Category: Uncategorized

Dear Mark,

Yesterday marked the day you abruptly left this earth five years ago. The fact that you have remained dead fluctuates from astounding me to pissing me off. A few days after you died, when I had worn and slept in the same clothes for three days, I showered, put clean clothes on, did my makeup. There was so much food coming in the house and I couldn’t eat any of it. When a friend offered to bring me anything I wanted, I asked for a salad. When she arrived with it she said, “This seems really inappropriate to say but you look beautiful.” I didn’t think it was inappropriate at all. I wanted to look beautiful for you when you came back.

I started a small remodel of the upstairs bathroom three weeks ago. It had the kind of chaotic energy all my creative endeavors have which drove you nuts. Even though I always insisted I had a plan and you needn’t worry because IT WAS GOING TO ALL COME TOGETHER AND BE GREAT, I was always (and still am) flying by the seat of my pants. Months ago I called the guy who did the kitchen, he put me on the back burner which was fine, I called him again, and he said he’d get back to me which I’d heard before, and then he called the following week and said he’d be starting the next day. He demo’d the floor and said tile would be going down the next day and I didn’t even have tile. Hell, I hadn’t even looked at tile so I went on a frantic search that night with Will who picked a few samples out and said, “Let’s take these home and try them out,” and I said, “Yeah, no, I have to buy this one and cross my fingers it works because Kyle is laying it tomorrow.” Will let out a long sigh and said “Jeezus, Mom” which was very reminiscent of you.

While the upstairs bathroom was torn up, I was using the downstairs bathroom. I don’t know why you liked showering in there. The shower head and water pressure sucked but that may be because it’s the first time it’s been used in five years. Every night I’d go down, turn the water on, step in, and the first thing I’d see was your bar of soap and a bottle of shampoo tucked in the corner, on the other side your netty pot. Showering with the relics of the life we used to have was like keeping company with a ghost and I never lasted longer than five minutes.

Last month the kids and I all went to Ashley’s wedding. Let me tell you (as if you didn’t know), your kids are so much fun. When Mal and Rubin made it to our hotel and we were so excited to meet them in the lobby, the desk agent told us we had to lower our voices because it was midnight and they had a strict policy on noise which made me giggle because they had a far less strict policy on the smell of weed wafting through the place or providing hot water. The next morning we went to downtown Ann Arbor, had coffee, spent forever in a bookstore, then ate lunch and watched the coming and goings of the Pride Festival. The day had the quiet comfort of doing ordinary things with people you love and reminded me of the time you and I were in New York and took our coffee and books and went to Central Park.

I recently had a mammogram which I got a call back on for a spot that needed more imaging and an ultrasound. Early after your death if I’d have had the same call, I would have prayed it was the kind of cancer that took me fast so I could be with you. But my stomach flipped at the news and I told very few people. I longed for the intimacy I had with you, telling you and knowing by your eyes that you were worried and we were in this together, you squeezing my hand extra hard at night. Everything came out okay and I imagined you saying, “I knew you’d be fine,” when I knew, without a single word being spoken between us, that you were relieved beyond measure.

You always had a frantic pace about you that I never understood until recently. There were never enough hours in the day for you to accomplish what you wanted and as soon as you met one goal you’d have five more lined up. For the past two years I have been working at an interior design studio. The environment is wonderful, there are so many perks to this job, I am well paid, and yet so restless. Every month I create invoices for clients’ billable hours which requires me to take the notes the designers input and turn them into pretty little sentences. The guidelines are very specific and the writing has to be tight, not one unneccessary word. I edit daily which I think has helped me in my own writing, but on the flip side of that is accounting and spreadsheets and coding massive credit card bills. I’m not doing what I’m most talented at or proud of so I have a goal and a plan for the spring. I am not wringing my hands over this one as changing course and setting my sail in a new direction, even if it fails spectacularly, could never come close to the worst thing that ever happened to me.

I read that the hummingbirds were migrating so I made some nectar and filled the feeder. It’s in the front garden now where I can keep an eye on it and change it every few days. I had taken the feeder down and was letting it soak for a bit in the sink when I went out the front door and there was a hummingbird hovering where the feeder was supposed to be. With its long beak and the sort of franticness I’m familiar with, he darted back and forth a few times and then disappeared in the blink of an eye.

I don’t know how one ever gets used to the loss of beautiful things.

love,
k.

P.S. The bathroom CAME TOGETHER AND TURNED OUT GREAT 😉

Earlier this month over the course of eight days, I attended two funerals and a wedding. The first funeral was on a Friday morning for the husband of a friend’s friend whom I have gotten to know over the years. When Mark died she gave me a pen with a note telling me to keep writing. It’s still in the box and every so often I get it out and hold it in my hand before putting it away again, so afraid that I might misplace such a beautiful thing. I went to the funeral home, hugged the widow, and sat with some neighbors during the service. I was mostly fine but when it was over I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I sat in my car for a bit and watched as friends and family poured out of the funeral home. I don’t think there is anything sadder or more beautiful than seeing an army of people stopping their life to remember and pay respect to one.

The next day I went to the funeral for a friend’s son. He was young, successful, and married with two small children until it abruptly ended. Hundreds of people poured into that church – many I knew along with a host of his young friends and colleagues. For some of us this was a repeat of returning to this church after ten years earlier when a beloved husband and dad died. Over the years I observed this friend with her grace in loss and thought, “That’s how I want to be if Mark dies,” never hearing the loudly ticking count-down clock. So there we were again watching this graceful mom and widow, her daugher-in-law newly christened with that awful title, his brother and wife, and so many family members filling the front pews. Within those walls the utter unfairness of this death was as palpable as the shock.

