it off by singing Glory Days by Bruce Springsteen.

Glory days, well, they pass you by….

Mark had his own Glory Days in the years that he was a roofer, and it wasn’t due to it being some major feat, but because he survived and lived to tell the tale. During those physically hard blue-collar years, Mark worked for two different companies. I didn’t know him when he worked for the first one, but according to Mark the guy who owned it was a cheat. Cheated customers and cheated his employees, and when Mark had enough he went to a competitor and got hired on the spot. The owner of that company was named, Jimmy, a full-blooded Italian at 5′ tall, and what he didn’t have in height he made up for in rage. He could explode at the drop of a hat, the kind of rage that would have made someone like me cry and then quit, but Mark could perfectly imitate him with his frantic pacing, swearing, and arms flailing, so every meltdown gave him more material.

The roofers would report to the office by 7:00 a.m. Mark was a foreman so he’d lead a crew to the job, whether it be shingle roofing or hot tar, and over time Jimmy relied on Mark because of his experience and how he could help younger guys learn the ropes. It was with Jimmy’s company that Mark would learn how to spit nails. Long before automatic nail guns, he’d throw a handful of nails in his mouth, turn them around, spit one out and pound, spit one out and pound. One of his front teeth had a groove permanently worn into it from spitting nails. On our first date he showed it to me and said that he once swallowed a nail. On other dates, we’d drive around Chicago and he’d show me jobs he’d done. He’d pull over and talk about the pitch and how they had to nail narrow sticks to the side of it to stand on as they roofed, the bullet holes they’d sometimes find in tear-offs, how many bundles of shingles he’d pounded that day.

Much as Jimmy liked Mark, he cut him no slack. He constantly was on him about getting jobs finished on time, getting repairs and leaks figured out in one visit, making customers happy. One time we were invited to a family party at Jimmy’s house, and when Mark introduced me to him he asked, “What are you doing with this dumb sonofabitch? You can do way better than him.” Mark laughed and Jimmy slapped him on the shoulder, looked at me, and said, “I’m kidding you. I love this guy,” and it was mutual.

But the forklift story that Mark told would surpass the regular and frequent verbal abuse. Mark and the other roofers reported to the office to get their jobs for the day and Jimmy was in rare form. He was raging mad first thing in the morning and when he got that mad he’d tear off the job sheet, hand it to each crew, and then start pointing at trucks and yelling at everybody to get out of his face. In Mark’s case, he needed him to use the forklift to move shingles before he left and Mark knew to move fast and efficient before Jimmy exploded again. After moving a few loads of bundles, the chain on the forklift broke. I think that probably happened often to most of the equipment in the yard but it was the first time it happened to Mark and all five feet of Jimmy came running over. “What did you do, Fisher? Did you just break my forklift? Did you just do that to me?” Mark didn’t know what he did so he started trying to fix it and Jimmy said, “I swear to God, Fisher, if you don’t get out of here in two minutes I’m going to crush your nuts in that forklift. Do you want that? Do you want me to crush your nuts??!!!”

That night when Mark told me what happened my mouth hung open. “He said that? That he was going to crush your nuts? That’s bad, Mark, if he does that we’ll never have kids.” Mark laughed and said he didn’t mean that literally, but based on the stories I heard every day about Jimmy I didn’t believe that for a minute. Mark said he ran to the truck, jumped in, told the guy driving to hit it, and they peeled out of the yard with Jimmy screaming at him in the rearview mirror. By the end of the day when they got back all was fine. The forklift was fixed and Mark was back in Jimmy’s good graces.

Years after we moved away from Chicago and were home for the holidays, Mark said he was going to go to the yard and pay Jimmy a visit. He walked into the office and Jimmy jumped out of his chair and said, “Well, will you look who the cat dragged in.” Mark updated him on his life, told him he was a professor now, and that we had three kids. There was nothing more important to Jimmy than family and so the news that there were little Fishers made him happy for us. A crew came in during their conversation and Jimmy said to them, “Look at this guy, will you? He used to do the same thing as you and now he’s a professor. If you dumb sonofabitches applied yourself once in awhile maybe you could do that.”

