Missing Mark

  Today would have been our 45 th anniversary. If I were a betting person, I would not have placed a dime on this marriage lasting.   Let me tell you why I say that. December 21 st , 1973, Snohomish High School, a home basketball game. The games at home were always followed by a dance afterward. I was with my girlfriends at the dance when Mark came up and took my hand and off we went. Now if I were writing a script for a Lifetime movie I would say, “and we danced together for the rest of our lives.” But this most certainly is not a Lifetime movie. Mark was a sophomore, and I was a junior, fifteen and sixteen years old, what are the chances of being together still together fifty plus years later?   Our oldest daughter was born the May before Mark graduated. Yes, that is correct, we had a child while he was still in high school. You are now understanding why I would not make that bet. Mark worked for a year and then went to Central Washington University and when ou...

  Written 1/10/2025. Lived September 10 th and 11 th , 2024. I watched as they wheeled Mark off to the operating room. They would put a camera down his throat and get pictures of his heart from a different angle. They told me to go up to the third floor waiting room where the operating suites were. By now I had been up for 25 hours. My children were waking up, reading my texts and the calls started to come in. At the sound of my youngest daughter’s voice on the phone I broke down. As the words of the surgeons started to come back to me, I realized that this might be worse than I thought. I had brushed the weight of their words off; I did not want to hear things like “in the world of bad things that can happen to a heart this is one of the worse.”   Still, in my mind, I was thinking long recovery bad, not he could die bad. He went in around 5:30 and about two hours later Dr. Ritchie, the cardiothoracic surgeon, came out to speak with me. A note about Dr. Ritchie. Wha...