A Speckled Trout

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.

In January it will be two years that I have had a standing appointment on Monday afternoons with a therapist for grief counseling. I initially thought I’d go one or two times so that I could say to everyone who suggested I needed help, “See, I went and now I’m fine so you can quit nagging me.” I found this woman through a friend who works in the psychology department at the med center. Her boss knew Mark and gave me a couple of names. The first person I called said he wasn’t taking any new patients but that his partner was and she was very good. I called her and we set up an appointment. Her office was located in the shopping and entertainment district and I came directly from work an hour early. As I wandered around wasting time, I passed someone on the sidewalk. He said he loved my shirt, I said thank you, and as he walked by he turned around and said, “All of it, the shirt, the hair, even the sunglasses. You’re looking good today.” I sometimes think he was sent on a mission from beyond because more than anything I wanted to get in my car, drive home, and forget this whole therapy idea. But that very brief encounter gave me the shot of confidence I needed to walk into a therapist’s office, tell my story between sobs, and look into the eyes of this woman I just met to see them tearing up at the heartache of it all. In the midst of this sad retelling of that September day, and because my life is an ongoing comical shit show, on the sidewalk below were a group of Hare Krishnas chanting and banging on drums. I wanted to open the window of her office and scream at them to shut the fuck up but was afraid she’d think I had raging anger issues which I did but was hoping to keep on the down low. The following appointment had a lot to do with my mother who was not the problem so I left thinking that this therapy thing was worthless and not going to fix anything. I was smart enough, though, to know that if I quit with her that I would never seek out anyone else and I’d be in trouble.

I kept showing up, making my copayments, pouring my heart out on her loveseat every Monday afternoon. When everything was so dark, when I prayed every night to not wake up in the morning, she looked at me and promised me things would get better. When I cried over the loss of so many connections that we had as a couple that just vanished, she told me there would be new connections. When I said there was nothing in my future but utter and terrifying blankness, she told me I would carve out my own future. These weekly appointments and the work of grief have been hard, incredibly hard. There are times that it feels like a weight lifted, but more often I cannot speak to anyone for hours afterwards.

At the end of a recent session, I told her how Mark saved everything. It made me crazy. He had stacks of paper everywhere. He’d print articles to read and make notes in the margins, he kept every business card he ever got, he saved spirals from college with every page filled with notes, he saved scientific journals from thirty years ago. If he got a free notebook at a conference it was filled with equations and scribbling. His office was even worse. Besides saving all of those same things, he saved everything from every class he ever taught, every book he ever used. When cleaning it out with help from his boss and a friend, we found attendance sheets and notes on lectures, who participated and what they had to offer, a drawer of thank you notes from students. There was a CV from a colleague when he was applying for a position. Noted in the corner Mark wrote “my favorite.” Joe got hired and did end up being Mark’s favorite, so much so that I asked him to speak at the funeral.

I told her how I saved Mark’s love letters to me the first year he was in graduate school. It was 1982 and there were no cell phones, no texting, it was how we communicated between the times when we would see each other when I drove to Champaign, Illinois to his studio apartment for the weekend. Those letters have been such a gift to me since he died. To read his words feels like he’s talking to me, to see how out of his league he felt early on and then to watch the arc of his career as it rose. Those early days of love and uncertainty seem ancient and like yesterday.

In all the stacks of paper I have gone through, I have found a couple of cards to him from me but not a single letter I wrote from that year we were apart. I know I wrote a lot because I had two hours on a train every day going back and forth to work. So where were they? Why was everything related to his career saved but not the letters I wrote where I told him how much I missed him? How I loved him and couldn’t wait to start our married life?

My therapist explained that those things he saved from his career were proof of his worth, what he did for his job that he felt like he earned. And he did earn them, he worked hard for all of that. So why didn’t he save the things that were from me? Did he think my love for him wasn’t deserved? The emotional weight of those letters may have been too much for Mark to hold on to, as if he would never be able to hold up his end and wasn’t worthy of any of it, and that possibility knocked me off my feet for days afterward.