Before Mark left, Jimmy said, “I’m glad you came by. I’m really proud of you.” It would take years of Mark keeping his own lab afloat, when money started to dry up and he’d panic, to see that he and Jimmy always had something in common. They stayed hungry less it all collapse while they were in charge, but even on his worst days at the med center, on days when it felt like everything was in freefall, Mark would come home, tell me about it, and then say, “But nobody threatened to crush my nuts today so I got that going for me.”

Last week I went on a job interview. While I love my little, bohemian retail gig with its assortment of the coolest women ever, there have never been enough hours and since the Christmas season ended even less so. I get a sweet discount and want to keep working there, but I need something else to add to it as being inside this house and my head all day and night is making me a little loco. I have been job hunting since last summer and sending off resumes, but since I got the Covid bounce last June, there are a whole lot of other people doing the same thing. The competition is fierce and I rarely hear back from anything I’ve applied for. Last week, though, the employment storks flew overhead and dropped a listing in my lap for an office position at a medical spa. I checked out their website (Skin resurfacing!! Botox!! Fillers!! What does all this stuff even do?? I don’t know but I think I need it!!!) and I was like, yep, that will work for my current needs.

I sent my resume, and a mighty fine cover letter if I do say so myself, and they contacted me two days later for a phone interview which I aced because I’ve sort of made a career of interviewing for jobs. The following day I was asked via email to interview in person for the position, and even though it was the coldest, rainiest day ever, I was glowing from the inside out in anticipation of all those employee discounted anti-aging procedures. Not really. I slept crappy the night before and wanted to stay home drinking coffee and look outside the window and say, “Thank God I don’t have anywhere to go today,” instead of dressing like Sinbad the Sailor in a Nor’easter to go sell my skill set.

But I sucked it up and put the directions in my phone even though I sort of knew where it was because of my crack navigation skills, and then it turned out it wasn’t where I thought it was. It wasn’t even close to there and Google Maps had me in and out of a residential area and turned around and then I was headed west and I didn’t want a job WAY OUT THERE so I was kind of annoyed because there was no indication in the phone interview that I would have to drive that far for discounted Botox. Finally I made it, stressed and ten minutes late which is a stellar start to an interview. I waited all of thirty seconds because they run a way tighter ship than my lost, underemployed self, when in came the doctor and owner of the center and yadda, yadda, yadda.

During the yadda, he told me he loved women, LOVED THEM. I mean who else can bring life into the world, amiright? But women, once they get to a certain age, tend to dry up and need help to feel better about themselves and give them back the youth of their twenty year old self. I looked down at my chapped hands that scream in agony as they get slathered in hand sanitizer a dozen times a day and nodded in agreement, but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the dry place he was talking about.

He asked about my experience and I gave him the Cliff notes version and he said, “That’s interesting,” with the same enthusiasm as me when someone tells me the details of their mother’s recipe for meatloaf. He told me that women come in for all kinds of treatments and quite often they don’t want anyone to know, not even their husbands, and what he’s learned from years of doing this is that women are deceitful. I sat up straighter. Did he just tell me that women are deceitful? Did he really just say that to me? Does he know that I’m a women or is he one of those people who don’t see gender? And then he said it again.

Moving right along, he also said it was important that the newest employee fit in because they were like family. He had, in fact, just treated the staff and their significant others to a little getaway in Mexico and that’s when my face gave up the goods. You go on vacation together? No no no. In the history of my working life I have never, and I MEAN NEVER, wanted to vacation with coworkers. Not even if it’s free. A vacation is for the sole purpose of getting away from everyone in the Department of Misfit Toys, not hanging out at a pool and having to suck everything in for five days. Besides that, a few months ago when I was in a hot tub I discovered that my bathing suit top gets big air pockets inside that sound like a gas explosion as they search for an exit point. Over wine and starlight and serious conversations about life, random bubbles would climb up my top and launch themselves out and I kept saying, You guys, it’s my suit!!!” and they said “Did you know it farted when you bought it?”

Dr. Doctor talked about his patients and how they range from their 30s all the way up to, heck, 60ish, and I said, “Oh 60s, hmmmm, interesting,” in my meatloaf voice. What about somebody, say, 65? Does that dried up fossil actually come in and think she can look better? I mean, what are you supposed to do with her? Sheesh, at that point she needs a miracle worker, amiright? Things were winding down and I was asked if I had any questions or anything to add. I had A LOT to add but I gave him a smile and said, “Well, this sounds like a very, very special place and I really appreciate the time you have taken to talk to me,” then went back out into the Nor’easter wiser than when I walked in.