The following Friday the kids and I headed off for the wedding of Mark’s niece. When she got engaged and we received the save-the-date card, I told the kids that they should all plan on being there. Like them my niece has lost a parent, the sister my kids’ dad loved dearly, and if life had played out differently Vicki would have been front and center and Mark would have been beaming from the sidelines. But the certainty I had about being there waned as the wedding got closer as this would be the first time I would see any of Mark’s family since his funeral. For many months after Mark’s death I tried to stay in touch but every phone call would send me spiraling with sadness and anger. I was already so far down that I was terrified of what would happen if I went any further and so I stopped most contact.

We flew into Detroit and the next morning piled into an Uber to spend some time in Ann Arbor before we had to head back to the hotel to get ready for the wedding. Mallory was sitting next to me in the car and asked if I was doing okay. I was not. My anxiety was through the roof so I surprised myself when I said, “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t keep holding all of this against Grandma when I don’t know her whole story. I have to let this go.” Over the years of our marriage, my mother-in-law would frequently tell me that there was nobody more perfect for Mark than me. “You have always let him be exactly who he is,” she would say to me and those words were such a gift then and even more so after he died.

We went to the wedding and sat towards the back. When it started and Mark’s mom was walking up the center aisle my eyes immediately filled with tears. She looked older, thinner, needing an arm to steady herself, and so beautiful. Then the bridal party walked up, Lou with his parents, Ashley with her dad, and in the first row on the aisle seat was a bouquet of flowers for Vicki who was very much included in the ceremony she didn’t live to see. The vows were recited, a beaming bride and groom were pronounced husband and wife, and in that joyful wedding way they hand-in-hand practically skipped down the aisle. The kids and I waited for some of the crowd to disperse and when I saw Mark’s mom off to the side we headed over to her. I hugged her tight as she sobbed in my arms. “This is so hard,” she said and I told her, yes, this day was as brutal as it was lovely. The kids all enveloped her in hugs and she introduced us to everyone around her.

When Mark died, people had all kinds of ideas as to what happened that day that caused him to end his life. Sometimes they felt the need to share their theories with me and I have been asked several times if he was cheating on me. He was not and never had. Because I still fiercely love him I protect him in death as I would in life. It is also because I know what he told me and I know what I saw but there are huge gaps of time that are blank. I was so hurt when people filled in the blanks to come up with a story to try to make sense of a senseless act. Somewhere along the way I did that exact thing to my mother-in-law which I hadn’t realized until I was sitting in the back of an Uber.

The rest of the night was perfect. My kids have never been to a single wedding reception that they haven’t danced for hours. I was on the dance floor with them and grabbed my mother-in-law to join us. “This isn’t like the old days when we did the polka,” she said with those same beautiful eyes Mark had which were a slice of heaven to see again.

At the second funeral the minister said, “Love is notoriously bad at letting go,” and oh dear god I thought, how have I only thought of that as a negative thing? In a world that encourages moving on from our losses as quickly as an expiring lease, grievers prefer to share our stories and our tears and remind everyone that this beautiful and gutting thing stays forever.

As it should.

From the moment I met Mark I was wowed by his intellect. He took deep dives into subjects that interested him and I often wondered if he had a photographic memory. He could recite facts easily about a variety of subjects and I’d always ask, “How do you know all this stuff?” “I read it,” he said, and I read too but I never could come close to retaining the volume of information that he could.

For as smart as Mark was, he was also very gullible. I’d be reading the paper and gasp out loud. He’d come running in from another room and say, “What’s wrong, what happened!!!,” I’d say, “Oh my god, your horoscope is only one star today. Don’t even go to work. Your moon is twisted in knots and HR is probably going to fire you for showing up in that spandex every day.” He’d get so mad at me and storm out of the room mumbling, “For chrissakes, you and your damn horoscope…..”

Over the years I did that to him many, many times and every single time he fell for it.

One time a group of women I know were getting together and invited me. I thought it was with spouses/significant others, but it turned out that Mark was the only guy there. He didn’t mind and they made him feel so welcome that after that he was always trying to invite himself to my girl’s night. We drank our wine and ate our soup, and when the table was cleared someone said, “Time for the Tarot cards?” and inside I was like yesssssssss while Mark exhaled a big ol’ sigh like you’d expect from a guy in his career. I ignored him. I can’t remember what my cards said but afterwards I said, “Now do Mark,” which he vehemently protested but he was surrounded by a bunch of women who weren’t going to let that happen. His cards said that his financial outlook was going to look very good in the near future and I squealed. He was waiting on a grant and I was like, “Welp, Fisher, I guess we know how that’s going to go down because the cards don’t lie,” and I think he wanted to declare it all hogwash, but that grant was stressing him out.

Will texted me a few weeks ago to see if I wanted to go see a psychic to which I immediately responded OF COURSE I DO. A flooring rep he knew from coming into the design studio where he worked was hosting it and told him he should bring me along. As soon as I agreed I got cold feet. I knew it would be emotional and I didn’t want to hear things John Edwards style with random thoughts being shouted out before a live audience. He texted the host who assured him that anyone who wanted privacy would get it. The day before I still was backtracking and wanting to bail but a storm barreled into our area knocking out power. With trees down everywhere this wasn’t going to be a quick fix so on day two of no power with temps climbing to the nineties and a phone that needed to be charged I decided to go meet a psychic.

It took a long while after arriving for me to wander over to this woman. I was curious and terrified. We had a bit of chit-chat before I blurted out, “Okay, let’s get into this,” and what unfolded over the next thirty minutes was incredible, interesting, gut wrenching. “First of all,” she said, “he wants you to know that he was not in his body the day of his death. It’s important to him that you know that. He was not in his body.” She elaborated and I felt instant relief. I have recreated his last moments on earth over and over until the point of agony. She told me that he wanted me to know that he loved his life but that he is now free, that something short-circuited in his brain in adolescence and from that point on he was never free.” Five minutes in and I was sobbing.