The minute I sat at that table at Denny’s on our first date and looked into those eyes of his it was enough. When he laughed at my jokes it was enough. When he got up in the middle of the night and changed the diapers of all of our babies and brought them to me to nurse it was enough. When he sat next to me in the bleachers of a track meet or a darkened auditorium to watch a dance recital, loaded the car with sleeping bags and tents for a campout, or lugged boxes into dorm rooms it was enough. When he walked in the door from work, from biking, from mowing the lawn it was enough.

For him to leave this earth not knowing he deserved love or his life is a heartache I will always struggle to carry. The swiftness with which everything emotionally tanked for Mark still shocks and scares me, and those eyes I miss so much, that danced with humor and joy and passion, went blank and lifeless by demons that kept their claws dug in so deeply that they kicked a lifetime of love out of the way. So I keep going to therapy every Monday afternoon to make sure I stay one step ahead of the voices that tell me I’m guilty, that it was my job to save him and I failed, and at the end of every session I wonder the same thing.

For all that is holy, Mark, how could you ever believe that you weren’t enough for me?

***for Eileen***

This neighborhood of mine is full of cape cods that were built in the 1940s and surrounded by trees, lots of trees. It was the appeal of these old homes and well-established trees that drew Mark and I to this area and why we wanted to live here. Those trees, though, can cause a lot of problems. Many years ago we had an epic ice storm in October. The branches were heavy with leaves that hadn’t fallen yet and then got coated in ice. When I took the trash out in the late afternoon, all I heard from every direction was snapping limbs. It was terrifying, and Mark and I were awake all night listening to branches crashing to the ground as the sky lit up with blown transformers all around us. We would be without power for five days until an army of lineman cleared brush and climbed pole after pole to restore power.

While the fall isn’t usually that dramatic, it does bring an avalanche of leaves that seem to never let up. Every weekend, homeowners are out raking, blowing, and bagging leaves. Mark and I tackled it year after year, and when the kids got older we made them help us. At first it would be a fun kickoff to the fall season, but that got old quickly when after a marathon raking day the yard looked no different 24 hours later.

A few blocks away is a house that never has any leaves in their yard. I first noticed it because it was the only house on the street where you could see green grass, and then I got kind of obsessed with it. How did they go through the entire fall season without a single leaf on their lawn? How did they not have them clustered around the bushes and blown against the fence?

It was so odd to me that I needed to talk to Mark about it, and when I did he asked me why I cared. “I care,” I said, “because every yard in every neighborhood in this entire town is covered with leaves but that one. You don’t think that’s strange? Doesn’t it make you think of a Dateline show with Keith Morrison asking in his husky, doubting voice, “Where did the leaves go?” Besides Mark having no idea who Keith Morrison was, there was only so much of me he had space for in his head and The House With No Leaves was encroaching on more important stuff. One day I made him drive by to see for himself and still he did not care, so I was a lone wolf trying to figure out what was going down inside that perfect house. Weeks passed by until Mark came home from the hardware store one day and said, “I went past that house and you’re right. There’s never a leaf anywhere in the whole yard. It’s weird,” and I loved him so for finally noticing that something was very wrong in Mayberry. That opened the door for me to tell him that I think this couple must sit in their living room and watch for leaves to fall and Leaf Man screams, “MOTHER!!! We’ve got a trespasser,” then goes outside, shakes his fist, locks and loads his leafblower, and blows that thing to kingdom come. How this gets repeated over and over and over with the maple trees and the oak trees, and Mother drinks all day because he goes off the deep end every autumn and no matter what she says he rides that rail all the way to Crazytown. “Why do you think it’s him?” Mark asked me. “Maybe she’s the one obsessed with the leaves.” I asked him how many women he’d ever seen with a leafblower in their hands. “I’ll answer that for you,” I said before he had a chance to open his mouth. “None. Speaking for all women we hate leafblowers. We hate the sound of them, we hate men’s obsession with them, we hate the minute the garage door opens and that thing comes out.” Mark pointed out that we didn’t even own a leaf blower which was true, but I have a fondness for making sweeping generalizations to prove an inaccurate point.