The next day I woke up and thought, “Oh my gawd, what am I going to do if they actually offer me this job? What the heck….” which now seems comical to think they’d want somebody my age front and center in their business. Here’s the before before and then she got some treatments from us and now she looks like a regular before which was the best we could do considering what we had to work with, because pssssst, she’s in her 60s.. I sent a thank-you-so-much email and said it didn’t seem like the right fit for me and I sure hoped they found the perfect match. Two hours later I got an email from them saying that though they loved meeting me and learning more about me they were going to go in another direction.

Excuse me???

I read it three times. I checked to make sure my earlier email had been sent. I had chalked the whole thing up to a learning experience in the land of injectables, and now they were trying to reject my rejection with their own rejection?

I wrote all kinds of responses to them in my head, every one being adamant about who rejected who first, including a screenshot of my email with the time clearly indicated. I had therapy later that day and told my therapist the whole story which she found very entertaining until the end and said, “Wait, they sent you a not interested email after you sent them a not interested email?” “Exactly.” I said. “They can’t do that,” she said, “you were the breaker-upper.”

If Mark were here he would say that kind of job isn’t like me at all and he would be right, but I don’t have him as a guardrail in my life to careen against. I did imagine him saying, “Nobody puts Baby in the corner,” with his faux outrage and I’d giggle, he’d say it was their loss, and life would go on.

Life does go on, a lot harder and far less bright, but there are many things that have remained the same. Just like when Mark was here, I am still managing to get in my own way and failing to pay attention to what I know and what he told me a hundred times, “Just write, Kath, that’s what you’re supposed to do with your life. Write and somehow it will work out.”

A few months before Mark died, I took a yoga class. For eight weeks I’d leave the house on Tuesday night, and as I was walking out the door Mark would say, “Have a good class,” just like I’d tell him to have a good ride on Saturday mornings. On the second to last class, I was doing a pose and felt a slight muscle pull in my lower back. The rest of the week I babied my back so as not to make it worse, but during the last class I did a pose where you leaned over touching your fingertips to the floor while raising your opposite leg as high as you could against the wall. Should I have done this with my back already hurting? No, but as one of the older women in the class I wasn’t going to sit that one out while those younger seemed to be doing it easily.

It only took a few days for that pulled muscle in my lower back to morph into sciatica that lasted for months. I went to a chiropractor who said in six sessions I’d be back to my old self. After twenty, meeting a deductible, and a lot of copays, I quit. I went to two different physical therapists, had a steady diet of ibuprofen, and after five months without much success, I was finally given a referral to a pain specialist. That appointment was scheduled to take place two days after Mark died, and it wasn’t until January that I rescheduled it. The doctor recommended a steroid treatment and I was so desperate I agreed to it immediately. I was told it wasn’t necessary to bring anyone with me and arrived late in the afternoon on an overcast winter day to a full waiting room. One by one patients were called back, and at one point a nurse asked me my name, my appointment time, and how long I’d been waiting. I gave her the information and she said, “Okay, I just noticed you’ve been sitting here awhile and want to make sure I have you on my patient list.” She left the waiting room and a man sitting directly across from me looked at me and said, “She waltzes in here after all of us and gets priority treatment. Looks like we have reverse discrimination going on here, folks. Guess it pays to be a woman,” and then he snapped the pages of the newspaper he was reading to emphasize that he really was a toxic jerk. I was so taken aback and finding everything about being there too hard that the only defense I could muster was to curl up in my chair in a fetal position.

I did get called back when it was my turn and not a minute sooner, and while the waiting room felt accusatory and ugly, the other side of the doors were frantic and stressful. The portable xray machine for the department wasn’t working and they had spent the day having to share the ER machine making everything backed up. The doctor came in and gave me a two minute briefing before I was wheeled into the procedure room to get multiple shots into both sides of my lower back. I should have been able to go home soon after but my blood pressure was too high to release me and I had to hang around waiting for it to go down. When I got the okay from the nurse that I could leave, I couldn’t get out of that place fast enough.