From that powerful opening she said that he will always love me, that whenever we are all together he is with us, that he could not have survived without me and that Will knew that. Will who was sitting next to me nodded. All of the kids have said the same thing but Will told me several times that if I had been the one to have gone first that he would have moved back home to take care of his dad. She asked me about his ADD and my mouth dropped open. It has only been in the last few months that it occurred to me that maybe Mark had ADD. He could come up with a hundred ideas and get them in motion, but once the grand plan was executed he lost interest, got overwhelmed, or moved on. I am sure that every student who ever worked for him would say, “OF COURSE HE HAD ADD,” but for me he was just Mark, and though he often drove me nuts with his ideas, it never occured to me he was wired differently. I have been mulling it over for months and told nobody, not even my therapist.

At one point she asked me if Mark was a class clown. Mark was very funny but in the typical terms of being a class clown that seemed like a stretch. I did say that he was excellent at dropping a one-liner to reduce the tension in a room or situation. “He wants you to know that even though he could do that he never took his eyes off the room,” and a chill went through me. She then asked me if I had been sick because Mark was worried about my health. After months (or maybe years) of feeling utterly exhausted all the time I went to the doctor. I didn’t know if it was grief, depression, regular life or all three, but I knew something was wrong. My bloodwork came back with a too low B-12 count that was causing all kinds of vague issues including my hands often feeling numb.

In our years together Mark and I traveled very different avenues to get to the same place. “The pulse of life is all around us,” he used to say, and he saw and understood that at a molecular level while I saw and understood it differently. In his last few days what I most wanted for Mark was for him to be free of the things that had been wreaking havoc on his mental health for a very long time. I got my wish in a way I could have never predicted, a way that will always be painful for me, our kids, and everyone who knew and loved him. But there he is, a million starlights away and right here, and sitting on a couch across from a woman named Susan who was trusted to deliver messages from the dead, I swear that for the briefest moment the drumbeat of his pulse and mine were back in sync.

***Caveat: I know this sort of thing is not for everyone. This experience was so raw and tender to me (and Will who was there the entire time) that I am requesting if you have any doubt about the validity of it that you not share that with me. I lived with a doubtful scientist for 35 years and have heard all the arguments as to why this makes no sense. I also know that if that doubtful scientist wanted me to know something he’d do it in a way that would bring me some peace and hand me a story that you’d have to have witnessed to believe.***

As is fitting for a guy who packed a lot into 24 hours, Mark was born on the longest day of the year. He loved summer, and fortunately for both of us, we grew up a hop, skip, and a jump from Lake Michigan. While I was an Indiana Dunes girl, Mark loved to go further north into Michigan and the Warren Dunes State Park. Weeks into our dating life he took me there and I never looked back. The Warren Dunes were untouched by commercialization, by noisy boats and wave runners, by throngs of people. It was perfect for me and my new hottie, explorer boyfriend. We’d climb the massive dune, trek into the woods and walk a trail, cool off in the water, eat at the snack bar. We always stayed until the sun was setting and drove home after dark. “Less traffic if we wait,” Mark would say. By that time nearly everyone would be gone and it felt like it was all ours.

When the kids came along and we’d be back in Chicago visiting family, we’d drive up to Warren Dunes for the day. First we’d stop at the Swedish bakery on the outskirts of town and then make the meandering drive to the lakefront. Upon entering the park it’s very wooded and doesn’t seem like there’s a lake anywhere, but then you’d catch tiny glimpses of blue until the trees thinned out and there was that beautiful lake. The kids would scream and say, “It’s as big as the ocean,” and Mark would yell, “Look to the right! Look to the right!” And there would be the other main attraction, the massive sand dune, and the kids would scream again.

Over the years we were gone the sleepy, little town of Sawyer became the hot place to build a vacation home. We were talking to a merchant one day about how much the area was growing. “It’s technically a suburb of Chicago now,” he said. “Why back in the eighties you could buy lakefront property for $20,000. Nobody cared about this place.” To which Mark said, “We cared!” We came here every weekend,” and then he looked at me and said, “We should have bought a lot. I mean $20,000. What the heck? Can you imagine?” Except we didn’t have $20,000 back then. We didn’t have it at that moment either. When I pointed out this glaring fact Mark said, “We could have figured it out,” and yet there we were with our three kids eating their donuts and no idea how we were going to afford their college tuition let alone a vacation home.

The days leading up to Father’s Day this year were fine. I got a huge raise at work, my garden is looking great, things were going okay. Then Sunday arrived and on social media there was post after post about wonderful dads and husbands. “Nobody loves me like my dad!!” “I didn’t know when I married my husband that I married the perfect dad!!” All I had to offer was a dead dad in one hand and a dead husband in the other. I got off my phone and went to Target. I came across a dad who looked so miserable with his family, kids who didn’t listen to a single thing he said, one who kept threatening to leave with the cart, another barefoot and dressed in an Elsa costume that kept following me and saying “hi” over and over. I wanted to tap him on the shoulder and say, “For what it’s worth, I think this day is shit, too.”

Three days later was Mark’s birthday. I met a friend at my neighbor’s house first thing in the morning and the three of us dug up her plants for her to take to the new place she is moving to. We worked for over an hour and when I came home I decided I’d figure out what to do with my little patio that was a mess. Mark laid it out many years ago and now the bricks are uneven, the weeds pop up everywhere. Last year I got an estimate to have it redone. It was $6000 and I laughed when I read that because it’s not much bigger than my dining room table. Deciding to live with its imperfections, I cleaned it, pulled weeds, cut a border, went to the pop-up nursery that was closing the end of the week, spent $15 on plants, and stopped by the hardware store for mulch.

