I've been putting a lot of thought into what I wanted to say here. I hope there's not a text character limit. If there is, I'm sorry if my story has been clipped short.
It's been a little bit since I saw the obituary, but every time I started writing this, I had to step back. As someone who only had a year's worth of time around Mark, I can't imagine how everyone else feels. However, I just wanted to share some of the experiences that I had with him. He left a sincere, lasting impression on me, and I will never forget him, or his kindness. I hope I can pay it forward to everyone I ever meet.
There was a period of time that I lived at Mark's house. The idea was for it to be a stepping stone into a better situation, but he treated me as though I'd been there forever. When I was in a really bad place mentally, he would talk to me, sometimes for hours. He'd recount stories of his life and the things he'd done, the places he'd been. I've never had a single real parental figure in my life, so it was really meaningful to me that he would spend time with me. I never outright said that, but I hope I was able to show him I was appreciative in a variety of ways. Sometimes he would just come up and say "okay, I'm going to hug you," and it always made me chuckle. He was a really thoughtful person.
When I was beginning to recover, he invited me to do some gardening with him. He took me to Fred Meyer to find Fuschias. He was a big fan of Fuschia Saturday, and told me he'd never gone alone (or at least that he hadn't gone alone in a long, long time). The flowers had been quite picked through, and I believe we ended up going to another Fred Meyer and even Walmart. He told me to find some Fuschias anyways, and that he would choose some too. We picked out some other things as well, and he picked up some fresh soil. We planted the flowers together, and he brought out some other plants he'd had for a while too; some preserved Dahlia bulbs that were looking a bit rough. He didn't seem to have much faith they'd actually come up. When some finally started sprouting he'd point them out and say "Look, they're coming up! Those are the Dahlias we planted. Some of them didn't sprout after all," and showed me which ones never came up.
He said he loved Heliotropes, but they were all the way in Bellevue. He talked about them often. I said multiple times we should go out there and get some to plant, but he always said he was just too tired to make that kind of trip. I could still convince him to go to Walmart sometimes, though.
After that, Mark encouraged me to go outside here and there. He gave me the name board out front to paint since he'd wanted the letters filled in for a while, and asked me to help him clean out the front yard and move some dirt to the back. He said, "I'm actually using you to try and get my kid to get up," he laughed with this huge grin, then said, "He really likes to help. I bet it'll work." That gave me a good laugh, too (and for the record, it did work!).
I got busy after a bit working on some projects that I had a deadline for: he'd ask, "Are you busy this weekend?" and I'd say, "Sewing away!", so he started coming downstairs to talk to me.
One time, he came down and saw me cutting fabric on a plastic fold out table, on top of some cardboard. He said, "Do you need a bigger table?", and I said, "What I have is fine!" and he stared at me and said, "What's the width of your fabric?"
Not even a few hours later, he came back with a wooden slab cut just a bit wider than the fabric so it would fit. He'd even rounded out the corners so I didn't knock into them. I can't imagine how much energy that must have took out of him - it was very heavy, and he was often incredibly tired. But he was kind enough to do that for me.
Following that, he'd pull up a chair at that table and talk to me multiple times a week.
He told me his mom was a seamstress. He said she would have entire "tea parties" where she would invite over her friends and they would just be chugging away on the sewing machines. He told me he liked Sergers because "they do the neat patterns on the seams". He asked if I knew how to use a Serger, to which I laughed and said I'd never even seen one in person besides in a box, because they're quite expensive. I offered to fix his clothes, since a few of his shorts and pants had holes in them. He always said no, though. Even when I'd offer to do his laundry he'd say no (but I'd still bring it up the stairs when I saw it down there anyways).
Mark said a lot of people felt comfortable telling him really dark things in their lives. He said he wasn't sure why that was, but that he would try his best to comfort those people. I told him he was an incredibly thoughtful person, and he just stared and shook his head, chuckled and moved on.
I told him once about some of my own experiences about a month prior to him saying that - more specifically about my experience being trans in relation to one of his co-workers. He told me something that has stuck with me ever since, and I swear I hear him saying it in my head when I think about it: he said, "I've always wished I had healing hands. I know I'll never see your scars, but I wish I could make them go away. Everyone who's ever told me something like that, I wish I could fix it."
Sometimes he would talk about his late wife. He explained a lot of things to me - her upbringing, some of the things that made her the way that she was. He talked about their relationship, and would sometimes reminisce for hours. She was, without a doubt in my mind, his true love.
He told me he always wanted to write a book: "Life at the End of a Little Green Tube", an account of his experience as a spouse of someone with COPD. He wanted to tell her story. He told me how he would have written it.
He told me about the very end, then went silent for a while. I just remember sitting with him in that silence, until he moved on to tell me more about her childhood, and the childhood of his kids.
After a while, about once a week, I would clean the kitchen. Without fail, he would come out there and talk to me. Sometimes he would just stand there and stare at what I was doing. Sometimes he would start helping, but it very obviously made him incredibly tired, so I would shoo him out to go watch his anime. When that didn't work he would just playfully swat at me, or sit at the kitchen table and do something else. More often, he would talk about how he's feeling, what the doctors were saying. I would recommend some things here and there depending on how he was feeling (based solely on what I've tried of just little tips and tricks - I'm definitely no medical expert of any kind), but in the end, he was just exhausted.