The next morning I woke up and had no side affects from the shots and no pain, my sciatica was gone. I was so happy and told everyone at work that they’d seen the last of me hobbling around the office with my bad back, and that lasted less than a week before it came roaring back. The doctor had told me that sometimes these shots work with one treatment, sometimes it takes as many as three. It didn’t matter to me. I managed my first health hurdle without Mark while being harassed by a stranger in the waiting room and I had no intention of repeating that experience again.

After death everything is a first-time hurdle and it’s unpredictable what will knock you flat. There’s plenty of warning for the first holidays, the first birthday, the one year anniversary of death, but there are other firsts that don’t come with a warning label. Mark and I were both passionately political from a young age, we followed it all whether it was local or national politics and we loved watching election returns for state races and the presidency. We always voted together, standing outside in a snowstorm for two hours for a presidential election when we moved here because the county didn’t expect a heavy turnout and there weren’t enough voting machines. I expected voting this past November to be hard without Mark, but there were so many volunteers yelling Covid protocol every thirty seconds that it felt like the security line at the airport and I just wanted to cast my vote and leave.

When inauguration day arrived last week and I watched it all day long like I always do, when night fell and Mark should be coming home from work and celebrating with me, when all of a sudden absence was the loudest sound in the room, I felt like a bird that flew into a plate glass window and slid to the ground in a stunned and shaken heap. All the excitement and hope that I felt earlier in the day set with the sun and it turned into a lonely winter night that I didn’t see coming.

It would be days later before it felt like I was returning to myself in a way that I have learned to manage. A new day in a new week presented itself with an unrelenting cold rain which seemed especially fitting, and every unwritten word about Mark’s death remains firmly planted up one side of my spine and down the other.

When I moved bedrooms many months ago, I cleaned out Mark’s dresser. I had been dreading it but it wasn’t as hard as I thought it was going to be. It was mostly underwear and a lot of socks with no mates, bike shorts and jerseys. Mark’s drawers were always a mess, he would put everything together in whatever drawer had room, shove the drawer closed, and then stand for the longest time in front of the dresser in the morning looking for something. I’d be especially helpful and say, “You know, if you spent a few minutes organizing it this wouldn’t be such a big deal.” Then he’d imitate me in an annoying bitchy voice because 1) it turns out I wasn’t being helpful at all, and 2) he could not be shamed into caring about an underwear and sock drawer.

After days of looking at this dresser like it was a some kind of ticking time bomb about to go off, I pulled a drawer out and started sorting everything. Some things needed to be thrown out, others went into a bag to donate. When my son came by to help me move some furniture, he went through everything to see what he wanted. The bags then got moved to the downstairs bedroom where they sat for months. I decided it was crazy to keep walking around them and put the bags in my car to take to a donation center where they have sat in my trunk for a few more months. I didn’t want to look at these bags and I cannot seem to let them go.

This weekend I cleaned the front closet. It is tiny, I cannot believe the five of us squeezed winter coats, boots, hats and gloves into it when the kids were all at home. When it got to just Mark and I in the house, you would think it would have been less of a mess but that was not the case.

I started by pulling everything out and it overflowed the hallway. Then I pulled the shoe basket out and saw a pair of Mark’s sandals. The dumbest sandals, they had a Velcro strap across them and didn’t fit him at all. Mark’s toes hung over the top and I always told him he should throw them away, but they were good for taking the trash out or running outside in the rain to unclog a downspout. Why in death shoes bring you to your knees is beyond me but they do every single time. I pictured him digging in the bottom of the closet to find them, slipping them on his feet, me seeing his toes hanging out, him running out the front door in them.

Him alive in his shoes.

It didn’t get much better after that. Biking gear, his favorite winter hat, his fleece jacket, gloves, the boots he would wear when he and Will went camping, the waterproof boots he wore when he shoveled snow, the gear of life. Like sorting through his drawers, I did the same thing with the contents of the closet, only this time I couldn’t stop crying. All of it was a heaping pile of loss.

Over these past two years I have read many grief books to make sense of this life and to confirm I am not crazy. Some have been good, others of no help at all. One of them said that when it came to going through your loved one’s belongings to use the barf test. If the thought of it makes you want to throw up you’re not ready. If it doesn’t then you are. But then what?