Then winter came along and up the street from the House With No Leaves was a house that was decked out for Christmas. I drove by it many times and my thoughts were always the same. What in the ever loving…….? This house had every kind of Christmas decoration in their yard and on their roof that you could imagine. There were cables running up into the trees with lights wired to them and a star haphazardly dangling from the roof. Every time I drove by I felt like knocking on the door and offering unsolicited advice on behalf of a neighborhood that was dazed and confused. I made Mark drive by it one night on our way home from a party and he asked, “What am I looking at here? I can’t even tell what all this is.” “Right??? “It’s like they go out and shop the after Christmas sales and buy everything that’s left, store it in the garage for months, and then shove it all into the yard every December. There’s no theme. There’s no cohesion. It’s a gigantic Christmas cluster.” Then we laughed and high-fived each other because even that plastic half-price Jesus with Frosty stalking him knew the Fishers were better than everybody else.

The other day I drove down the street of The House With No Leaves. The lawn is still immaculate and the Christmasclusterpalooza House was its annual mess. I wished Mark were around to trade scathing critiques and snarky observations with me, how everyone tends to think I’m so nice, so sweet, so blah blah blah, but he was on to the scam. Now he’s gone and what am I supposed to do if I meet someone that actually buys into the idea that I’m a nice person? How long can I keep that up before I let it slip that there’s landscape architects for a reason? That you don’t hodge podge your boxwoods, roses, and hostas like some outdoor checkerboard game, that just because they’re on sale doesn’t mean you load dozens of them into your SUV.

If I already pre-pity the imaginary oldmanfriend who wants to get to know me better over dinner, a guy who drives a cool vintage truck, has a nice smile and great laugh, who likes to read, and is up on current events, maybe it means that I really am nice.

I’m kidding.

It means Leaf Man and Christmasclusterpalooza Guy have saved a seat for me on the rail to Crazytown.

Many years ago Mark and I went to Spain for a conference he was attending. We had three young kids at the time and it wasn’t cheap for me to fly there with him, but he came home one day and said he’d booked the flight despite me repeatedly saying we couldn’t afford it. His mom came into town to take care of the kids and when we got to Atlanta and checked in for our flight to Barcelona, we found out we’d been upgraded to first class. Everything from that point on was perfect and there is something about exploring a new city with someone you love that elevates all the senses. We would go on other great trips but there was never another quite like that. Maybe it was because it was our first international trip together, or maybe it was two young, exhausted parents who found their way back to each other in a beautiful place. Whatever the magic was, whenever we made travel plans it always circled back to that trip. “Spain,” we would both say sighing. “Nothing will ever beat Spain.”

But whenever I talked about it to anyone else and was asked what part of Spain we’d been to, I could never remember. Over and over I’d have to ask Mark. He was like an encyclopedia. He had an ability to remember a multitude of specific facts on many topics with ease. A year before he died we saw Dunkirk, and all the way home he spoke in detail about WWI – things that were completely unknown to me. When I asked him how he could remember so much with such accuracy, he said that whenever he found out something interesting he’d sink into it. While there is plenty I find interesting, too, I never seemed to be able to retain anything with the ease he did.

Mark wasn’t so great at remembering other things like parent-teacher conferences, signing up for health insurance during open enrollment until the very last day, dinner plans, or significant dates. For that he relied on me. The day after he died when a close friend came to the house, he told us that he and Mark had made plans to meet for lunch. Mark never showed up. They rescheduled. Mark never showed up. Finally, on the third try Mark remembered to meet him. His mom would often say that he lacked common sense but that wasn’t the case at all. His mind was in constant motion with plans and experiments and papers and grants. He was the juggler of many professional demands, I kept track of the rest.

One time we got invited to a dinner party at the home of Mark’s boss. There was a big meeting in town and Mark said there were some heavy hitters in the science world that would be there. We assumed that other people in the department would also be attending but when we got there it was only us and a table full of people we didn’t know. Mark could handle that kind of stuff with ease. Me? Not so much. I was mostly a stay-at-home mom at the time which was the kiss of death to any conversation with a bunch of scientists, but over the years I learned to hold my own even if it was pretty shaky. After dinner, the conversation of the table turned to wine and our dinner companions knew their years, their barrels, their oakiness, their grapes. I was amazed at all the information these passionate wine drinkers had, and said, “So how do you know all this? Do you google it?”