That night I was watching a show on cabins. Each episode is ten minutes long and shows someone who bought a cabin, why they chose the land they did, the materials they used, how they live in it. It’s a peek into the life of someone else, and unlike similar shows, these are not extravagant by any means. One episode was of a cabin on a river in Oregon. I didn’t love the inside but the view was incredible. As the episode was ending, it showed the wife in the kitchen cutting up vegetables and from the picture window she watched her husband walking to the riverbank with his fishing pole.

And that’s when I lost it. My pretense and busyness during the week blew sky high, just like the dream Mark and I had of owning a little place by the water that we could escape to on weekends.

When the owner of the company I work for was giving me my review, she told me I was always cheerful and willing to help anyone who needed it. After she left my desk all I wanted to do was sneak away and call Mark at his office and tell him the good news, to hear him say, “Woo hoo!! Let’s go out for a steak dinner tonight, Moneybags.” With that not an option I went back to work on a client spreadsheet where I had to make sense of a hundred pending orders for their new house, a task new to me but that they want me to take on. A few days later I was talking to the comptroller about my increase and thanking her because I knew her influence was the reason I got the raise that I did. “It seems to me you live your life with integrity,” she said, “and your work reflects that. You deserve every cent.”

I was flattered and on cloud nine until a few days later the thought of it made me want to burst out laughing. Integrity? Most days I feel like I’m the headliner in an off-off-off Broadway show. A show that has a compelling story with a lot of promise, deep pockets to pay for it, a great set, everything to eventually make it a smash on Broadway. Then the critics come to see it and say, “Close this farce down, the lead actress is simply awful, truly unwatchable.” I’m abruptly yanked off the stage with a shepherd’s hook around my neck and I don’t bother defending myself because it feels true enough.

.

Prior to Mark’s death, I knew little of a death by suicide. Both of my sisters had family members on their husband’s side who ended their lives, but other than that it was something I heard or read about, shook my head, and tsked tsked at the awfulness of such a loss. Then a friend’s son died and it landed on my street. When I heard the news and hung up the phone I couldn’t even absorb what I was told. Mark came out of the shower and when he asked who called so early I told him and he said, “Oh my god,” and started crying while I stood in unblinking shock in the bedroom. As the hours went by and I didn’t know what to do, I called my mom who asked me if I’d been down to their house to talk to them. I told her I hadn’t and she told me I needed to and I said, “Well, it’s almost lunch time so I’ll wait until they’re done eating and then go down.” The absurdity of that still baffles me, as if they were sitting around at noon having ham sandwiches and potato salad with a refreshing glass of lemonade and making a list of funeral homes as one does on a beautiful spring day. “You get yourself down there right now,” my mom sternly said and I will always be grateful she wasn’t about to let any kid of hers off the hook for not showing during someone’s darkest hour.

Five years later the same story would unfold in my house.

For those at the center of a death, whether intentional, sudden, or after a long illness, the moments pass in disbelief and fear. It’s like being on an out of control rollercoaster that nobody will stop as you are whipped from one side to the other. All you want is to get off of it so you can throw up, put your head between your knees to stop the spinning, and thank the universe that nonsense is over. Except over is very loosely defined and out of reach.

I was recently on the listening end of a story about someone I didn’t know who committed suicide. First of all, for the love of God stop using that term. It is loaded with shame and feels like salt poured on raw skin. Mark may have died that way but I know what he was committed to and every day but his last was not his own death. During this I sat with my hands under the table and my nail dug into my palm to keep from screaming, crying, or both. I could have spoken up but I knew it would be awkward and draw attention to the pain of a story that I thought was understood.

That night I had a dream that Mark and I were in a vintage store – something that he indulged me in often. We tended to wander away from each other and he was either way behind or way ahead of me but we would always find each other at the checkout. In the dream they announced that they were closing and all customers needed to bring their purchases to the front of the store. I was looking for him and he was nowhere to be found. An employee found me and told me I needed to leave as I was the only one left in the store. “I’m not,” I frantically said, “my husband is here. I was just with him five minutes ago.” She was guiding me to the exit and said, “You have to go,” and pushed me out the door and locked it while I screamed Mark’s name over and over.

I love a good story, I thrive on them. I have heard my brothers and brother-in-law tell the story of Mark’s bachelor party dozens of times and I never get tired of it. Each of them remember different parts of it so it’s layered, outrageous, and hilarious. You know what else is great about it? Everybody lived to tell the tale. End of life stories are missing the humor and waking up part which lands much differently. When anyone tells me about an untimely or awful death in their circle and asks me how to help a family, I feel their heartache and can think of so many things they can do. I am touched that they ask me, but anyone who has lived through it does not need to know about your cousin’s friend in the cul-de-sac one block over who is at death’s door. They have seen the color of death’s door. A person who watched someone they love have a heart attack in front of them will never need to know a single detail of a similar story you heard secondhand and does not affect your daily life. They witnessed and have relived every moment of it.

I was lucky enough to live most of my life without trauma or the resulting triggers and had no idea what a gift that was. That is not the case since Mark died and it is terrifying when I find myself in a loop of horrible memories. Each time another layer gets unpeeled because when you are no longer in shock your brain says, “Hey, remember this part? Oh you don’t? Let me turn the lights down and show you on the big screen because it’s a doozy.” There are coping strategies which sometimes work and sometimes don’t. There is ongoing therapy which often feels repetitive and unnecessary until you start sobbing in the middle of one and realize you’re not as okay as you thought, med adjustments, med changes, walking, walking, walking, digging in the dirt, and gently burying pieces of pain hoping it blooms into something beautiful.

I use all of the strategies and when they don’t work I go to bed and pray tomorrow is better which I also learned from my mom. But after a few painful days when I doubted whether or not I could kick myself to the surface one more time, I know I need to speak up, to address the awkward, and say that the need to tell a story I don’t need to know or you haven’t lived through, might land me back on the rollercoaster I worked desperately hard to get off of, and that feels landing back in my worst nightmare.