I often daydream of getting in the car and driving with no destination in mind, just leaving and along the way finding exits that say, 20 Miles to A Great Night’s Sleep, Welcome To Your New Life – No Reservations Required, Gas, Showers, and Bottomless Peace Next Exit. I have imagined so many things while harnessed into this rollercoaster, this being a huge misunderstanding and Mark coming back, or a horrible dream that I wake up from and he is asleep next to me. Or the possibility that it could be different and good once again, a different relationship, happier days where joy comes naturally to me like it used to.

It all churns over and over and over, but in every scenario I have yet to imagine giving away the remains of Mark’s life and not walking away feeling like I’ve lost everything.

Postscript: Like most things I’ve written since Mark died, this was an attempt to come to terms with the next step. After I wrote this I contacted one of my daughter’s friends who has worked with the homeless for years. She promises that these things are desperately needed and will be used immediately by people living on the street. I think Mark would be okay with that. I’m going to do my best to be okay with that too.

Every holiday season, Mark’s Saturday morning biking group would have a Christmas party that included spouses. I’m not sure when it started but it was our favorite party of the season as Mark talked about these guys all the time and it was a chance to get to know them and their significant others better. Between them, they would do a gift exchange that usually involved some kind of gear. If Mark seemed excited by what he got I’d say “Oh that’s great,” or “That will sure come in handy,” when most of the time I had no idea what it was.

The first year I went to the party after Mark died, I asked my son and son-in-law to go with me. I was going to attempt to be strong even if it required a couple of sidekicks, but all day I felt like throwing up. I was okay once I got there and everybody was very welcoming, but it was hard and as soon as I came home I went to bed and cried.

The following year the party was at the home of a couple I knew well and I decided I could manage this one on my own. After all, Mark had been dead for over a year. One of the bikers was moving back to Australia in the coming week, and instead of the normal gift exchange it was rigged that every gift was for him with mementos to remember his time in town and with the group. It was such a lovely and thoughtful gesture and I was so moved by it. I remember sitting there thinking that this was how you were supposed to leave a group, with a party and gifts, good wishes and a sweet goodbye. You don’t leave by ending your life so that your farewell is a funeral and your wife has to stand up and talk about how funny and passionate you were. I was barely holding it together when some guitars came out to sing a version of a Christmas song specific to the biking group. I lost it and kept telling myself TO GET IT TOGETHER but I couldn’t. I couldn’t stop crying, I couldn’t get out of the chair, I couldn’t do anything, and all I felt was shame for publicly falling apart like that.

The next thing I felt was an arm around me telling me it was okay. I didn’t even know who’s arm it was because my head was down and I thought that if I dared to lift it everyone could see that Mark’s wife shouldn’t have come because she makes everyone sad and has ruined the party. The arm stayed there, with a firm hold on me, whispering “it’s okay” over and over, and when the song was over I got up and saw it was the wife of one of Mark’s friends. I don’t remember if I hugged her or not but I do remember whispering, “thank you,” before I grabbed my stuff and ran out the door. Though it took place over mere minutes, it is seared into my mind because that woman literally stood next to my pain. She didn’t try to fix it or diminish it. She stood next to it and didn’t move until I did and there aren’t many people who can do that.

I have heard many, many times, “Call me if you need anything.” There are times that I am capable of asking for help outside of my son and son-in-law but mostly not. I have lived my entire adult life being fiercely independent and building a support system wherever we lived. Since Mark died it is a daily challenge to support myself, to not succumb to the depression that nips at my heels the minute I get out of bed, to quiet the voice that screams at me YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN YOU OF ALL PEOPLE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN. I don’t have the energy to pick up a phone and ask for help or to say it’s a really bad day because all I’m programmed to do is to try to keep my head above water.

A few months after Mark died, a friend and I went to hear Cheryl Strayed speak at a fundraiser for the library. Her book Wild has always been one of my favorites and her talk was so inspiring and exactly what both of us needed to hear. On the way home I was talking about the utter emptiness of my life and said, “You know, I’d just like to see a cardinal and think that it’s Mark’s spirit paying me a visit. Just one cardinal. Is that too much to ask?” When I got home there was a gift bag from a friend on my porch. Inside was a cardinal windchime.