There is a faux pas and then there is a FAUX PAS. Everybody stopped talking and looked at me. Turns out it’s rather insulting to ask a table full of people who do research for a living if their vast knowledge comes from Google. Mark leaned over and whispered, “Thanks for ruining my career.” I recovered quickly and said, “I mean, of course, you couldn’t possibly learn all this from a basic internet search. I was kidding. Ha. Ha. Ha.” Then I asked some dopey questions about grapes in an effort to pull my husband’s career out of the flaming dumpster that I set ablaze. All the way home, Mark imitated me. “Do you goooooooogle it?,” he kept saying and we laughed until we cried that two box-o-wine hacks like us got an invite to such a classy party. “The good thing about wine coming out of a cardboard box,” I said to him, “is that you never have to worry about it being too oaky.”

I recently read that when you lose a spouse it’s like burning a library down. That is true and it often feels debilitating to not have Mark here to rely on for so many things. I am winging life, and it feels as awkward as my attempt at dinner party conversation with a bunch of people out of my league. I forget things, I overthink things, I sleep too much or not at all, I buy too many clothes to fill the gaping hole where my husband used to be, I cry, I rage, I’m hopeful, I’m depressed, I walk around this house like it’s some kind of labyrinth in hopes that the last time I circle, Mark will be there to tell me again that he married up, that I’ll always be his girl. My grief job requires me to untangle myself from a lifetime of us so that I can move forward, and most days I have a bad attitude about it.

As for Spain, I asked Mark so many times where we went that I put it in my notes on my phone. We went to Costa Brava, and like the day he ended his life, I remember everything about it. Ever since then my memories are in a constant battle to be acknowledged, so much so that I am always confused as to whether I am dancing with the angels or dancing with the devil. The only thing that is certain is that it’s impossible to learn the steps.

There is a popular book that has been around for several years called The Body Keeps The Score. It is about the complexity of traumatic experiences and how the body physically reacts to the stress. I had heard about it long before Mark died and thought it sounded interesting until I had to live with it.

Three years ago last week, Mark and I were in Portugal. He had been invited to an international conference to give a talk, and because he’d been there before and was close friends with another scientist, he also gave a talk at the University of Lisbon. Mark had traveled extensively in his career, and Portugal was his second favorite place, only slightly behind Greece. Mark wanted me to go with him on all his work trips which were normally 2-3 days, but I had a job, and though part-time, I didn’t want to take advantage of my boss by asking off too much.

But Portugal? I’d shamelessly beg for time off to go there.

Mark was bursting with happiness the second we arrived in Lisbon, it was as if the city was a gift he couldn’t wait for me to unwrap. With its cobblestone streets and century old buildings, it was stunning in history and beauty. Mark quickly figured out the subway system and every day we jumped on a train to some new adventure. We’d walk for miles and return to our hotel late, wake up and eat a big breakfast in the morning, and then figure out what we felt like seeing and doing. Sometimes Mark could hang out with me all day, sometimes for a few hours, other days only for dinner, but I figured my way around the neighborhood where our hotel was, and would wander off by myself when he was busy.

Mark’s friend, Claudio, insisted on giving us a tour one night and he drove us to see castles, a monastery built in the 1500s, a custard tart shop that had been around since the 1800s, historical places of conflict, the burial grounds of poets. There is nothing better than seeing a city through the eyes of someone who is immensely proud of his homeland. When we were done touring, Claudio took us to a restaurant, where over tapas Mark would meet his graduate students and launch into professor mode for details on the work they were doing. Two days later we would leave that beautiful city to head back home, unpack from that trip, work a few days, then pack the car and drive to Illinois to celebrate Thanksgiving.

Mark loved Thanksgiving and being around my big family, but for the first time the Fishers would be minus one as our youngest daughter who lived in LA wasn’t able to get off work to join us. As a couple, Mark and I spent more holidays and special occasions without family than with, and though we managed to survive just fine, I wanted Mallory with us. During the eight hour car ride I texted her a few times to see how her plans were shaping up for the next day and if she needed any recipes. She’d cheerfully respond back each time, and though it wasn’t like having her with us, she seemed good with her plans and I stopped worrying. We arrived at my sister and brother-in-law’s’ house, had dinner and were sitting around talking with them and my mom when my other sister walked in the door with her girls.