Before our kids were born, I told Mark that even though he wasn’t Catholic I wanted the kids to be raised in that faith. As we made moves for his career, I got to know different churches where I would take the kids and we would sit front and center so they could see what was going on and hopefully behave. When they were in grade school I enrolled them in religious ed. It was every Monday after school and they absolutely hated it. There were other Catholic kids on our street who went to the same church but also attended school there. “You’re not really Catholic,” one of the girls said to Will one day, “you’re only half-Catholic because you go to a public school.” When Will came home and told me I was first enraged and then thought it was hilarious. Talk about casting stones at the ripe old age of nine. “How you behave and how you treat people,” I told Will, “determines your faith and values and not where you go to school. Now go back outside and don’t give it another thought.” But I gave it plenty of thought, dug my heels in, and got more involved in that church and then another. I was committed to teaching my kids about a higher power and showing up weekly to make deposits into the Bank of Faith.

Last Monday I called a friend and it went right to voicemail which was odd. I tried again an hour later and the same thing happened. Later that night he called and told me he was in the hospital with six broken ribs and a concussion after falling down the stairs. He would stay there until Friday and is now in rehab. My hairdresser, whom I adore and have been going to for twenty years, sent a text that she was also in the hospital after her immune system went haywire fighting off bronchitis and a sinus infection. She’s still there. My neighbor signed off to finalize a divorce after 44 years of marriage. Another neighbor whose life fell apart exactly when mine did, who has sat with me many a night as we both cried and made dark jokes that I’d dare not repeat to anyone else, has to move because the house she has been renting for 15 years is being sold.

All of those things made for a strong case of heartache but the week had another trick up its sleeve. Last Thursday the med center Mark worked at announced the purchase of a cryogenic electron microscope. This was a huge win for scientists in the Midwest who have had to rely on sending images to research facilities on the east and west coast. Six years ago when we were visiting Mallory, Mark scheduled a meeting with a scientist at UCLA who had access to a cryo-em. Mark wanted images of proteins he was working on, and besides being very expensive, the wait to get them was close to a year. After many emails and phone calls, he was hoping an in-person meeting would bump up his wait time. “So you’re going to schmooze him,” I said, and he told me he was pulling out every stop to get things moving along. It didn’t work and he would impatiently wait, call and check in, and shake his fist that such an incredible research tool was only available to a few. The initial happiness I felt when reading the news quickly turned into something different.

On the flip side of the grief coin is raging anger. I hate feeling it, I hate when it takes over, I hate it. It rears its ugly head when life goes on in ways that are the new normally crappy, and it awoke from its slumber and barged in the door over news of that microscope. At my regular appointment I unloaded on my therapist who said anger was fine so long as it is directed in the right way and asked me what I did with all those feelings. “Well,” I said, “I dug in my garden until my knees throbbed, and the next day when it was too cold to do that I cleaned my basement. I ruthlessly got rid of things, gave Mark’s very expensive treadmill away, mopped the floor.” “This is good,” she said, “this is a healthy way to handle these emotions.” So how come it doesn’t feel good? And why does drunk dialing when you’re pissed off get such a bad rap? Because my dead husband dreamed of that microscope being at the university where he worked so I need somebody in charge to answer the phone and explain to me why he isn’t here to use it.

On Friday I sat on my porch until midnight talking to my neighbor about her impending move and cryo-em. “You know what,” I said, “it should have been Mark that came home months ago to tell me the inside scoop, it should have been Mark showing it off because he was the one who was writing the equipment grant to get it. He was the one who saw the value in it and now all of that is gone.” “Here’s the thing,” Jen said, “Mark was the kind of guy who could build the room. There was nobody else who could envision what he could, nobody who was able to see that far in advance. He could create it, build it, he could even put the roof on it, but he couldn’t run it alone. He needed everyone else to do their part. They’re running the room that would have never existed if it weren’t for him.”

My first big attempt at gardening has in recent years been neglected for other spaces. As we sat on the porch, I told Jen I needed to work on it, needed to amend the soil so everything had a better chance at thriving. A few days later I carted a wheelbarrow of compost from her house to mine but first had to dig up my chocolate vine. It was healthy and filled up a lot of space but it had become invasive. It wrapped around other plants and choked them off, traveled then would root and shoot off in a new direction. I didn’t know how much until I started digging and two hours later got it all up. It wasn’t lost on me how similar this vine was to how grief travels, how just when life seems steady and I think I’ve got a handle on things, a tendril reaches out, grabs me by the ankle, and pulls me to the ground.

In the many things I’ve read on loss, the common thread is that you become another person in the after, you hone in on what matters, and simplify. You can’t help but be different but the rest of it I already knew. I knew Mark was the best thing that ever happened to me. I knew that how we raised our kids was our most important job. I knew how we treated each other inside and outside of this house mattered regardless of deposits made. I knew very early in my life that when it came to a foundation of love and faith I hit the jackpot.

I don’t know that so much anymore.

There is a saying in the grief world that “one moves forward” after the death of a loved one rather than moving on. The latter implies that you are leaving that person in the past rather than going forth with the spirit of that person into the future. That sort of thing seems like splitting hairs to me when for the longest time I couldn’t move at all.

I tend to grip tightly to the thought that I am stuck in grief, in life, in everything. I bring this up in therapy all the time until at a recent session my therapist listed all the things I’ve accomplished since Mark died. “And on top of that,” she said, “you went through a pandemic.” Her list surprised me because I am moving in ways I have not acknowledged. Though it may not be in the way I want or as fast as I want, I haven’t settled for stagnation which is an easy place to stake your tent when your world turns upside down.