While some put the burden on me to let them know when I needed something, others were able to figure it out while I tried to process the shock and horror of Mark’s death, when the light of my life was gone and weight fell off of me pound by pound because I didn’t even know I needed to eat.

When Mark finished graduate school, he got a post-doc from the National Institutes of Health. He flew out for the interview and was hired, then kept working in the the lab of his mentor while I worked at a bank as we waited for our firstborn to arrive. Six weeks after Maggie’s birth, we packed up our life and drove a U-Haul from Illinois to Maryland.

While he was excited to start his career and prove himself in the big leagues, it was a hard move. We were moving across the country with a newborn and no family support, no friends, no job for me, and Mark’s starting salary of $26,000. Even in 1987 that was dismal. You would think all of that would be plenty to make a new mother cry and it did, but I also had to find a new home for our dog, Clem. We couldn’t afford a rental that allowed pets because it required a higher security deposit and we didn’t have the money.

Mark was aware of how hard this was on me (especially the dog part), and three days after we arrived, with a townhouse filled with unpacked boxes and a million things to do, he told me we could go wherever I wanted. I said I wanted to see the White House. He figured out the Metro system and we packed Maggie and the stroller and the diaper bag and got on the train.

When we arrived at our stop and carried the stroller up the steps, the first thing we saw was the Capitol Building. I couldn’t stop staring at it. I’d seen it in photos and on the news so many times but to see it in person felt surreal, almost like it was a mirage. We walked all over that day, eventually finding our way to the White House, and over the years we would go to the National Mall often. We went to the inauguration parade of George Bush, we decided at the last minute to hop on a train and watch fireworks on the 4th of July at Lafayette Park. We went to Arlington National Cemetery many times, Ford’s Theatre, civil war battlefields, Harper’s Ferry, Annapolis, Monticello, Mt. Vernon, Williamsburg, Andrews AFB, the National Zoo, the Air & Space Museum, the Natural History Museum. We drove to Rehoboth Beach in Delaware most weekends in the summer, we went several times to Chincoteague Island in Virginia where it was not unusual to see wild horses walking along the surf. The entire five years that we lived there we never stopped being tourists.

We often had visitors come to town and the first thing everyone wanted to see was the monuments. We never got tired of showing them around, but Maryland summers are brutally hot and humid. When a friend of Mark’s was visiting and at the lab with him all day, the only time we could squeeze in a trip to the National Mall was at night. From that moment on it was my favorite time of day to go there. It was quieter, cooler, and so much more reverent at night. The Lincoln Memorial was awe inspiring, the Vietnam Memorial so solemn.

To make ends meet, Mark started working on Saturdays with another NIH friend and colleague who delivered antiques. Dave’s wife worked for the store that was selling these high-end pieces and Dave needed somebody to help him with deliveries. Mark was all for it as it was strictly cash and we needed the money. They delivered across the DC, Maryland, and Virginia area, often going into the service entrance of multi-million dollar homes in Potomac. They delivered pieces with price tags that were more than their combined salaries, and held their breaths until they got it in place. They banged up their knees, their shins, their elbows. On a miserable, cold day they delivered a piece to David Gergen, long before he was a staple on CNN, and he insisted they stay for a bowl of chili.

For both of us, the years and our many experiences in Maryland held such fond memories. We made many friends there as everyone was from somewhere else, and without any of us having family close by we found our community. It was a neighbor who came and got Maggie at midnight while Mark and I headed to the hospital to deliver Will. It was a neighbor who became one of my dearest friends and who has been on this widow journey alongside of me from the beginning. It was neighbors who made it feel like home.

On our last trip to DC and the National Mall, I said to Mark as we were going up the stairs from the Metro, this time with two kids, “I never get tired of seeing the Capitol. It still takes my breath away.” He looked at me and said, “I know, Kath. I’m really going to miss that sight.”

To watch the Capitol being overtaken on Wednesday by terrorists shocked and sickened me. I had the tv on and was half paying attention to it to watch coverage of the Electoral College vote and suddenly there were thousands of people mobbing our Capitol. I watched well into the night, and the next morning woke up thinking that it really couldn’t have happened. Citizens of our own country wouldn’t have violently desecrated the Capitol in the manner that they did. Nobody could have that little respect for what that building represents to do that and yet it was true.