He would do the same when I was cooking; just stare at it and comically say, "What are you ruining this time?". He was not a fan of heat in his food, and I absolutely add heat wherever I can. He was a sarcastic, funny guy. (However, he tried some slightly spiced short rib cutlets I made once, and said it was one of the best things he'd had in a while).
I always saved some for him when I made it from then on, but he wasn't hungry enough to finish it, even if I only gave him a little tupperware of it. He was quite the fan of fresh fruit, though, even if he couldn't finish that either. He was a big fan of rice and would say, "I can't get it to be as good as yours!", but eventually, he was told he couldn't eat it anymore, and had to stop. He told me once that all he was actually cleared to eat was broccoli, then stared into the distance and shook his head. He was going through a lot, even if he didn't directly say that. I can't imagine how immense the pressure was to keep up with it all.
He'd tell me the outrageous prices of his medication, the doctors he was seeing and whether or not he had the energy for the appointments: I offered to go with him, to take him wherever he needed to go, but he always said no. Sometimes he would just ask for company, and I'd sit on the side of his bed while he laid down and talked about his time on fishing boats in Alaska. Sometimes he'd want a hug, and to just lay there in silence. Sometimes he would just say, "I miss my cats", and I'd say, "Do you want another cat?" and he'd say, "No, I miss 'my' cats."
Mark had a longtime friend he really cared about, named Howard, who I believe he worked at Pro-Club with. He would talk about Howard in the present tense, even if Howard is no longer with us. Perhaps that was his way of processing it - but I've wondered since then if he would prefer to be talked about in the present tense, too. I remember when he told me Howard had passed just a few months prior when I asked how Howard was doing and if they had any plans; I was stunned. I wouldn't have guessed from the way Mark talked about him that anything had happened, but I remember him saying, "Heart problems. It finally got him," and all I could do was sit with him for a while.
For all the stress he was under, I only saw him cry once. It was one of the times he'd asked me for a hug while he was laying in bed, exhausted. It must have been a solid hour, maybe more, of just laying there. He apologized and I told him it was okay, that it was perfectly understandable to feel the way he felt, and he just went back to talking about Alaska, like it wasn't happening. He told me he and his late wife would donate to food banks, that they would come with a full load of food. He recounted that one time they were given bread, and the food bank said the bread would likely go stale, but they would try it. Shortly after, the bank would call him up and ask, "Do you have anymore of that bread? Everyone loves it!"
He was a giving, selfless person: the most generous person I have ever met, in every way anyone could possibly imagine. He gave his energy away when he didn't have it to spare, and gave humor even when his circumstances were dire. Most times when asking how he was doing he'd just say "peachy" sarcastically, but other times, he'd explain a number of things. He showed me his patch and told me how it worked, what kind of diet he was technically supposed to have. He really liked lemon juice and lamented it a lot when he couldn't have it anymore (but I think he might've still snuck some here and there - he definitely loved lemon loaf cakes, anyways!)
After I told him I finally had a solid move-out date, there was a noticeable change in his mood. I tried to cheer him up and spend as much time with him as I could, anyways.
When I had to leave, he'd been admitted to the hospital just days prior. I wanted to wait to see him off, but no one was sure when he was getting out, and the move-in date for the new apartment was strict. I wrote him a letter with my number on it telling him he could call whenever he wanted: I never did receive a call. I didn't have his number, either.
In that letter, I told him I would remember his kindness forever, that I would pay it forward, and that understanding a disability can make it somewhat easier to have, even if it feels hopeless sometimes. I'm disabled, too: we would often lament together about being able to do things before that we just couldn't do now. Once, when I had one heck of a stomach virus, he chuckled and said: "Sorry to laugh, but there's finally someone walking slower than me!", and that made me laugh more than I'd laughed all week. He really tried to keep the spirits up.
Perhaps a month and a half ago, I started having some bad dreams - then I saw the obituary. It's funny how the human mind works in that way, and also terribly sad. It's been nearly a month (well, a few weeks) of trying to write this, and I'm still not entirely sure if this recollection really gets across what kind of person Mark was.
My disability causes quite severe memory loss in unpredictable patches, but I remember every kind thing he said to me. There's even more than what I've written, but these things left the biggest impressions on me. I hope that through this that other people, even strangers who stumble across these memories, can get a sense of the light Mark brought to a dark room - and to the people who were closest to him, his family and his dearest friends, I wish them nothing but peace. This world is a hard place to live in, and Mark really did make things feel a little less heavy: or as he might have said it, a little more "peachy".
Though I am not a Christian, I have prayed for him. I feel that if anyone were to get into the pearly gates, it would be Mark.
I'll forever be grateful to you, Mark, and I'll always remember you. Thank you for showing me genuine kindness, and even if it was only for a short time: how it might've felt to have a dad.
Sincerely and with love, Micah
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