I recently went on a date and as a chronic overthinker I am surprised at how much I underthought that decision. Said sure why not and my young, single coworkers said, “Way to put yourself out there, Kath, good on you,” and I said good on me right back to me and met this man at a dance performance. Having two daughters who danced through high school, and one who majored in it in college, I have been to more dance performances than I could count. Ballet, tap, modern, hip hop, all the dances, and so I sat down next to this man in the second row of a theatre, and in the universe’s way of saying I see what you’re trying to do here, one of Mark’s colleagues was sitting right in front of us which upended any confidence I may have thought I had. We exchanged pleasantries, said it was good to see each other, while my brain frantically repeated shit shit shit a couple of hundred times. The dance started and it wasn’t long before I thought how much Mark would have loved it, how it being a Friday night and being tired, I would have laid my head on his shoulder and rested, how we would have talked about it all the way home. Instead I kept wondering if I was crossing and uncrossing my legs too much, why was it so bloody hot, and if it would be rude for me to lean over and whisper, “You seem nice but I can’t do this tonight,” and got up and left.

But when I make a bad decision I dig in my heels and go all out. I stayed and smiled weakly at Mark’s coworker when it was over, met a few friends of my date, and went to the reception afterwards. He walked me to the parking garage and when he saw my car said he had the exact same one. I wanted to ask him if he had a dead spouse, too, because then we would have two things in common. Once inside I rested my head on the steering wheel for a few minutes, exhausted in every way. When I told my therapist about the night she asked me if it made me cry and I told her it should have, everything was in place for a good cry, but I was too tired to even do that.

I recently read that grief is stagnant and it is joy that comes in waves. In a tidal wave of joy, my daughter and her husband, after having two miscarriages and many dark valleys, gave birth to a baby boy last month. I was on duty as Grandma Doubtfire for a few days and was woefully out of practice to wrangle myself, two kids, and a dog in the morning in any sort of timely manner. The first day Walter went off to preschool and Mabel was on spring break so I told her we needed to go to my favorite store because my birthday coupon was about to expire. She got herself dressed in leggings and a mermaid tshirt. When I said to her, “You good now? Need anything else before we go,” she thought it over for a hard minute and said, “Oh yeah, I forgot something,” pulled her rainbow tutu out of the drawer, and my gay pride little mermaid and I got in the car and headed off.

There was no news of a baby yet and behind me in her booster seat Mabel said, “Mimi, do you want to know what I think?” I said of course I did and she said, “I think this baby happened because Boompa and my baby sister who died knew how sad my mommy and daddy were. I think they sent this baby to us so we’d be less sad because they’re not here.” It took me a minute to gain my composure to speak and when I did I said, “I think you’re right, Mabel. I think those two did have something to do with your new brother, and aren’t we so happy they helped us?” She continued her gaze out the window and said, “Yeah, I think they’re in the stars working together.”

There is no amount of time that will diminish the what ifs and if onlys with some losses. That’s the deal we make with life and it seems like a fair trade until the reality of it knocks on our door. Death’s echo can be excruciatingly loud when you’re bravely trying to crawl out of the darkness of the valley. Meanwhile, the unseen is alive and moving around us in ways a seven year old in a rainbow tutu understands far better than me.

Last week I took a trip to Florida to see two of my siblings who have second homes in Fort Meyers. I was scheduled for an early flight and booked an Uber to pick me up at 4:00 a.m. Twenty minutes prior, when I was ready to go and hadn’t got a text from the driver, I checked the app and discovered that the credit card linked to my account was one that had fraud on it last month. The payment never went through which I didn’t know. I had a slight panic attack, threw my luggage in the car and drove to the airport – the brand new Kansas City airport that was having its debut that very morning. I was low on gas and high on adrenaline, and as soon as I walked through the doors I wanted to turn around, walk out, and drive back home. Traveling without Mark is hard, he loved to go just about anywhere, was always content to be in the window seat and take it all in, and loved the sun. Escaping the gray days of winter to relax where it was warm might have required some arm twisting if he was busy at work, but I knew from experience that once committed he would have loved every minute.

While walking to my gate, I passed a crowd of construction workers in neon vests and hard hats and found out they were one of hundreds who built this new airport and were there to watch the first flight take off. As I was already a bit shaky on this whole trip thing it could have sent me spiraling, but they looked so proud and I remembered when Mark and I were dating and he’d drive me past some of the roofing jobs he did. “This will still be standing long after I’m gone,” he would boast, and so I hung around with the trades and watched as a Southwest flight left the gate and taxied to the runway.

The sun and heat did me a world of good as most days we hung out at the pool. There are plenty of activities to do in their complex, and I thought “so this is what retirement looks like,” knowing with certainty that even if Mark were alive and well he could never do it. After a few weeks he’d be climbing the walls, driving me crazy, and desperately wanting to be back in the science game instead of on a pickleball court. The man had things to do and relaxing wasn’t one of them.

The last night I was there we drove to Fort Meyers Beach which was directly in the path of Hurricane Ian. Much had been cleaned up, my brother-in-law said, and yet the devastation was staggering. Whole houses gone, others stripped of everything inside, boats in the marina piled on top of each other, no trespassing signs on lots reduced to a pile of rubble. The expensive newer homes were still standing and looked to have minimal damage, but the framed homes that had been there for decades, the old-timers the town was built around were obliterated. Every single thing inside swept out to sea with the storm surge. How do you calculate your losses when everything you own is gone, not even a photo left of your life? I felt that destruction in my bones while over and over seeing spray-painted signs reminding people of #FMS (Fort Meyers Strong).

I lived many secure years in the house Mark and I built and was certain it was indestructible until the morning he left it and never came back. The house is still there, but for the life of me, despite how much I try, I cannot get it to stand as straight or beautiful as it once did. I thought that was what was expected of me, what my job was in Mark’s absence, when what it needs most is for the foundation to be shored up. That is an ongoing project, and so I will plant a sign in my yard that says I’m not strong at all but I knew to salvage every broken thing that both of us knew was important, while telling every passerby that they should have seen my house when the storm hit.