The thing about living in that part of the country is that it is surrounded with our nation’s history. You can feel it in your bones – the blood, the struggle, the death, the rows and rows of headstones all in an effort to become and sustain a democracy. It was hard fought and the struggle continues and always will. In that place the evidence of the struggle is everywhere.

As a scientist, Mark talked about evolution all the time, mostly in regards to diseases, but since when are we not required to evolve, to examine our lives, to open ourselves up to new ideas and new ways of thinking? On that awful day last week I saw a group of people who have stopped evolving, whose lives feel so insignificant to them that they destroy history to feel important, who wear violence and woeful ignorance like a badge of honor, who call themselves patriots as they pillaged their own country and beat a police officer to death.

I often think about what Mark would have to say about all that has happened in the last year, but it’s too painful to consider for very long. The denial of scientific evidence, the denial of the effectiveness of mask wearing, the denial of the validity of a vaccine, the denial of the results of an election. At the start of every semester, he’d often have a student who would challenge him in class about evolution, who would ask him why he didn’t teach creation as well. “If you want to learn about creation,” he’d say, “I encourage you to take a religion class. I teach science. If you don’t believe in evolution you cannot make it in this field and you cannot make it in my class. Any other questions?”

One time when we were at someone’s house for dinner, the host confronted Mark about cancer and how it was a pharmaceutical cash cow that the government was aiding to make money. Those claims have always been difficult for me and still are. Like everyone else, Mark and I have lost many friends and family to cancer including our own fathers. The idea that scientists are willfully participating in some vast conspiracy to not find a cure for cancer is antithetical to everything they do. While I did a slow burn at the audacity of the allegation, Mark calmly explained that cancer cells are constantly evolving, that protocols work until the cells adapt and change because that is their job. I loved to listen to him talk about evolution because unlike everything else he talked about I understood that, and when it came to conspiracy theories he would listen and then calmly destroy every facet of the argument with a deluge of facts that he could rattle off as easily as a grocery shopping list. He was such a bad ass when it came to that kind of stuff.

In these last two years I have been going through my own evolution. I would love to wake up one day and have this grief magically vanish and turn into a beautiful butterfly, yet life often deals cards that are anything but beautiful and that we’d rather not hold. But you cannot be married to a scientist for decades and not understand that life constantly grows and changes. The only thing I have known from the beginning is that I had a choice to make when it came to a future without Mark, and living in the stagnant waters of loss would only breed disease.

So, too, is the case for democracy.

When I was a little Catholic school girl in my plaid uniform, I learned in religion class that dead babies did not go to heaven or hell, but rather to limbo. The babies landed in limbo because they had the misfortune and bad timing to die prior to being baptized. Since an unbaptized soul couldn’t jump the line and get to heaven, the babies went to a different place as you wouldn’t want them with the drunks, the tax cheats, and the philanderers in purgatory. My mom would tell us all the time to “Pray for those poor souls in purgatory and the babies in limbo,” so it seemed perfectly legit that there was a cloud of floating babies that were on pause for eternity. I prayed extra hard for them as it seemed to me that those sketchy souls waiting to plead their case in purgatory had a better shot at making it to heaven than non-annointed infants, and mostly because I was afraid a limbo baby would drop from the sky and land on me when I was riding my bike.

Since Mark died, it feels as if I’ve been living in limbo, like I’m on a cloud looking at my life but not in it, as it doesn’t resemble anything I’ve ever known. Every morning when I wake up, I open my eyes, look around the room and the light filtering in through the blinds, and think, “Oh you’re alive.” It’s not a good thing or a bad thing, but an acknowledgement that I’m still here which is stunning progress. In the immediate aftermath of Mark’s death, I was certain I was dead and nobody had the heart to tell me that I needed to move along because I was taking up space meant for someone fresher, happier, and easier to be around.