We all got up to hug them and behind my sister and her daughter was not her other daughter but Mallory. It took a few seconds for all of us to register what was going on but when it did we screamed and cried and laughed, and Mark and I grabbed that kid and squeezed the daylights out of her. Unbeknownst to us, my sister had called Mallory weeks before and somehow she managed to swap some shifts to get a few days off. Ann and her husband arranged the flight and paid for it, and while I was texting Mal in the car in Iowa, she was hanging out with her cousins in Wrigleyville. I was so grateful to my sister and her husband, and would find out later that when my brother-in-law came the next day for dinner, Mark went up to him with tears in his eyes and thanked him many times over for bringing our daughter to us for the holiday.

Over these past two weeks, my body has diligently kept a scorecard on these memories. It remembers how good it used to be until trauma rewired it to the point that everything often feels like fight or flight. In the midst of this scorekeeping, though, are the tiniest fireflies of light blinking on and off, on and off. The beauty of a centuries old church in Europe, the taste of milk and coffee at the hotel breakfast buffet every morning, falling asleep on my husband’s shoulder in the airport because we went non-stop for five days straight, and the joy that Wednesday night when our Mallie Bee unexpectedly walked in the door.

Around the world this year loss has so much devastated company, while in the dark night sky souls quietly blink on and off and on and off. From the ground we hope our prayers reach high enough for them to know that despite the aching emptiness and pain, we are grateful that for the shortest of moments they belonged here with us.

Happy Thanksgiving.

When I was a little girl my best friend lived across the street. She would often invite me to spend the night and I’d pack a small bag with my pajamas and toothbrush and proudly walk over with my mom for my overnight adventure. At some point during the night, I’d get homesick and start to cry and Nancy’s dad would wrap me up in a blanket and carry me home to my mom who would be waiting for me by the back door. This happened over and over, and I don’t know why my mom or Nancy’s dad just didn’t give up, but we all kept trying and after many attempts I was finally able to sleep there all night.

Such was the early start of someone who preferred home to most other places. When Mark and I were first married we lived in a basement apartment in Champaign, Illinois, and we would find out within days that there was a massive roach problem. During that time Mark developed a deep and long-lasting hatred for the smell of RAID because I used it so much that he said he could smell it from the parking lot. It got so bad that we had to put baggies over our toothbrushes because the roaches would sit on top of them and eat the dried toothpaste. Six months of that and with both of us teetering on some kind of breakdown, we were able to get out of our lease and move to less creepy digs. I never considered that crappy apartment with its constant parade of cucaraches a home, but Mark? Mark was home.

From there we lived in three different townhouses in three different states before we found our one and only house. I’ve always loved this house and told Mark that often. He loved other things more and wasn’t nearly as enthusiastic as me. Nevertheless, he would proudly show it and the yard off and say, “It’s all Kath. She’s the one who’s made everything look so great.” Now without him here, I don’t even know what to call it. It’s no longer “our house” and saying “my house” sticks in my throat and burns with loss. It doesn’t feel so much like a home but more like a bed and breakfast with phantom hosts.

Last week I had to go to the med center for a dermatology appointment. The fact that I could get in after calling two days earlier was some kind of miracle and I was feeling pretty good about taking care of something that I’d neglected for two years. That didn’t last long as the campus came into view and I started crying before I made it to the parking garage. On prior late afternoon appointments I’d have, I would call Mark when I was done to see if he could meet me for coffee. He always had some fire to put out and would say he wished he could but that he was too busy. I’d be disappointed and say, “Or we could grab an early dinner and you could get those chicken wings you love, but if you’re too busy that’s okay. Maybe another time.” He’d tell me to hold on, that maybe he could hurry and finish things up, that he’d meet me at the back of his building in twenty minutes. I’d park by the loading dock and wait for him and he’d come running out the back door, get in the car, kiss me, and tell me what a great idea I had. All the while I’d congratulate myself for using the ace-in-my-pocket-chicken-wings that he’d fall for every time.

At my appointment the nurse kept looking at me and said that I looked really familiar to him. I said he probably had me mixed up with someone else but I wondered if maybe he was on one of the buses that came from the med center for Mark’s funeral. “Maybe you saw me in a church two years ago,” I wanted to say. “When I stood in front of a couple hundred people and talked about the life of my husband and my voice had only the slightest crack at the end. How I told stories of how funny and passionate he was, how I begged everyone to remember how he lived rather than how he died, how I asked them to tell our kids stories about their dad because they were looking at me in the front row and all I really wanted to say to them was that I was so goddamn sorry that I wasn’t able to keep him here for them.” But instead of saying all that I shoved a fingernail into the palm of my hand to keep from crying as he kept looking at me and saying, “I swear I’ve met you.”