I couldn’t even open the door and get out.

I was recently talking to someone about the early days of Covid and all that has transpired in our lives since then. The day we were sent home from the office, I had to send my boss a list of what I would be doing that justified my getting paid while working from home. There were things that needed to be fine-tuned and/or revamped, but my job was student focused and I was winging it when it came to accounting for my time. In those first few weeks it felt surreal for everyone in the neighborhood to be home all day every day, and there were offers of grocery runs, puzzles dropped off on porches, and long distance gatherings for wine and talk of how long this quarantine thing could possibly last. Four weeks tops is what we thought at the time.

After weeks of not seeing anyone, my son called and asked if he could spend the weekend with me. He was also alone, working from home, and climbing the walls. I told him to come over and the minute he walked in the door he burst into tears. “Oh, buddy,” I said, “I know.” None of us understood what was going on, and if there ever was a time we needed Mark’s knowledge it was then, but we didn’t have that so we watched movies and reset our attitudes when it became clear this wasn’t going to be over any time soon. Will came every weekend after that, and when he wasn’t here I’d dive into a junk drawer or closet with gusto. Twenty years from now if I’m asked about the Covid years, I will say that’s when I incessantly read the news and organized every inch of my life.

Things started opening up, I got let go from my day job, and my fun weekend job took center stage. Slowly a new normal began to take shape which wasn’t nearly as terrifying to me as the new normal after Mark died. I went with the flow because if you learn anything in grief it’s that the more you fight it the more it controls your life. In the process, I have found out I’m more suited to a quiet life than I ever thought possible. Now that most things have returned to close to where they used to be, I’m overwhelmed by normalcy. Everything seems too much, too loud, too crowded. Relationships that were always challenging have run their course. I can’t do them any more. My energy reserves are at an all time low for problems that aren’t my own.

One of my favorite gifts this Christmas was an amaryllis bulb dipped in wax. I loved it so much I bought two for gifts. Every day I checked its progress and by centimeters it grew. I’d rotate it so all sides got to face the sunlight and when it bloomed I was as happy as my mom would be when her Christmas cactus sprouted color. It was gorgeous and I’d say “Look at you,” like it was my kid learning to ride a bike. In talking to my therapist, I wondered if this contentment from something so small was from grief, age, or Covid. “Probably a combination of all three,” she said.

During that awful time when Covid was ravaging the world, I watched a news report about a woman whose mother died, like most alone in a hospital ICU. The funeral was held in a parking lot and she sat on a folding chair underneath a canopy next to her mother’s casket where friends and family drove by to pay their respects. Such a contrast to Mark’s funeral, and I wondered how it is possible to survive the heartache of not only losing your mom, but then having to say your goodbyes on top of asphalt while people shouted condolences from car windows.

And yet somehow, I, like so many others have survived the heartache of the unimaginable. I’ve learned, I’ve changed far more than anyone realizes, I have oh-so-delicately dipped my toes into the pool of life and tested the water. This go ’round, though, is different. Because I am too familiar with how fragile this all is, the best approach for me is to live smaller and quieter. Will it always be like this? I don’t know, but I do know it’s the reason the beauty of a single blooming bulb in the darkest time of the year made me yearn for more of that.

I was recently talking to a widow friend about our journeys navigating the world as half of a couple. It wasn’t until I was alone that I found out how much power there is in being two. You have no idea of this when your partner is alive and well, but when that is no longer the case it is a startling revelation. Walking into a restaurant by myself or any kind of gathering, even after all this time, feels like a jarring exposure of every vulnerable part of me.

We also talked about being around people who constantly complain about their partner. That it is a different kind of jarring, the kind that can tip into rage at any moment. Thinking you know what life would be like without your partner and living in the reality of it are vastly different. “If only they knew what we know,” I said to my friend. “I could easily list a hundred things I miss about Mark without even trying that hard.”