On Christmas morning I woke up in an empty house which was a first for me and not something that will make the year-end highlight list. The kids came over later in the day, we opened gifts, had dinner, and zoomed with Mallory and her boyfriend. It was the quintessential pandemic holiday, and unlike the previous two years, I wasn’t engulfed in loss and on the verge of a sobbing meltdown. Besides the reminder from my mom to not forget about the babies in limbo, I learned from her that on the extra hard days you get dressed up like you care, put some lipstick on, and get on with it because nobody likes being around someone who wears their sadness like a heavy, black cloak. But at the end of the day I couldn’t wait for everyone to leave so I could have a good cry. I’d held it in for days and went to bed like I woke up, alone and a little scared of the future, and missing a husband and a life I loved.

The next day I woke up with the light filtering in through the blinds and told myself I was alive like I do every morning. Thankfully, these last days of this harsh year are nearly over as December gets torn from the calendar to make way for pages unmarked by celebration or tragedy. I happen to know a bit about years that are harsh and how they can make you spiral to the darkest of places. I also know about a new day blinking me awake with the light of a sunrise and asking me to try again.

I’m going to be okay. So are you.

Happy new year.

My dad died at the same age as Mark in the same month, and my mom was the same age as me when death and grief came barreling into her. For many years prior to my dad’s death, it was a tradition for Mark and me to go to Chicago for Christmas. When it was just the two of us it was a pretty easy thing to do, but it got much more complicated to pull off when we added three kids into the equation.

After my dad’s death I couldn’t bear the thought of my mom waking up alone on Christmas Day, and so it became more important to me that we keep up this tradition despite how insane it was to pack up all the gifts, suitcases and tote bags, and drive all day, sometimes through harrowing winter weather, to be with her and the rest of my family. This went on for years until I waved the white flag and said “no more.” Mark and the kids were mad at me because this is what we always did, so I suggested we try for Thanksgiving instead and see how that went.

My mom’s house was small and always too warm, so Mark, Maggie, and Will started staying at my sister’s house a few miles away while Mallory and I stayed with my mom. My mom loved the company, and as we settled in for the night, she’d flip through the channels and every year come across The Sound of Music. She would pour us some of her homemade Irish cream and we’d sit on the couch sipping a nightcap and watch a movie we’d seen dozens of times. Towards the end of the movie, when the VonTrapp family is hiding from the Nazis in the abbey, I once said to my mom, “I’m always so scared for them at this part. No matter how many times I’ve watched this I feel like I can’t breathe until they escape.” “Oh, I know,” my mom said, “I can’t imagine keeping seven kids quiet for that long,” and as a mother of six she had some street cred behind that statement.

This year my mom moved from independent care to the memory care unit of a retirement village as dementia causes her to slowly fade from herself and all of us. Due to Covid it has been impossible for my siblings to see her except through her bedroom window, and for my brother and I who aren’t close by, hard to schedule some kind of phone visit. A few weeks ago, I got an aide’s cell phone number and texted her to get a FaceTime call. She told my mom that she had a big surprise for her and showed her the phone. “Oh it’s my daughter,” my mom said, “that’s my daughter.” The rest of that very short call didn’t go well as she was having trouble getting words out. I talked mostly to the aide and said that my mom was ready to go, that she’d seen and done enough in her life to warrant some rest. The aide started crying and said, “Everybody loves her. All her kids and grandkids, you all love her. I wish you called yesterday. She was so chatty and held my hand and we talked and talked.” I can’t remember the last time my mom felt chatty. I wish I could, but like other times of impending loss, there’s no warning bell to signal that this time you’d better pay close attention because what you took for granted will no longer be.

The last time I saw my mom, sat and talked to her, felt her pat my back when she could see that I was so tired of being sad, was in February. Things shut down a month later, and our Mallory, who sat beside us during our annual watching of The Sound of Music, now lives in Los Angeles. Her plans to come home for Thanksgiving with her boyfriend were scrapped, and the last time any of us shared her presence with a glass of wine over dinner was in March. This Christmas seems like a gathering of beloved traditions and heaving them into a dumpster as a final stripping down to everything but the basics. But it’s also the story of a young, frightened couple that followed a star to Bethlehem to have their baby, and the VonTrapps escaping from their beloved homeland of Austria. In the breadth of this time that has seen so much death and darkness, I don’t think that the weary world rejoices, but maybe it stops for a longer pause to pay attention to who is here, who is there, and who always watches over us.

Merry Christmas.