That afternoon I got three pre-cancerous spots frozen off the side of my face. A different nurse said I got the award for strongest patient of the day because I never flinched. “People always flinch,” he said. “You were perfectly still and a dozen shots of liquid nitrogen to the face just about makes everyone jump off the table.”

“I’ve been through worse,” I said. Then I walked to the parking garage, paid my parking fee, and drove away from Mark’s other home without him running out of his building towards me, without him getting in the car and tilting my head to take a long look at what they did, without him saying, “I’m glad you took care of that so you’ll be around to keep bribing me with chicken wings.”

Ever since Mark died, I rarely go to the grocery store that is five minutes from my house. In the beginning there were too many people I would run into who were worried about me and I didn’t want to start crying about my life over 10# bags of potatoes. In contrast, there were also people I’d run into that knew me well, who worked extra hard at avoiding me, and could never say a simple, “I’m sorry about your husband.” Sometimes it was uncomfortable and hurtful, other times it angered me, but ultimately it was something that was fixable if I chose to shop further away and that is what I’ve done ever since.

Recently some friends were telling me about someone we knew whose husband died. He’d been ill for awhile and because our only connection were kids that were the same age, I had no idea because I hadn’t seen her in years. Whenever I hear that someone has lost their partner it pains me greatly. I know how hard it is, and whether expected or not, the death of a spouse upends every part of one’s life.

Last week I ran into this woman at a clothing store. She didn’t recall who I was and I told her that my oldest and her son were in the same grade together in elementary school. She had a blank look on her face so I told her my name and my daughter’s name and she said, “Oh yes, now I remember.” I understood as I know that utter confusion about basic stuff after your husband dies, sometimes I still have it. As a precursor to acknowledging the changes in her life, I said that I saw that her house had sold because I drive past it in the way to work. She looked at me and said, “No, actually we’re in the same house we’ve always been in.” I apologized and said I thought she lived on such-and-such a street and she told me where she lived and I wondered how I didn’t know that because I thought she lived in the same house for years.

All the while we were talking I kept telling myself, “Just say you’re sorry about her husband. You can’t keep talking about this dumb stuff and not acknowledge that her husband died.” But for the life of me I could not get the words out of my mouth and I thought about those times in the grocery store when people I knew avoided me so they wouldn’t have to say anything. I often labeled them as cowards and to my disappointment I was behaving the exact same way. We talked about the cost of housing in our area, and as she was talking I noticed she was wearing her wedding ring like I had for nearly a year after Mark died. I achingly remembered how hard that was to take off.

She then started talking about her and her husband walking in their neighborhood. Walking in your neighborhood? I know I was off my rocker for a long time after Mark died but I never thought about walking my dead husband around the neighborhood. And while she was talking I was trying to visualize getting the urn off the mantel and saying, “Time for our daily walk, honey!!!”, then tucking it under my arm and chatting up the fall colors to a jar of ashes.

Meanwhile, the Cap’n of the Neuron Firing Squad started pulling alarms and was screaming, “ABORT!!! ABORT!!!” and I was telling him to STOP YELLING AT ME because I needed to concentrate on the timing of my expression of condolences and he was saying, “NO!!! NO!!! NO!!! YOU. NEED. TO. SHUT. YOUR. MOUTH.” While these two conversations were happening simultaneously (which happens all day every day), I took a long look at this woman again and realized she wasn’t at all who I thought she was. Not only that, we had never been friendly towards each other and that was confirmed when she commented on a shirt and said she would never wear something like that and I had just bought it.

While the unsaid often hangs awkwardly in the air like an unmoving cloud, what hangs even more awkwardly is when you’re about to offer to have coffee with the wrong person to talk about dead husbands when hers is very much alive. Thanks to Covid, I was wearing a mask that hid the shock on my face as I narrowly escaped barreling headfirst into a hot mess of my own making.

And that shirt I bought? Of course she wouldn’t have gotten it. It had cougar widow vibe written all over it.