• The smell of his neck.
• How tender he was with animals.
• The energy of him in the house.
• How the kids had to label their leftovers so he wouldn’t eat them.
• The sound of his bike coasting around the corner.
• His ginormous readers that looked so nerdy.
• Hearing at the end of the day about an experiment that his students knocked out of the park.
• His daily yelling at right wingers on cable news and Chuck Todd every Sunday morning.
• How every night he wore earplugs and a black sock over his eyes so he’d get a good night’s sleep.
• His whistling.
• When I was talking to him and he pushed the curls away from my eyes.
• Folding his clothes.
• How we worked side-by-side every Sunday to cook dinner for the kids.
• That he could sit on the screened porch and do nothing but watch the birds.
• The sound of his work bag when it thudded on the bench.
• His pride in the kids that would make his eyes tear up when he talked about them.
• That he was on so many committees at the med center because he believed it was his obligation, and also because he liked having the inside scoop on what was happening in that place.
• When he’d go to the store and would ask beforehand, “Good Visa (the debit card) or bad Visa (the one that always had a balance)? Then he’d use the wrong one.
• Seeing the debits in our account from him having a four-shot espresso with his students at their morning lab meeting.
• How he loved my style and would want to see what I was wearing before I went to work.
• That he could hear a couple of notes of music and know exactly what movie it was from.
• When he squeezed my hand every night before he fell asleep.
• That a prediction of any kind of storm caused him to say, “We’ve got to batten down the hatches,” as if we were on a dinghy in the middle of a nor’easter in the Atlantic.
• When I was telling him a story and got tripped up on some part of it and he’d say, “It was always, no it was never……..”
• That he appreciated homemade soup on a cold night.
• Going to the garden center together and him loading up on vegetables and me on flowers.
• Whenever he was near any kind of water he would crouch down and flip things over looking for snakes.
• The way he delighted in Mabel and being her Boompa.
• How he’d sit in the basement fixing a tire on his bike like he was doing surgery.
• That he loathed anyone in his field who he thought was phoning it in.
• When he came home with news that he’d gotten a grant and we’d go out for a steak dinner.
• How he called old professors who wouldn’t retire to make room for hungry, young ones “fossils.”
• The times Will would stop by with bagels after an early Saturday morning with his running group and he’d act nonchalant and then wolf down three.
• Watching him barbecue while reading a scientific paper over the grill.
• How my constant decorating and rearranging made him nuts but he’d always brag about it to anyone who came in the house.
• Him carrying the laundry basket up and down the stairs.
• That he’d clean the kitchen and make the next day’s coffee every night.
• How he’d putter with his fish tanks in the basement and after he died we found out there were thousands of guppies in them.
• When we’d argue about money and he’d say, “Tell me what it is we need that we don’t have.”
• How he loved talking to Mallory about dance and would research different styles for their next phone call.
• His intensity countered by his ability to be outrageously silly.
• How he hated hanging Christmas lights outside but did it because I loved it.
• The exchanges of love throughout the day, both big and small.
• When he’d hear me waking up and have my coffee ready when I came downstairs.
• How he’d say he was trying to lose weight and didn’t want ice cream but would help himself to a heaping bowl the minute I went upstairs to go to bed.
• How he always predicted another pandemic and would have been all over the research on Covid.
• How he’d say, “We need to get that fixed,” and pretend he was going to do that when we both knew it would be me that would follow through.
• Walking every night after dinner.
• That if he were flipping through the channels and came across Shawshank Redemption he’d watch it every single time.
• His disdain for wealthy people who didn’t use their money to make life better for others.
• How he could string curse words together like it was an Olympic event.
• His roofing stories and the pride he had in starting out as a blue collar guy.
• That he was adamant that every person who did any work in our house be tipped.
• The empty spot on the sectional we bought before he died that he never got to sit on.
• The many conversations we had about the kids and how he didn’t want them to make the same mistakes he did when he was young, and me saying, “And what part of that would you give up? What part didn’t lead you to where you are now?”
• Going Christmas shopping for me with Maggie and how I could tell when he walked in the door that he had so much fun with her.
• How he always kept the birds fed.
• That whenever I’d say, “Since you’re not doing anything…,” he’d yell, “I’M THINKING!!!” from the movie A Serious Man.
• That the cats ran to the door when he got home because they knew he’d give them more cat food even if they’d already been fed.
• How much he looked forward to he and Nate going off to see a guy movie together.
• The way he cherished the friendships he had with his biking buddies.
• When we had to do our taxes and he knew the details of every work trip he made that year and whether we could claim it or not.
• How he often repeated the story of the neighborhood kid who knocked on the door and asked to speak to Mr. Kathy.
• That his favorite winter activity on a Saturday night was sitting at the dining room table watching music videos on Youtube.
• Making something new for dinner and him raving about it.
• Knowing every single day that I was loved.
• How he worried about me every time I got a kidney stone.
• When I’d call him at work for something and he’d say, “Hey, darlin.'”
• The gentle way he always spoke to his sister.
• When he’d come home from work and say, “I was talking to Joe and he said…..”
• Our road trips.
• That he thought I never spent any money on myself because he never saw the bags.
• How when we’d get in an argument I’d say, “I’ll tell you one thing, Mark Fisher, my next husband is going to respect me,” and he’d imitate me and we’d both burst out laughing.
• His obsession with ridding the yard of squirrels.
• How he rated peaches and loved opening the fridge and seeing a bowl of cherries.
• When we were going to get something to eat and he’d say “no” to everything I suggested but could never come up with an alternative so we always ate at the local pizza place.
• How much he would have loved the bedroom flip I did because of how dark and quiet that room is.
• When the cats would scratch at the bedroom door at night to get in and he’d throw a pillow at the door and go right back to sleep.
• How he’d advise his mom on on her meds and tell her she needed to take care of herself.
• That he hated shopping but loved Costco.
• How he tried to learn as much as he could about each of his graduate students and stayed in contact with them after they graduated.
• That he was proud of his degrees and just as proud of the plaque he got for being Rookie of the Year for hockey in his freshman year at Purdue.
• Sitting around and deciding what we would do if we ever won the lottery.
• How he would research any subject that caught his attention.
• How he always wanted to take a sabbatical to work in Europe so we could have an overseas adventure for a year.
• That somehow his bike was an extension of him in ways I couldn’t explain.
• How he wore his shoes until there were holes on the bottom.
• That he never minded mowing the lawn or shoveling the driveway but hated taking the trash to the curb.
• Being at his work events and seeing how much his colleagues and students liked him.
• How much he loved my mom.
• That he only learned to appreciate the strategy in baseball when I explained it to him when he was high.
• How when we were in Portugal he noticed all the men wore scarves knotted around their necks so we went out and found him one and he wore it all the time.
• Taking care of him.
• Hearing the garage door roll up when he worked late and knowing he made it safely home.
• Checking National Parks off our list.
• Saying “This is my husband, Mark.”
• His work ethic.
• How he paid close attention to politics around the world.
• Our dream of having a cottage on a lake.
• His eyes, dear god, his eyes.

I will always feel fortunate that Mark and I gave each other a wide berth to have interests and friendships outside of our marriage. It made life more interesting for both of us, but at the end of the day it was him and me navigating life and marriage and jobs and kids and the world. If you think your life would be better without your partner next to you, then I think by all means you should make changes to make that happen. But for those of us on the other side, those of us who didn’t have a choice, please measure your words carefully. You have no idea the vacuum that absence creates, the huge and the small things that slam into you, even years later, from nowhere.

One hundred things is but a tip in the iceberg of loss.